Season 9, Episode 18 (3/8/19) review
After last week's excellent bank robbery episode, this one had a tough act to follow.
In typical Five-Zero fashion, the producers took everything good they did with the prior episode and threw it away in the next one.
Steve and Danny were completely wasted in a pointless plot about Danny's ex-mother-in-law, successful romance novel author Amanda Savage (played by Joan Colins). This was a major plot point to the show, and it featured absolutely zero crime-fighting, and not much drama. Steve and Danny were inexplicably acting as bodyguards for Amanda during a book tour on Oahu, despite the fact that she was not under any kind of threat. It was not explained why Steve and Danny could just ignore their important Five-Zero jobs for days, while playing errand boy for a stuffy old bag.
The Amanda character was written as a caricature of a rich, stuffy old English lady, and the recurring theme was that she never cared for Danny (even when he and Rachel were married).
Steve was along because Danny was turning in his "one time favor" for donating organs to save Steve's life. Steve inexplicably finds the stuffy old bag to be charming, probably because she drives Danny crazy.
At the end of the episode, after Danny finally tires of her verbal abuse and walks out, she finds him in a bar and explains everything. It turns out that she always hated Danny because she actually liked him so much -- that she had always wanted to marry an honest, caring man like her father, and Danny reminded her of him. She was jealous that Rachel found such a man, and she never did, so she took it out on him.
This might have been a sweet moment if we had prior experience with this character, but once again, Five-Zero dropped a new family/friend character on us, and we were supposed to immediately care about them. This entire storyline seemed like yet another self-indulgent attempt to build a storyline around an old-school star, as they did with Carol Burnett a few years ago.
I really wish all family and friends of Five-Zero characters would disappear entirely. They're never interesting.
The crime of the week had potential, but wasn't executed well.
A roid head was shown at the beginning of the episode, walking around the highway like the Incredible Hulk, screaming at people in passing cars. Eventually he was hit head-on by a semi truck, and killed. Upon examination, it was found that he had both steroids and another substance in his system. That second substance was one which was unlikely to ever be taken with steroids, as it would provide no benefit while often causing death.
The Five-Zero team, sans Danny and Steve (who were too busy following around an old lady), quickly concluded it was likely murder.
Grover and Adam take the lead, and visit the father of victim Brad Chen. It turned out Brad was a minor league baseball player who was a hair away from making the Majors, before an injury derailed his career. He was back in Hawaii attempting to rehab and become the player he once was. Oddly, the father breaks down into tears when it's suggested Brad was murdered, yet before that suggestion he was surprisingly calm about his beloved son's violent death. The father cannot offer much help, but says he's not surprised that his son used steroids.
Tani and Junior are assigned to work undercover in the gym where Brad worked out, and presumably got his roids. Junior pretends to be a wannabe bodybuilder who wants to get an edge via steroids, and Tani takes a job at the place as an aerobics/yoga/dance instructor. We get to briefly see Tani conducting a "Booty Booster" class (is this a real thing?), where she improvises an ass-shaking dance, in what seems to be a scene solely to show off her body and the bodies of other attractive women in the class.
Junior attempts to ask around how he can get roids, but seems to strike out. When he finally gets a tip from Tani who the main roid guy in the gym is, he approaches the dude and very quickly asks for roids because he's "impatient" regarding seeing results. Not surprisingly, the guy gets suspicious, but stupidly arranges two of his friends to help him beat up Junior behind the club. They claim they are going to beat him up because his asking questions would "bring too much heat" to their roid operation, which makes little sense. Wouldn't beating a guy senseless bring more heat, after he goes to the cops?
Junior easily beats up all three of them, and arrests the main guy.
This is where the story goes off the rails. It's found that the steroid vials with the silver cap are regular roids, and the ones with the gold cap have the substance which kills people. They arrest another guy from the gym and find out the name of the roid supplier, but it's found that he just died of a heart attack shortly after going on a massive roid rage, which was fairly similar to the one of Brad Chen. The same gold capped vials are found in his house, with the same deadly substance.
It's theorized that this guy was the intended victim of the substance, and then this is verified when a closed circuit camera within the gym shows that Chen broke into the locker room shortly before his death, and likely stole those same vials (though the actual theft isn't seen on camera).
Also, throughout the episode, weird packets of human blood are found both in Brad's house and in the house of the steroid dealer.
So who was responsible for the murders?
Turns out that the blood was being traded for roids, where some quack doctor was buying "the blood of young, healthy males" and injecting it into older people as a way to "stop aging". The supplier of the blood was getting it from males at the gym, in exchange for roids. However, when he repeatedly raised his prices on the doctor, the doctor intentionally gave him a poisonous batch of roids for himself, some of which then got stolen by Brad, who also died.
When they attempted to arrest the doctor, he stabbed Tani with a needle filled with something deadly, and Adam managed to save her with an AED device and adrenaline, both found on the premises.
The doctor was arrested after getting shot in the leg by Grover, in somewhat of an anti-climactic scene.
It's never explained why the poisonous vials had a different color cap. Wasn't the whole point to trick the victim into taking them as he would normally?
The entire plot about the doctor buying blood, which was acquired in exchange for roids, was completely far fetched. If the doctor was a scam artist anyway, why did he need blood of young men? How could the patients tell the difference? And if he killed his supplier of the blood, how would he keep getting it? Wouldn't it be easier to simply stop using the guy?
The whole episode was a mess.
1.5 stars
