Hawaii Five-0 - Waimaka ‘Ele’ele - Review:"Black Tears"

I love it when Hawaii 5-0 does an episode that focuses on the unique history of the islands. It is one of the few shows on television that films in the place it’s set and the writers enjoy mining the location for its rich history, lore, and culture. The JFK episode from earlier in the season was a standout and this one too takes advantage of Hawaii’s past.

Steve’s Navy past makes him the perfect lead investigator for the death of one of the last survivors of the USS Arizona (played by Hal Holbrook). The poor man is having an ice cream with his granddaughter when the car is t-boned by an SUV fleeing the scene of a bank robbery. After surviving World War II and cancer, he died in a violent, senseless accident. The team would have pursued his murder in any case, but the man’s special connection to the USS Arizona particularly inspires Steve to ensure that justice is done.

Steve is angered even more when he realizes that the robbery crew are former military contractors targeting military credit unions. They can make $12,000 in sixty seconds and don’t mind any collateral damage.

The DNA from the crash site leads the team to the secluded house of Rider, a member of the robbery crew. After a poor SWAT team member gets greeted with a hail of bullets, the team realizes they’ve been led into a trap. The contractor escapes and the team barely makes it out alive before a bomb blows up the house.

Steve engages in a brief firefight with Rider before Rider shoots him the chest. Steve, of course, is wearing a bulletproof vest but plays dead just long enough to take down Rider permanently. Unfortunately, this means that the team is almost out of leads to find Rider’s associates.

Kono does have one clue: Paladin. It was the private security company Rider used to work for before the DoD cut their funding after a disastrous incident in Afghanistan. Lou posits that the guys are hitting military credit unions as revenge. Steve orders undercover officers to follow the rest of Rider’s old team, but is quickly found out by Lee Campbell, the leader. Steve uses the meeting Campbell arranges to dress him down for killing a ninety-two-year-old war hero for a pretty lousy payday. Campbell makes it clear he doesn’t care.

More investigation leads the team to the widow of one of Campbell’s contractors. He’s robbing banks to help her pay the lien on her house. Steve tells the team that there is no way that Campbell will back down and, when the team responds to a bunch of fake alarms, he also realizes that they are dealing with a clever foe.

Steve figures it out in time and rushes to the scene of the real robbery – a jewelry store. The robbers have made the interesting decision to take off their masks before they make their getaway and it’s obviously Lee and his crew. They engage in a gunfight that ends up riddling everyone’s cars with bullet holes. If there’s one misstep in the episode, it’s that the gun battle goes on for so long I got bored halfway through. The fistfight and Campbell’s insane impaling on a piece of well-placed rebar succeeding in catching my attention once again.

The episode did a great job of incorporating the history of the attack into the episode through Steve watching Patterson’s testimony. Steve is surprised when the filmmaker in charge of a Pearl Harbor documentary says that his own grandfather is mentioned in the testimony. Steve gets to hear the heroic sacrifice his own grandfather, who he is named after, made to save others. Steve finally understands the story behind the purple heart his family treasures.

He shows up at Patterson’s funeral to give him one final salute.

Meanwhile, Adam is solving a mystery of their own. He is trying to adjust to a new life working on a construction crew when he unearths a small bone. His horrible boss refuses to shut down the site because of one little bone, but Adam can’t let it go.

When Adam approaches Jerry about researching the bone, Jerry proves that he learned his lesson from last week and doesn’t want to keep secrets from any other team member. He tells Adam how stupid it is not to tell Kono, but is talked into keeping quiet.

Adam tries to investigate by himself, but gets caught by the foreman and promptly fired. Jerry confirms that the site was never used as a heiau or a burial ground. It looks like Adam stumbled upon a murder and he’s so freaked out by the idea that he idiotically lies to Kono about getting fired. When Jerry and Adam find out that one of the realtors working on the property had a wife who went missing, Jerry once again tells Adam that they need to tell the team.

Adam ignores him and tries to catch the realtor in the act of moving the body. Finally, when the team is celebrating the end of the case, Adam goes to Kono. The foreman’s security cameras catch the evil realtor in the act and Adam proves it was murder after all. As much as I enjoy their cute lunch date, can the writers just find a magic way to get Adam out of construction and on to the team? Are his qualifications really worse than Jerry’s? Ok, the criminal record may be a problem but this episode only goes to prove that Kono and Adam excel as a husband and wife detective team.

What did you think of tonight’s episode? Let me know in the comments!