Hawaii Five-0 – “Ma Ke Kahakai” – review

While hiking Ko’olau Mountain Range, McGarrett and Danno find a dead man who appears to have been shot and dumped from a plane or helicopter. Meanwhile, Chin Ho and Kono’s visit to their dying aunt forces Chin Ho to revisit the incident that cost him his HPD badge.

The investigation was almost immediately complicated when McGarrett lost his footing trying to climb back to where he first saw the dead man. Steve broke his arm in the fall and had to be airlifted to the hospital. This twist may have been written in due to a real-life injury to Alex O’Loughlin, but it showed how the others could operate for stretches without McGarrett.

The dead man was identified as Jack Leung, a fisherman without a police record until three days earlier, when he’d had a fight with another fisherman who turned out to be smuggling crystal meth. According to the other fisherman, Leung did not object to smuggling the drugs himself, he just didn’t want his son implicated, as well.

Also shortly before his death, Leung, who had shown little interest in technology until then, had been surfing the Web, looking at news coverage of the strangulation of a 19-year-old college student. Her suspected killer had dropped out of sight.

As I re-watch this episode and lay out the facts, it strikes me as obvious Leung saw something or someone connected to that open murder case, and that’s what got him killed. On my first viewing, though, I found the plot compelling enough.

The straightforward main case was also balanced by our learning the truth behind Chin Ho’s fall from the ranks of the HPD. His dying aunt had been facing kidney failure years earlier, so Chin and Kono’s uncle, also a cop, had stolen the money from police storage to buy a kidney on the black market. Chin Ho had taken the fall for the missing money so his uncle wouldn’t be disgraced. Even though he had now told Kono the truth, Chin did not want to be exonerated because it would lead to their uncle being blamed for the crime.

Overall, this episode was a nice break from the show’s go-to plot devices. It did not advance the investigation into McGarrett’s father’s murder. It also did not involve Danno’s personal life, which has been explored enough this season already.