Season 10 episode 8

I see that Mike didn't make a thread for it. I just watched it right now.

Here's Mike's review: http://www.fiveohomepage.com/2010-log10.htm#8

Mike describes the plot pretty well, so I won't bother to do that.

Here are my thoughts on the episode:

The "Grover's niece" portion of the show was boring and difficult to care much about. We had never seen this girl before, and in fact she hadn't even been referenced in the past. All of a sudden Grover's picking up a teenage girl at the airport who seems to have some kind of relation to him, and it turns out she's the daughter of one of his childhood friends. There's a pointless cameo by Metta World Peace (playing himself). We are supposed to care about and root for this previously unknown character, and her backstory is kept purposely opaque throughout most of the episode.

Then we finally find out she was expelled for getting in a fight and being part of a gang, but her constant protests of, "It's not what you're thinking" and "You don't understand" fit perfectly with the "adult wrongly judges good kid as a delinquent" TV trope. Of course, it turns out that she was actually fighting in order to PREVENT her friend from being forced to join a gang, and the gun she had was in the process of being turned in to the cops.

Even stranger, it appears her dad (Grover's friend) knew all of this, yet chose to lie to Grover that his daughter was in a gang? That plot point made zero sense to me.

And after all the basketball hype surrounding her character -- including outplaying Metta World Peace during one practice possession -- it turns out she doesn't want to play basketball at all, despite being "the number 1 (female) player in the country". She wants to be a cop. Actually felt like a letdown. If there was to be any payoff to the story, it would be that she got a full ride scholarship to University of Hawaii (as was conditionally offered to her), and became a top player. Instead, she's turning down fame and money from a potential WNBA career to become a police officer. Lame.

As Mike mentioned, there were some mild implications that we might see her eventually as a Five-Zero team member.

In general, I hate when Five-Zero brings in previously unseen friends or family members, and we're supposed to care about their dramatic stories.

More interesting was the crime of the week, which was flawed, but at least still had some action. Sadly, the main villain of the episode was killed off way too easily (he died in a crazy firefight where you don't even see him get shot), to where it wasn't particularly satisfying to see this nasty villain meet his end.

Don Johnson's son Jesse Johnson played a corrupt FBI agent who drew Quinn's ire throughout the episode, and he managed to snow McGarrett the whole way despite many red flags. At first I was annoyed how McGarrett was so gullible, but then I saw it became a plot point, where McGarrett revealed that he wasn't on his "A" game due to depression over his mother's death. Okay, I'll buy that.

Jesse Johnson looked and acted a lot like his famous dad. They even did his hair somewhat like Don Johnson's on Miami Vice. I don't think Jesse's appearance on the show was random. It has been clear since the beginning of the series that someone behind the scenes at the Five-Zero production team is a big Miami Vice fan, as some episodes have paid homage to various elements and episodes of that show.