Hawaii Five-0 Recap & Review: The One With The Dead Pirate

We found out last Friday that Hawaii Five-0 won't be returning next season. I am so sad! It seems sudden and I'm worried they won't have a chance to wrap up the storylines in a satisfying way. Not to mention I'm going to miss this show. I've watched from the very first episode and it doesn't seem like it's already been ten years. The show had a great run and I will definitely miss it.

We start out with Adam in the previouslies again, showing his footage of Kenji killiing Haru and Endo and  Kenji lying, saying he sent them to Japan, then cut to the masked SUV guys coming for him with guns.

Our next scene is at McG's home, where he is ironing again and Danny is watching. Our SuperSEAL likes ironing and just wants to iron in peace, but Danny can't resist needling him, telling him to invest in wrinkle-free clothes. McG brushes him off with, "Is it boring being as predictable as you are?" (Oddly, he says he's going on a date with Emma now, but isn't she the vet who said she was dating someone during Eddie's PTSD ep? Weird. And last week it was Brooke. Something's fishy there.) Junior comes in and asks McG to leave the iron out because he has a date, too. McG thinks it's great Junior and Tani are giving it a go. Steve gets a phone call that shots were fired at Adam's building and Grover is on the way. Uh oh.

Grover gets to Adam's place and sees the Yakuza dead bodies near the door. Adam is bloody, but okay. (Since Adam took out most of the Yakuza sent after them when they kidnapped Tamiko, I would think when the henchmen found out they were assigned to go over to Adam's place, they would be, um, hey, can I have a different assignment? Please. Ha!) Adam tells Lou that Kenji sent them and they need to take Kenji and his crew down now. Lou wants to get him somewhere safe, but Adam grabs his SD card and admits that he's been trying to dismantle Kenji's operation for months and finally has the evidence to do it.

Cue music.

SWAT is on their way to Kenji's. Kenji is bailing, grabbing money and passports and a gun out of his safe while SWAT rolls up. His terrible-decision-making crew opens the door and start firing while Kenji runs away. Adam gives chase to Kenji (and he's already cleaned up and changed clothes. Maybe in the SWAT truck?) However, Adam has a light on his gun that announces his position to Kenji so Kenji nearly picks him off. Junior and Lou are holding off the other Yakuza back at the house and Kenji is running across a stream and up a hill. (You know, I'm wondering where Tamiko is. We haven't seen her for ages? Did they break up?) Adam is right behind him, but when he gets to the top of the hill, Kenji tackles him. They fight, each trying to grab the gun and Adam wins and shoots Kenji in the shoulder. Kenji tells him to finish it, but Adam wants to hear him say Masuda. Kenji smiles and says, yeah, I killed Masuda and you and your girlfriend would have been next had Tokyo not intervened. Adam is shaking, but doesn't pull trigger and instead, calls for EMTs. He taunts Kenji that he was playing him, working for Five-0 the whole time and now he has footage of Kenji executing Endo and Haru. He's going away and will never get out! Kenji doesn't look worried and says he'll talk and he has a lot to say about Adam, so how can he let him live? Adam says he'll take his chances. (Well, he's pretty, but no one said he was smart.)

Back in Maui Noelani is headed to her uncle's wake. She briefly talks to her parents who accept a donation to her uncle's church from a councilman since the uncle was a pastor who helped a lot of kids get out of gangs and get clean. Her parents think her profession is weird since she works with dead bodies and they sort of just woodenly stand there through the whole thing. Noelani gives up and goes to pay her respects. While looking at the body in the coffin, she notices a red rash on her uncle's wrists.

Adam has been called to the boss's office. Steve is sitting there with him, dumbfounded about Adam's plan to dismantle the Yakuza from within and spy on Five-0. Adam assures Steve he only gave the Yakuza morsels to keep them on the hook while he gathered evidence. Steve seems more upset that Adam lied to him multiple times, even though he had several chances to come clean. Adam is all, yeah, you would have said it was too dangerous and shut it down, so he did what he had to do. Steve is feeling a bit of righteous anger and tells him that wasn't his call to make because Adam risked the reputation of the entire unit and that's something Steve has to answer for. Adam says Steve can take his badge if he wants, he'll understand, but Steve snaps back with, "if I want your badge, I'll take your badge!" He tells Adam to go down to HPD and debrief the organized crime division and tell them everything he knows. (Steve is wearing a very nice blue shirt for this scene.) Before Adam leaves, Steve gets a call. A freighter two miles off coast was attacked and the crew were taken hostage. The captain was shot dead and, according to crew, it was the Coast Guard who attacked them! Dun, dun, dun.

