HAWAII FIVE-0 Stays On Course

A couple caught in a rainstorm is lucky enough to find a tent, but inside they find the body of Petty Officer Clay Garcia, a member of SEAL Team Nine. The senior M.E. rules Garcia’s death a suicide, but Joe White (Terry O’Quinn), who knew Garcia personally, asks McGarrett to look more deeply into the case.

After some prodding, Max Bergman (Masi Oka) found the blood spatter patterns were inconsistent with a suicidal gunshot. The evidence indicated that Garcia’s gun was placed in his hand and the trigger pulled after Garcia’s death.

“Kame’e” maintained recent episodes’ greater emphasis on procedure, which has made the show’s plots easier to follow. No one believed a SEAL would allow himself to be ambushed, so McGarrett, Chin Ho, and Joe White searched the area around Garcia’s campsite while Danno and Weston (Lauren German) looked into Garcia’s failing marriage, for which he’d requested a leave of absence from the SEALs.

Chin Ho found half a bottle of whisky that appeared to contain some foreign sediment. Chin also almost triggered a shotgun shell booby trap around the perimeter of a secret drug growers’ field. When questioned, however, one of the growers revealed that he and Garcia had agreed to leave each other alone.

Meanwhile, Garcia’s widow, Marissa (Sarah Roemer), admitted to Danno and Weston that she had fallen out of love with him, but that he suspected she was having an affair with her boss, restaurateur Nick Drayton (Dash Mihok). Drayton’s fingerprints were found on the recovered bottle of whisky, which also turned out to be laced with the horse tranquilizer ketamine.

McGarrett did his usual, not very leader-like thing: putting Drayton in a choke-hold and accusing him of murdering a SEAL. Fortunately, Danno pulled Steve off and gave Drayton a chance to say he tried to take Garcia’s bottle away out of concern for Marissa, who was just a friend. McGarrett’s gung-ho act seemed even more out of place now that the show is mostly sticking to procedure, but the writers may have decided the hard-charging part of his character had been established and had to be served.

The team was out of leads until the body of another member of SEAL Team Nine was recovered from an apparent car accident. This time, Max Bergman found no trace of airbag chemicals in the victim’s lungs, meaning the victim was already dead when his car crashed.

From there, White and McGarrett questioned an old SEAL contact (David Keith) who hinted that SEAL Team Nine had aided the DEA in taking down a local drug cartel. As the cartel re-formed, they apparently hired a hitman to kill the members of SEAL Team Nine. This was a layer of plot I couldn’t have seen ahead of time.

The only other questionable aspect of the episode was McGarrett’s mid-air rescue of one of the members of SEAL Team Nine. The SEAL had unknowingly gone skydiving with the hitman, had been drugged with ketamine, and dumped out of the plane. McGarrett came diving out of nowhere, and was able to catch the drugged man and carry him down by parachute. I can’t say for sure whether such a rescue is possible.

Finally, after making friends with some corrupt cops, Kono met their boss, Frank Delano (Billy Baldwin), who asked her to provide information on an upcoming HPD raid before officially joining their circle. I’ve already heard one viewer say it’s obvious Kono is working undercover to bust Delano. Still, it seems a solid storyline from a technical standpoint. I like how far the show has come in just a few episodes.