- Title: Hawaii Five-0 – Ho’opio
- tv.com: link
The discovery of the body of a 17 year-old girl kidnapped and kept in captivity for 10 years leads Five-0 to investigate a current kidnapping of another 6 year-old young girl by the same couple (Henry Rollins, Mare Winningham). After talking to both sets of grieving parents, and finding no connection between the two kidnappings, Danny (Scott Caan) enlists the help of the Pacific Knights motorcycle club who volunteer their time to help find the missing girl by tracking down the van seen in the neighborhood just prior to the kidnapping.
The team manages to capture the van, but the driver (Don Swayze), is only a low-rent thief casing the neighborhood, not their kidnapper. Their second lead, a woman posing as a Honolulu police officer, ends literally in a dead end when the suspect commits suicide rather than reveal her part in the kidnapping. From what they are able to gleam, the suspect specialized in kidnapping children and selling them on the black market with new identities. One of these identities leads Five-0 straight to their kidnapped girl’s new “parents” and, eventually, a very scared young girl who the couple buried alive realize the police were closing in.
In the episode’s B-story Kono‘s (Grace Park) doubts over her relationship with Adam (Ian Anthony Dale) hit a critical juncture given his latest disappearance. Going to Chin Ho (Daniel Dae Kim) for advice, and doing a little snooping around Adam’s home, Kono decides to asks Catherine (Michelle Borth) for a favor to look into the only lead she has – Riku Sato, and old friend of Adam’s father and a very dangerous high ranking member of the Yakuza (who Catherine discovers Kono’s boyfriend is visiting). It’s good to see the show revisiting this arc, and in a normal week Kono’s story would be the highlight, but the emotionally-charged main storyline works well enough for the B-story to mainly foreshadow some hard decisions for Kono in the future concerning a boyfriend she may no longer be able to trust.
It’s nice to see an episode where McGarrett (Alex O’Loughlin) and Danny’s roles are flipped as Danny’s personal experience with the kidnapping of his own daughter (Teilor Grubbs) leads the usually more level-headed of the pair to lose control and push the envelope in a way that’s usually McGarrett’s domain. “Ho’opio” has a couple of nice twists, including the sickening reasoning behind the kidnappings (and the reveal of the necessity of the older girl being killed). The episode succeeds in showcasing Danny’s emotions without making it the driving force of the episode. I also enjoyed the short scene we were given between Kono and Catherine, who becomes more and more a part of the Five-0 family with every scene she’s in with cast members other than O’Loughlin.