Steve, Danny, Junior, and Tani fly out there and interview a crew member. He thought it was a routine check, they had Coast Guard uniforms and badges, and their skiff was skinned to make it look like the real deal. But once they were on board it was guns out and they ordered them on the ground. They locked the crew in the cabin and ordered the captain to take them down to the safe, so that's where everyone heads to next. There are some shell casings near the captain's body, so he got a couple of shots off before he was killed. There was payroll and petty cash in the safe, but only around 20-50 grand. The crew member gets dismissed so the team can spitball possible reasons a gang would go to so much trouble for less than fifty grand when the cargo was worth millions. Maybe they were just getting started with the safe when the captain fired and they bailed? Right in the middle, Noelani calls Steve and says she needs his help. The family was told her uncle died of a heart attack, but a rash on his arm doesn't jive with a cardiac event and it wasn't mentioned in the coroner report. The coroner won't give her the time of day and she wants the truth. Steve will send Quinn to help her out so they can get to the bottom of it. (I was surprised his cell phone worked in the bottom of the ship.)

Junior finds a fresh blood trail and shows Steve. If the captain fired his weapon and hit one of the pirates, his crew could have left him for dead and he could still be hiding on the ship. They split up to go look for him, guns drawn. Tani and Junior are going door to door and he's sorry he had to cancel their date. They were both looking forward to it. Tani goes into a kitchen area and gets a knife thrown at her, then attacked with a fire extinguisher. She fights with the pirate and the door closes and locks so Junior can't get to her. He's yelling for Steve, quickly escalating from Boss! to McGarrett! while Tani is getting her head pushed toward a hot grill. She whacks the guy with a pan, and while she's going for her gun he throws her around, she kicks him and breaks a coffeepot over his head. (In the real world she wouldn't have stood a chance. That guy was huge compared to her.) McG and Junior work together to kick the door in and hear shots fired. They rush in and Tani is standing there, saying she found him. (Loved Junior's emotion and protectiveness in the scene.)

Noelani and Quinn go visit the CrankyCoroner. He's not happy to see him, but Quinn shows her badge and they start asking questions like how did he fail to notice an obvious rash on the pastor uncle's body? When Quinn threatens to arrest him, he caves and said he saw the rash, but someone approached him in the parking lot and said if he didn't say the uncle died of a heart attack, something bad would happen to him. Since he was too scared to go to the police, he just didn't mention the rash. The rash indicates carbon monoxide poisoning, but if it was a suicide, then why cover it up? They're going to need a description of the man who threatened CrankyCoroner and footage of the parking lot.

The gang is back at the Chatting Table, and Lou tells them he got satellite images of the freighter during the attack and guess what? The pirates loaded a crate from the ship! But HPD went through the ship's inventory and it was all accounted for, so something was smuggled onto the freighter with legit cargo. Well, if the pirates knew there was something smuggled onto the ship, they had to have an inside man. Since they ID'd the pirate Tani killed, Kyle Munoz, they're going to look for any connections he had to someone on the crew. And Tunior will also look into boats that fit the pirate boat description.

Quinn easily finds the man who threatened the coroner and it's Eke, a guy who just got out of prison for trying to kill Noelani's uncle a decade ago. They go see him and he says that back in the day they ran with bad crews and when someone was a rival gang member, you retaliated and thought of them as the enemy. He was shocked that Noelani's uncle wrote to him in prison that he forgave him and turned his life around told him so could he. It gave him hope, but why did he threaten CrankyCoroner? Well, the day Uncle died, he invited Eke over, but didn't answer the door. Eke went around back and could hear the car running in the garage. Uncle was in the driver's seat with a hose from the tailpipe to the window. Eke cleaned up the evidence and insisted CrankyCoroner declare it a heart attack so that his legacy wouldn't be suicide. He gave so many people hope, how would they feel knowing he took his own life? Noelani doesn't believe Uncle would commit suicide, so they're going to his house to check it out.

Lou found a link between dead Kyle and the crew member they talked to, Karl Lawson. Karl and Kyle! Besties! They went to high school together and phone records confirm they were in touch last week and Karl was getting wire transfers from overseas accounts for the last three years. So, in a confusing twist, Steve tries to explain that Karl calls Kyle to put a crew together and pull off the heist, then Karl tells his smuggler friends the boat was hit by a pirate attack. They want to talk to Karl, and we see him in the back of an HPD squad car when they are rammed and Karl is kidnapped by masked men. Poor dumb Karl. When the team looks at footage of the kidnapping, with the way Karl is struggling it obviously wasn't a rescue attempt (how did they know when he would be transferred?) But the team guesses the kidnappers are the smugglers Karl was working for and they want their stuff. Oh, and Tunior didn't have any luck looking for the boat the pirates used so now they're going to look for the people who gave it a makeover.

