Hawaii Five-0--The One With KillerCars & Millennial Mayhem

Well, this one felt more like a filler episode to me, but here we go.

We start out with the police chasing a speeding car that committed a vehicular homicide. When they finally get it stopped, there is no driver inside. It's a remote controlled car.

Cue music.

Back at HQ, two social media influencers are being led in while filming their surroundings. Steve greets them and while they fall all over themselves telling him he's a legend (they're not wrong) he tells them there's no filming and they'll be shadowing Tani and Quinn today. Apparently the governor asked these two Pauly Shore wannabes (named Scooter and Skeeze) to make a recruitment video for HPD. (With how inept HPD is generally shown, that doesn't surprise me.)

Adam fills Danny in on the remote car killer car and he stares at the car, wondering if it's the robot apocalypse. (Now that might have been a welcome addition to the story!) Bottom line: the tech for autonomous vehicles isn't street legal, the plates are fake, the VIN filed off and no prints, but there was a bag with $400 inside. So the car went through a high traffic drug area and came out with $400 inside, so it's probably tech-savvy drug dealers who don't want to risk guys ratting out on them. But who is behind the controls?

Back to Pauly Shore wannabes waiting to nosh at the shrimp truck with Quinn and Tani. They drone on that they're not just dumb kids, they take their "work" seriously and it takes effort to look effortless. Kamekona gives them the VIP treatment (he claims he's a big fan, but doesn't know Skeeze's name, ha!) and he's hoping they'll take a selfie with him for his insta. They say they'll give him a tagged post! (Rad! Tubular!) Tani is notified that HPD caught a homicide and Steve wants them to assist so they leave.

All CSU found in the RemoteControlKillerCar is cameras, including a dashcam that records the interior. Unfortunately, they can't narrow down the control radius because the car operates on an ultra high frequency radio link that can be operated from 150 miles away, so the dealer could be anywhere on the island. Luckily, there were fingerprints on the bag with $400 that was in the car and it was (surprise!) an addict who is on probation! Junior and Adam chase him down, but he's slippery! He even gets hit by a car, but keeps going, until he runs through an old lady's house and she hits him on the back of the head with a fry pan. They put him in the Blue Room of Doom with an IV to help sober him up. He claims he didn't buy any drugs, but they show him his text messages where he sent his address and order to the KillerCar. The number was a burner, so who's behind the KillerCar? He doesn't know. He just texted what he wanted and where he was at, the car showed up, he showed his money to the camera and put it in the box then took the drugs from a separate box. it. So now he's going to order some drugs or Five-0's next call is to his parole officer. (He was a very convincing addict.)

Tani and Quinn introduce Scooter and Skeeze to Duke, but he knows them already since they shadowed HPD earlier this week. The crime scene is a murdered 81 year-old woman named Marion who died from blunt force trauma to the head. There weren't any signs of forced entry, no cameras inside the complex, only on the perimeter of the building. Oddly, Noelani is a fangirl of S&S and she loved their fibromyalgia video. (What kind of influencers are these "millennials" anyway?) Noelani also mentions that Marion was comfortable enough with her killer to turn her back on them and they struck her from behind and killed her around 12:30 a.m. S&S ask if they can take a selfie with the vic, but are told no. (Seriously? Oy What an embarrassment to call these guys millennials) Then Skeeze decides he needs to take his "meds" and proceeds to set up to vape some pacololo. Quinn puts the kibosh on that and they go down to talk to the manager who has the security footage. He tells them everyone hated Marion and she was an awful person. (The funny part was S&S are taking notes and one thinks that the manager could be guilty.) (Is that a nod to the fact that the guilty person almost always *is* the first person they talk to? Haha. I'm calling it. It's the manager.) S&S leave to play ping pong and the manager says no one came in or out between 11:30 or six a.m. Which means the killer lives in the building.

Tani and Quinn put the apartment complex on lockdown and have thirty-one suspects to interview. They narrow it down by finding the one gossipy neighbor who is watching them through her blinds. GossipGirl tells them that Marion was a gin rummy cheat, the devil incarnate, and lots of people wanted her dead.

