Season 1-"Once Upon A Time"
I watched this for the first time in a while because it came on the heels of my seeing Jack Lord in an episode of "Dr. Kildare" where he plays a surgeon who because of developing arthritis takes a quack remedy to help him but which has lethal side-effects. This time of course it's the opposite with McGarrett going after a quack.
I have to confess, apart from the fact this shows McGarrett at his most human in his relationship with his sister and his emotional breakdown after his nephew's death, the storyline just landed with a thud to me and didn't justify being a two part episode since it gave us a climax that had absolutely nothing to do with the build-up of McGarrett wanting to nab Joanne Linville for murder (I must have missed something on why he was racing against the clock on this because you can't file a new charge during the middle of a trial!) and just a Perry Mason style switcheroo gimmick that in the end means.......she's going to be convicted of a charge with a $1000 fine and one year in jail which McGarrett was brooding about as not enough. Or are we to assume that because of the public humiliation she's gone through with the demonstration and the fact that his sister now realizes all along he was right, McGarrett has decided to settle for that as enough of a moral victory? If so, we could have used some dialogue on that point. I just got the feeling this go-round that things were dragged out needlessly with a number of stage-like monologues and that this could easily have been a one part episode (unless two parts was needed to justify the fact that most of this episode is clearly shot in California?)