Back at her uncle's house, Noelani is looking at pictures and remembering good times. CSU is running the garden hose for prints while Noelani is confiding to Quinn that her parents already don't approve of her job, how will they react if her looking into this reveals that her uncle really did commit suicide? Quinn tells her that her brother Brian committed suicide and her family never talked about it at all and it made things worse. Brian's life was so much more than the way he died and the same thing goes for the uncle. No matter what they find, she should remember that.

Tani is at the Magnum PI friend's bar, (what was his name again?) anyway, the guy is sad that Quinn didn't come. Tani will put a good word in for him in exchange for the favor of calling Oz the Boat Makeover Guy down. She tells some story to Oz that she's been dating a guy and things aren't working out so she wants to secure his boat and have it skinned for ten grand. He agrees and she pulls out her handcuffs and puts him under arrest. She asks him for info on a client that made him skin a boat to look like the Coast Guard. He doesn't remember at first, but when she threatens him with a holding cell, he suddenly recalls that she's looking for Michael Garcia.

Quinn tells Noelani that there was only one set of prints on the hose and they are Eke's but that's weird her uncle's weren't on it. Unless someone wiped down the hose before Eke found the body. They can't think of anyone that would want to kill the uncle, so they find a kid named Lewis through phone records that Uncle helped. Noelani tells the kid she just wants to find out what happened to her uncle and the kid says he told the uncle too much and that's why Uncle is dead. There's a guy on the city council who is big in the drug game on the island and Uncle knew him. It was the councilman who gave the donation at Uncle's wake! The councilman tells the gangs where to sell and the cops won't bother them and in return they cut him in. Lewis wanted out of this life and Uncle made him feel like he could change, but because he talked Uncle is dead and he's next. Quinn assures him they're going to do their jobs and make sure the councilman can't hurt anyone ever again.

Steve, Danny, Junior, and Lou are all approaching Michael Garcia's house with guns drawn. They go in and find all the dead pirates still in Coast Guard uniforms. It looks like their mouths were foaming and they don't have any gunshot wounds. The powder all over the table and cupboards probably isn't heroin, so Steve calls for backup and a HAZMAT team. But instead, they get black SUVs and gunmen that start shooting at them! The guys duck under the table, but powder is floating into the air with the bullets and Danny doesn't want to be in the room with the powder that killed the people. LOL Back up is ten minutes out so Steve and Junior start picking off the smugglers. They get out of the house and Danny is coughing on the ground when another smuggler shows and Steve shoots him, nearly deafening Danny. When the EMTs get there, Steve gets some oxygen and they talk about how Lawson thought he was ripping off a little heroin, but that stuff is actually a synthetic opiod with a really long name that is ten thousand times stronger than morphine and was banned from the chemical weapons convention. It's that dangerous, which explains Steve's pounding headache. So the pirates went to all that trouble to steal that booty only to have it kill them. Tani lightens the mood with a little joke: Why are pirates called pirates? Cuz they ARRGGGH. No one laughs and she says, "Come on. That was solid." (Cute scene.)

Quinn and Noelani meet up with the CrookedCouncilman and show him the donation envelope he gave earlier. It's evidence now and the DNA on it matched the DNA on the teacup found in Uncle's kitchen. The second teacup had traces of roofies in it, so when Uncle found out the councilman was dirty, he confronted him and told him he needed to come clean and he would help. The councilman drugged him instead, then helped him to the car and ran the hose from the exhaust pipe to the window to make it look like a suicide. But he didn't count on Uncle having helped so many people that some of them were willing to help him in return. CrookedCouncilman gets cuffed and taken away. Noelani's parents awkwardly come up and pat her on the back and say they're proud of her and Uncle would be, too. Then we get a cemetery scene with Lewis and Eke there, too, and people laying roses on the coffin.

Back at the Magnum PI guy's bar, Quinn brings Noelani for just one drink and the team is there! It helps her feel better. Danny says Steve is buying the next round and Steve says he will he just needs to go home and get his wallet. Ha! He's been saying the same thing for ten years. Aww. The band takes a break and Backstreet Boys come on, which was Quinn's jam in fifth grade. The Magnum PI guy comes up and gets introduced to everyone and he offers the next round on the house. He and Quinn talk about the dinner he owes her and Noelani suggests they dance. Apparently, he's a much better dancer than dart player, so Quinn says to show her what he's got. Tunior are watching, think they can take them with dance moves, but they won't give away their best stuff right off. So everyone is on the floor dancing to Everybody Rock Your Body while Steve, Lou, and Noelani watch. A very sweet scene.

I thought it was a good episode overall, I'm mostly just sad that this is one of the very last ones ever! Did you watch? What did you think?