Book ‘Em: Damn dirty hippies!
McGarrett and Danno shake down an ancient Hawaiian king — hey, that's Al Harrington! (courtesy CBS)
BY BURL BURLINGAME / bburlingame@staradvertiser.com
Extreme close-up of a ladyscream! Doesn’t this happen at the end of the opening sequence? Ah, it’s a female rep from a pharmaceutical company, on retreat in the Hawaiian wilderness on a team-building exercise. But she doesn’t want to play on the team, she wants the the mai-tais-on-the-beach Hawaii. Hey, there’s the Phillies’ Shane Victorino as the pharmaceutical team leader!
Anyway, the lady stomps off, and as she’s wandering through the jungle, a Hawaiian-type warrior staggers out of the mist and flops at her feet, deader’n a mackerel.
Ah, now the obligatory #H50 opener-ender scream issues forth!
Credits. And so we start “Kupale,” H50.2.2.17. Defender?
Starts out with the same C-17 sequence featured in an earlier show, plus cobbled together touristy bits, as Elvis velveteens “Rock a Hula Baby.” McG is coming home from his one-week deployment, it seems, and the islands revert to cheerful natives in his absence.
Danno is cooking a flaming frittata in the McG household, and McG douses it with a fire extinguisher. It probably says something about McG’s culinary skill that he keeps a large fire extinguisher in the kitchen, unless, of course, he keeps one around to plan an elaborate physical gag on Danno. Anyway, McG’s still in his cammos — Lt.Cmdr. oak leaves on his collar — and Danno’s apparently been housesitting at Chez McG. He let the dog sleep on the bed. McG is shaken to his core at this knowledge.
MD.Max is natty in a kind coroner coverall out in the jungle, and immediately kickstarts his OCD quirky self, nattering about wormholes and time travel. There’s a shark tooth in the dead warrior’s open wound, and so Danno, our Mainland avatar, asks dumb-haole questions so’s McG and the other “locals” can provide a crash course in pre-contact Hawaiian warfighting. And right next door, there’s about a million Hawaiian warrior reenactors pretending to let loose the dogs of Kapu Kuialua, da kine martial arts.
Danno frightens them with an air horn and they whip out their ancient Hawaiian cell phones. Al Harrington is staggering around in a feather cloak and claims they’re all history buffs, practicing non-violent warfare reenactments. He knows the dead guy, but hadn’t seen him in a while.
When Kono and MD.Max find a bone fragment in the midst of jungle blood spatter, it sets off a never-ending product placement pimp for some sort of smart tablet. The size of a dinner plate, it can take pictures! Other than a close-up of a finger mashing a WINDOWS button, the manufacturers’ logo isn’t apparent. FAIL, as the twitterati say.
Turns out Dead Hawaiian has a zillion-dollar house on the water, and his grieving widow says he designed boats for a “living.” But check out Kono’s hair — she’s got an inch of dark roots showing where her highlighting ends.
Mrs. Dead Hawaiian is clearly mainlander. She calls him “Brandon” instead of Brangdan.
Danno is in Bishop Museum visiting Gabby, the Cute Curator, the only actress in Hawaii as short as he is. McG hulks along behind them, trying not to bang his head on the door lintel as they scamper down their hobbit hole together. What happened to the ex-Mrs. Danno? This guy is turning into a horndog.
Hey, Cute Curator is also brandishing a smart pad.
Car talk. McG and Danno attempt to discuss their feelings about Danno dating Gabby, but being guys, they evade and equivocate and subtrefuge and wander off subject. But then Kono, riding Magic Table, magically flips them an address of a reenactor who ducked out early. McG shifts the car into high gear and we hear it ripping off down the street, but in the aerial shot, it has pulled over to the side of the street and parked. Not a match.
The house is kind of flimsy-looking and has a chain-link fence. In the world of #H50, this is the kind of house perps live in, while “boat designers” live in hand-polished mansions.
Perp is holed up in the perp house. Cops are clueless what to do. So McG leaps onto the roof, pries open a skylight and drops a tear-gas canister inside. Easy Peasy. Although he could have just tossed it through a window. Naw. He had to do something Danno couldn’t do, and rubs salt in it by teasing him about his Flaming Frittata.