Danny and Steve are watching their ParoleeFriend waiting for the KillerCar. Lou is going to track the bag of drug money. The boys are talking about how it used to be that if you wanted something you had to get dressed and leave the house, talk to a human. Danny says he uses apps so he doesn't have to deal with people, but Steve feels that human to human interaction is the point of life. Why be alive if you're not going to do that? Danny seems surprised and asks since when does Steve like people and if he's social now. Before Steve can answer another KillerCar pulls up and makes the exchange with their ParoleeFriend. Danny and Steve follow.

Quinn and Tani are going to split up to interview the twelve suspects they have. Quinn takes Skeeze who immediately tells her that he has a lady so they have to keep the relashe strictly profesh. (Honestly who talks like that?) There's a bunch of people that Marion was horrible to, like putting used kitty litter in the back of a guy's 1966 convertible, keeping her TV up loud so a massage therapist's clients can't relax and calling CPS on a woman. Oh and screaming at a bartender who comes home late and wakes her up. In fact, last night was first time she didn't call when he came in at 12:45 a.m. Uh oh. Tani takes him outside with Scooter because they know he's lying. No one entered the building after 11:30, so he's busted. BartenderBoy does have a secret. He actually does Dungeons and Dragons every Tuesday at another neighbor's apartment and doesn't want his partner, Emily, to know. He did hear a weird clanking noise when he was going home about quarter to one, though. (S&S aren't even taking notes anymore, they're playing with D&D  swords in the background.) After they leave, Scooter tells Quinn and Tani that they thought turning bros and broads onto a career in law enforcement would be a hard sell since they break up house parties and arrest them for indecent exposure, but this job is actually kind of rad. Especially because Five-0 get to wear their own threads. (Threads? Does anyone outside of the 60s and 70s say that?) Since S&S took a pic of themselves in the D&D apartment with gear on and posted it and hashtagged it "murder weapon," they have to go play gin rummy with GossipGirl which they feel is a harsh punishment.

McG and Danny are following the car, but Danny wants McG to ease back so Kitt doesn't make them. Steve loved Knight Rider (Me, too!) but the KillerCar suddenly blows through a stop sign so the chase is on. Lou is tracking it, though, so Danny wants to know what they're doing and Steve throws out a scenario of losing the car, it stops for another sale and the customer takes the bag then they have nothing. Danny calls him a catastrophist (and Steve shoots back with Danny's making the most of the word of the day calender, ha!) Steve prepares for the worst and there's a world of difference. The chase ends with KillerCar going off road and exploding. The good news is if they keep going, they'll run out of cars, right? HPD can't get any evidence off the exploded car, but they got a look under the hood of the first KillerCar and it's run off some proprietary software owned by Tropovision Technology. They make drones and have now adapted that tech to cars. Since it's highly unlikely the company is involved in drugs, someone must have stolen the software. The team thinks it's a woman named Julia who runs R&D and used her own password and login to make an unauthorized download of the code.

S&S call Tani and Quinn to the roof. They were shredding with GossipGirl, sipping prune juice and wondering how the perp slipped into the vic's apartment on the DL. So they came up to the roof to investigate and there are scrapes on the edge of the roof with flecks of orange paint made by a fully-extendable ladder that is long enough to make a bridge between buildings, which also explains the clanking noise BartenderD&DGuy heard. S&S are taking credit for cracking open the case with their "insties" but Quinn knows they came up to vape, the door locked behind them and while they were trying to figure out how to get down they saw the ladder and put it all together. Scooter is impressed with how she solved the mystery of them solving the mystery. She takes pity on them and says their find still counts so S&S cry and Scooter goes in for a hug. No drug like a hug. (I did like that line, haha)

Julia is in the Blue Room of Doom denying she stole the code. Adam is trying to set up the scenario that she's a tech genius that came up with this amazing program and the company is taking all her profits when she has student loans to be paid. She points out that if she was so smart why would she use her own login? Lou comes in and says she's telling the truth. They decrypted the IP address that downloaded the stolen code and have footage of it in use. It's her dad. He's a former addict that abandoned her, but then he got clean a few months back and wanted to make up for all the lost years so she let him in again. She'll help them find him.

