- Title: NCIS: Hawai’i – Crash and Burn
- wiki: link
Closing out the two-part opening arc, “Crash and Burn” focuses on NCIS and the Coast Guard chasing down the escaped prisoners whose plane was brought down in the ocean. With everyone splitting up, we get several separate threads. Jane Tennant (Vanessa Lachey) and Sam Hanna (LL Cool J) take the biological weapons creator whose escape was the point of the crash. Kai (Alex Tarrant) and Jesse (Noah Mills) team with Pike (Mark Gessner) to take down a trio of criminals. Ernie (Jason Antoon) works on finding the hacker. And Lucy (Yasmine Al-Bustami) and Whistler (Tori Anderson) track down an arsonist whose capture reveals another target the team needs to be paying much more attention to.
Despite breaking up the cast in so many individual storylines, “Crash and Burn” turns out to be one of the best episodes of the series. With so much going on, there’s no need for B-story filler. Highlights include Lucy’s disappointment at not getting a more dangerous target, Kai siding with Pike to get under Jesse’s skin, Ernie having some fun at the hacker’s expense, Pike’s plan to distract one of the criminals during a timeshare seminar, and the final takedown at the end of the episode. Although the episode doesn’t address what exactly Sam is still doing in Hawaii, he does appear to be staying in Hawaii for more than just these two episodes.