Inside they find the apparent murder weapon and a whale-tooth pendant that was lifted off of Dead Hawaiian. Show’s over. Oh, wait, we’re only 20 minutes in. Somehow this will be connected to some grand mystic conspiracy, like how the Cabal of Secret Kenyans traveled through time just to get a Punahou grad retroactively elected president of the United States. (There really are adult people who believe this. Sigh.)
Commercial features people grooving on their Kindle smart tablets. If there’s an ad for sanitary napkins, it’ll be an all-pad night.
Green Room sweating the suspect perp. “You got the murder weapon in your house with the victim’s blood on it,” cries McG. “You know how that looks?” Looks bad, yeah? Perp confesses to looting Dead Hawaiian, not killing him. For an Olympic speed skater, Apolo Anton Ohno is also a pretty good actor.
They decide he’s telling the truth because the shark teeth in his weapon are plastic, not real. Plastic? They must be harder to get that real sharks’ teeth.
Car Talk 2: Danno has invited friends to dinner, which makes the worry lines between McG’s eyes double, then triple.
Turns out Dead Hawaiian’s “boats” are big-A ships. Dead Hawaiian’s partner rats out environmental activists who tag their ships under construction. Ghosts of the Superferry!
The environmental activists made threatening videos right out of the Taliban playbook. They need a new public-relations adviser, you think? McG gets all big-body over it, while Kono, being a GIRL, gets all fluttery, defending the need for environmental protest. McG probably believes the president is a Commie From Mars too.
Dumb environmental doesn’t realize that Magic Table can check his fingerprints from the videotape, and he’s identified as a “Kailua resident.” Oooh! But the image shown is Kaneohe.
The activist’s house is full of damn dirty hippies churning out environmentalist propaganda. McG wants to gun them all down. But the main hippie gets away, on a gas-powered motorcycle. Hypocrite.
They chase him onto Sand Island, proving that hippies are terrible at escape and evasion. McG carslams Hippie into the water, and Danno has to fish him out, because hippies can’t swim either. “Book ‘em, Danno!” cries McG. “Book me a towel,” whines Danno. I am not making up this dialogue.
Green Room interrogation. Hippie is a self-righteous know-it-all with his head firmly up an equine orifice. He also looks like the love child of a Neanderthal and a Breck Girl. McG looks like he wants to pepperspray some Occupiers.
Hippie claims he didn’t kill Dead Hawaiian, even though the man’s latest “boat” design would massacre all the whales and monk seals in the sea.
Hippie’s defense lawyer shows up. This is a liberal trifecta for poor McG. He looks absolutely crestfallen when the lawyer’s alibi for Hippie checks out.
They discover that Dead Hawaiian beached the superferry by shelving the environmental permits, but that Dead Hawaiian’s Partner reinstated them. Kono lets this all slip to Dead Hawaiian’s wife, and Danno and McG chastise her for it.
Magic Table lets them know that Dead Hawaiian’s Partner made an alibi-establishing cell phone call during “the T.O.D.” but the cell-phone tower was right next to the reenacting Hawaiian warriors. Nice metaphor.
Dead Hawaiian’s Wife is holding a gun on Dead Hawaiian’s Partner. The H50 squaddies creep up on her. Then Dead Hawaiian’s Partner turns the tables and grabs her gun, and just as he’s saying, “Stay back or I’ll …” McG shoots him. Which pains McG, because Dead Hawaiian’s Partner isn’t a damn dirty hippie, he’s one of them 1-percenter “job creators.”
Danno’s party for his circle of friends consists of his co-workers, plus the big Shrimp Guy, who orders shrimp at the bar to “test the competition,” and he apparently sticks a batter-fried shrimp up his nose. Cute Curator is out on the sand playing with Danno’s Daughter, and when Danno joins them, creating a family unit, McG nearly weeps with empathetic joy. Camera angle cranes skyward, into the unknowable vastness of the night universe.
Body count: One. “Kupale” is all about protectiveness. Danno gets the girl. Well, maybe next episode. McG reveals both his fascist id and his sentimental soul. Hippies are revealed to be secret Taliban agents. Entrepreneurs are revealed as anything-for-a-buck hypocrites. MD.Max is revealed as a snazzy jumpsuit model, in the cosmonaut mold. And Kono is revealed to be a silly girl.
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Burl Burlingame is a features reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Email him at bburlingame@staradvertiser.com and follow him on Twitter.
