Hawaii Five-0 Recap & Review: The One With Hirsch

We start out with Steve running on the beach and voices from the past are running through his head. His dad feels like he didn't say he loved him enough, Joe saying he couldn't be prouder of the man he'd become and his mom saying I love you so much. Steve runs faster as Joe says you're the closest thing I had to a son. Don't wait as long as I did to find somebody. (Awww. Go find Cath!) Steve looks haunted. (No wonder he's not sleeping and is pacing at night.)

Cue music.

Tani is waking up in bed at 7 a.m.She goes to her front room where Junior has made an amazing breakfast, but her only response is wow, that's a lot. (Poor Junior.) He was going for sweet and romantic, but Tani is all weird and says it's nice, but she usually gets a coffee on the way to work. When Junior points out she's usually late because of it, she says she shouldn't have asked him to stay over, she has a routine and is used to her own space. Junior looks so hurt when she tacks on that maybe they're moving too fast. He says he'll clean up. (Dang! Poor guy was just trying to do something nice!)

Steve gets back to his house and is getting a drink of water when he notices a coffee on the counter. He thinks Junior's home, but it's Hirsch. Eddie is sitting next to him and Steve informs Eddie he fails as a guard dog. (LOL Steve's house is the most broken into house on the island I bet.) Steve asks why Hirsch broke in and Hirsch tells him the door was unlocked and he was worried. Ha! Steve doesn't like to run with keys, Danny is on spring break with his kids and Junior slept somewhere else. Hirsch gets to the point that his Uncle Oscar had heart surgery and is moving in with him. This is the uncle that taught him all the essentials of con jobs and lock picking, but he's a model citizen these days. The problem is, when the movers dropped off Oscar's boxes, there was an antique snuff box in them worth $200,000. Given Oscar's history of criminal ventures, it might have been ill-gotten. Steve says "Let's go arrest your uncle," but Hirsch says the statute of limitation was six years, but could he look at  HPD archives and see if someone reported box stolen so he could return it? Of course if no report was made, he could sell it to the highest bidder, since elder care is not cheap. Steve says he'll have Tani run it. Then he gets a phone call.

The team is looking at a dead guy on the side of the road. He was changing a flat tire and died instantly from a gunshot wound. Apparently there's the same sort of robberies happening on the island right now, targeting an airport rental car, sticking a nail in the tire, and robbing them when they're changing the tire. Now they've graduated to murder, but murder victim Greg flew in with his wife. Where is she?

Back at HQ Hirsch brings Tani a cappucino and tries to get more info out of her about her relationship with Junior, but she wants to focus on his uncle. She found a police report about the stolen snuffbox from 1978, the same year Uncle Oscar moved to Seattle. But it wasn't just a robbery, it was a murder. The housekeeper interrupted the robbery and was killed. Hirsch is sure his uncle isn't a murderer, but when they pull up old newspapers, Tabitha's fiance is Uncle Oscar going by the fake name of Jay Gilbert. Uh oh. They go to Hirsch's house and Uncle Oscar is flirting with his nurse. They try to ask him what made him move to Seattle, if he was in any kind of trouble, and his heart rate goes up so the nurse says he has to lay down. Tani doesn't feel like he's innocent, but agitating him could be dangerous, so they'll get the facts first.

At the Chatting Table, Junior welcomes Adam back, but Steve only gives him a nod. Sad. They found the rental car a few miles from crime scene with luggage missing, and the car wiped clean. No sign of the wife and no ransom demands, so they'll widen the search perimeter in case she's still out there. Steve really wants to ID the perps, but all they have is the robbery pattern. Who is accessing the car rental lots without being seen? What about airport buses? They'll pull up the records and see what they find.

Tani and Hirsch goes to uncle Oscar's former fiance Tabitha May and she talks about her returned snuffbox and fiance. All bad memories. Sadly, she never recovered from her fiance's betrayal and never trusted or loved again. Even though her housekeeper was murdered and she found out he'd pulled the same con on four women, he was the love of her life and she wishes she was more than a mark.