Junior and Adam go to her dad's apartment, but there's a busted in door jamb, the door is open and furniture is strewn about with a fresh bloodstain on the floor. Dad didn't go willingly, so I guess they aren't the only ones looking for Julia's father. They put a BOLO out, and find out that the neighbors heard shouting less than an hour ago. Since dad has a schedule for a drug recovery group on the fridge and lots of pics of his daughter, he seems more like a proud sober dad, not a user taking advantage of his kid. Maybe Julia had it wrong and the drug dealers strong-armed him into it. GeniusJulia hacks directly into the CPU of one of the KillerCars. Apparently, the dealers have a warehouse full of the cars that are equipped with GPS so Steve is on his way. Adam and Junior head over, too, while Dad is being dragged out of the van and beaten while his daughter watches on screen. Lou calls Steve and tells him to hurry. DrugDealer holds a gun to Dad's head, but GeniusJulia remotely starts up one of the cars and runs over a few of the gunmen. The drug dealers shoot at it until the car is dead, but Steve bursts in with Junior and Adam and finishes off the rest of the gunmen to free Dad.

Guess who they have in the Blue Room of Doom? The manager! He *was* guilty! Quani talk to him about how Wifi works and that they have his specific digital signature logging onto the building next door at 12:03, they fifteen minutes later to Marion's building. At 12:48 the same sequence happens in reverse. Just enough time for him to shuttle back and forth on his ladder bridge with a quick pit stop to kill Marion. ManagerMan wants a lawyer and Quani add that the Wifi stuff is circumstantial, but they also have Marion's emails accusing him of embezzling money for billing the building owner for repair work he never performed. ManagerMan says Marion was crazy, but they went through his financials and he had several large deposits that coincided with work he billed his boss for, but never completed. Busted.

Tani and Quinn head into HQ while S&S call them T-Bone and Q-Money, legends of law enforcement who are like artists that totes nailed that douchenozzle. Quinn tries to join in with a totes harshed his mellow til he was mellowless, but yeah. Tani tells her to stop talking. (Can all four of them stop talking?) S&S feel that solving the case wouldn't have been possible without them, but Quinn is all, your only contributions were disobeying orders! And getting high! (She would know all about disobeying orders, too!) But then she feels bad and says they couldn't have done it without them. Hugs! Maybe S&S will give law enforcement a try if the social media influencer thing doesn't work out, but Tani and Quinn discourage that. They bring a tiny amount of joy to people every day so that shouldn't be denied to the world. S&S agree that we all serve in our own way, and plus there's drug testing. They get a selfie and all say, "Solved!"   

GeniusJulia hugs her dad in the ambulance. Seems Dad reconnected with Julia six months ago and bragged to his old buddies about her success. The unscrupulous drug dealers saw an opportunity and told him to steal the car tech or they'd force his daughter to hand it over. He decided to keep her out of it, so here we are.

A week later, Kamekona is talking to Tani as she walks into HQ. Seems S&S tagged the wrong shrimp truck and he wants her to fix it. Quani walk into the office and the guys are all watching the recruitment video on Junior's phone and laughing. They put it up on the Chatting Table computer screen and it's S&S in officer uniforms talking about helping people every day. The pay and benefits are rad, too! They hand over a scumbag (before he can expose himself to any more nuns) to Tani and Quinn lookalikes who gush that they couldn't have solved this case without S&S. Tani and Quinn protest that they did not flirt like that! But, hey, what if we get an influx of millennials that want to join the force and an army of S&S's patrolling the streets and keeping the island safe? Lou says God help us all and everyone smiles.

So, not one I'd watch again, but a few funny moments. So excited for next week. The promo looked good!

What did you think? Did you watch?