Nightmare Road turns 50!

Tonight Nightmare Road aired 50 years ago.

The basic premise is to take a gifted scientist out of Hawaii and have him work of a country who is essentially the highest bidder for his services. The baddies set him up making him believe he killed someone but his girlfriend has second thoughts. There is a major confrontation on the beach with the main baddie and the girlfriend dead.

As usual, I have to give a shout out to Mr. Mike's excellent review: http://www.fiveohomepage.com/5-0log2.htm#45

Unfortunately, I found this episode to be one in the category of "meh". There's nothing really outstanding about it to me, but that's my opinion. There is one trivial point: we learn Danno tried his hand at making jewelry when he was a kid :) This is from a decent scene where McGarrett, Danno and Che are in the lab and figure out how some scratch marks were made on the gun (held by vise grip pliers).

Happy 50th Nightmare Road! :cool:

I liked this one better than you and Mike did. Just re-watched this tonight, after not having seen it for about 25 years.

It wasn't the best Five-O episode, but I felt it was above average. The fact that Theresa had some feelings for Dr. Royce despite her deceptions was a nice touch, and it was fleshed out gradually in a subtle manner. She never got to tell the truth to Dr. Royce about her attempt to defect and be with him, but she showed that she had at least some loyalty to him by throwing sand in the face of one of the henchmen during the shootout.

I didn't understand why she grabbed the sand at first, though. Did she see McGarrett and Five-O hiding, waiting to pounce? If they weren't there, what would she have done with a fistful of sand against 3 armed bad guys?

Guest stars Charles Aidman (Royce) and Pilar Seurat (Theresa) ended up with something unfortunate in common -- both died in their 60s from cancer. Despite Royce supposedly being "twice Theresa's age", Aidman was only 13 years older than Seurat. However, as Mike pointed out, the actual age difference of the characters -- 28 and 47 -- was 19 years.

Pilar Seurat was really from the Philippines, as her Theresa character was supposed to be.

I had three problems with the episode, despite liking it overall:

1) The premise of a device being able to detect a tiny bit of metal in the deep ocean is laughable. You don't have to be a PhD scientist to know that Royce's invention was absurd. Even worse, the machine itself was a prop-looking boxy device with flashing lights. I actually laughed when I saw it demonstrated. I do wonder what that room with all the water actually was in real life. It's hard to believe that they set up that entire elaborate room just for Five-O.

2) The "chase" of the Island Star truck with the bad guys didn't make sense. HPD spotted the truck. Why not go after it right then, rather than simply informing McGarrett of where it was? Even worse, HPD didn't continue tailing it, and it almost got away, and Dr. Royce almost ended up on the submarine!

3) As Mike already pointed out, the existence of 3 pile drivers on the island somehow led to McGarrett and Danno guessing the right one on the first try (without any explanation as to why they tried that one first). How about either including something logical which led them to conclude that was the location, or only having one location on Oahu using pile drivers that day? Either way that plot point would have been better.


Overall I enjoyed the episode, and give it 3 stars.