Junior is running the search for Cynthia and they find her unconscious and bloody in the jungle, with a thready pulse so he calls for a medic. In the hospital, she tells them that eight hours earlier, someone offered to help fix their flat tire, then pulled a gun and demanded their money and wedding rings. The husband fought for one of the guns and was shot so she ran into the woods while they shot at her, too. She didn't realize she was hit, just kept moving even though she felt faint. The next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital bed. She manages to ID one of the shooters. After Lou and Junior leave, Lou says he's not sure he buys her whole grieving widow story. Why risk getting hung up on murder when those guys had a good scam going?

Tani and Hirsch are at HPD looking at the old case file. The housekeeper was shot through the eye. Ew. Jay Gilbert was the prime suspect, lots of info on his four other cons. They called him the Casanova Con Man because he romanced women before he robbed them. Tani mutters, "just like every other relationship." So Hirsch starts asking if there's trouble in paradise already and what happened, so she tells him her and Junior are in their first fight because he made her breakfast. (Still sounds ridiculous.) Hirsch tries to give her relationship advice that relationships are more like a marathon than a sprint and just say sorry and move on. She knows that and they go back to focusing on the case. There is an inventory of stolen stuff that includes a rare Winchester Magnum custom engraved pistol, first edition books, and jewelry. Hirsch knows the fence his uncle probably used, his old roommate Stanley, so if the gun was fenced before the murder, then his uncle probably didn't do it.

Lou and Junior are in the car, not talking. Lou invites him to confide in him, so Junior tells him he made Tani breakfast and suddenly he's the bad guy and they're moving too fast when all he wanted to do was save Tani a trip to the coffee shop. Lou wisely says it wasn't about breakfast, just give her some space and she'll figure it out. They turn the radio on and dance together to Walking on Sunshine. (So cute!)

The team finds a shuttle bus driver that appears to be the inside man, so Steve and Adam head down there. Steve waits until some people get off the shuttle, then gets on and informs the rest of the people that this bus is out of service, but another one is coming. They all get off and he shows the driver the nail. The bus driver confesses pretty quickly that he stops in the rental car lot, goes to the holding area and props a nail underneath the front tire. Luckily, he knows all the blind spots for the security cameras. He takes a photo of the car and gives it to his guys. They score, he gets a cut and that's it. He gives up the names of the crew and Adam, Junior, and Lou go to the house with the team. One robber has been tortured, but still has a pulse. The other one is still missing. There is luggage open on bed that has a secret compartment in it lined with lead and sporting a GPS. So Cynthia lied. Her husband wasn't killed for wedding rings, this whole thing was over what was in the bag. They're going back to the hospital to question Cynthia, but when they get there, alarms are going off and the hospital is in lockdown. Cynthia is gone. So, the buyers of whatever they were smuggling in figured out what was going on, used the GPS in the luggage to find the robbers, tortured one of them, but didn't get what they came for because one robber got away. The only person that can tell who these buyers are is Cynthia and she's MIA.

Tani and Hirsch are at a care center to talk to Stanley who is pretty talkative. He fenced items for Oscar all the time and they split the profits fifty/fifty. But he wouldn't part with the engraved pistol and skipped town because he didn't want to share the proceeds from the snuffbox. He says Oscar came back to the apartment the night of the murder acting all cagey and left. Didn't make sense until Stanley saw the papers the next day and he realized Oscar killed the housekeeper. He thought about going to the police, but  it would have been hard to explain how he got the information. He always felt bad for the housekeeper though, since she was shot in the eye. Hirsch tells him that his uncle isn't living large off what he got for the snuffbox and is now living with him. Stanley asks if they're going to arrest Oscar, but Tani says they need a search warrant for the boxes he had sent to Hirsch's house, but if they find the gun, the case could be done by the end of day. They walk out and Hirsch is thinking his uncle might be a murderer after all, but Tani is all, hey, did you hear what he said about the housekeeper? He said she was shot through eye and only the police and murderer knew that. If she's right, she knows what Stanley will do next.

Reporting in, Junior says they have an APB out on the missing robber and there's no word on Cynthia. Adam looked into the couple's travel history, and Cynthia has been logging dozens of trips a year, including Antwerp, which means they were probably smuggling diamonds. They're going to reach out to HPD on who fences diamonds on the island because if the buyers find the missing robber first, he's dead.

Back at Hirsch's, Stanley is sneaking in to plant the gun. Oscar confronts him after forty-two years of thinking about what he wanted to say after Stanley forced him off the island. Stanley is still mad Oscar wanted to walk away from that kind of a payday because he had the hots for the mark and that she didn't love Oscar, she loved Jay Gilbert. Oscar says he's going to call the cops and tell them everything and he doesn't care if he gets put away as long as Stanley goes away, too. Stanley goes for the gun, but Tani comes in gun drawn thanking him for the confession since it will be that much easier to put him away for murder. (I totally saw that one coming.)

Junior found a nurse who said her cell phone was stolen, so he got the phone record and Cynthia called her contact---a Samoan street gang. If the gang is going after the diamonds Cynthia is probably with them. They find out the diamonds are going to be sold in ten minutes in a parking structure so they head over and there's a good gunfight between the robber and the street gang. Cynthia has her gun pointed at the robber on the ground. She's shaking. Steve pulls up, has his own little gunfight with the street gang before he approaches Cynthia and tells her to drop the weapon or he has to put her down. Yikes. He talks to her about losing the most important person in her life and he understands the weight of her pain. But killing him won't take the pain away, just put the weapon down. She's tearful, but does it and they take her into custody.

Stanley is also being taken away while Oscar watching with Tani and Hirsch. He says he fell in love and wasn't afraid of going to the police, but couldn't look Tabitha in the eye and tell her what he'd done. He always hoped he'd have the courage to return the snuffbox. The next scene is of him at Tabitha's house explaining how he knows he caused her a lot of pain, but the truth is she saved his life because he went straight after that and never loved any other woman like he loved her. He'd like her forgiveness. Hirsch is happy about getting his uncle a second chance with Tabitha because if things go well with her, Oscar won't have to move in with him. Honesty would have saved them a lot of heartache. (Hint, hint, Tani.)

Back at Steve's house, Junior lets Hirsch, Lou, and Tani in and everyone is surprised the door was locked. Steve's been locking it since Hirsch broke in and drank their coffee. (Yeah, when has that ever been a deterrent? Steve needs an alarm system.) Hirsch goes to get a chardonnay and Lou goes with him so Tunior can talk. They go into the back with twinkly lights and tiki torches and she tells him that her reaction this morning wasn't about breakfast. Since her mom left her when she was really young, it screwed her up so that anytime someone is good to her, she gets this fear that she'll lose them or she doesn't deserve them, so she self-sabotages and leaves them first. Junior is so lovely and good and kind, she got scared. Junior assures her he isn't going anywhere.  They hug and Junior offers to be meaner, but she laughs and says he couldn't if he tried.

Lou and Hirsch are on the couch dissecting the chardonnay, but Lou isn't doing it right. Adam comes in with beer and Lou is relieved. Adam just got off the phone with Interpol and Cynthia is cooperating so they'll be able to shut down the diamond smuggling operation. While all this is going on in his house, Steve is in the garage listening to his dad's old tape about five-year-old Steve saying he wanted to be a cop. His dad told him to be anything but that because the life of a cop is not easy. He's proud of the work he did, but has regrets. Steve gets a phone call from a lawyer in London that his mom left instructions to deliver a package to Steve four months after her death. Dun, dun, dun. What could it be?

So, the Hirsch case was a bit of predictable filler, but both cases had some good twists. Did you watch? What did you think?