Off the wall "What If...?"

Don't ask me why but this has entered my brain and I got to put it out here...

My "what if?" question is what if Danno had been around for Season 12?

The obvious answer would be things would certainly be different but by how much? I suspect he would have been pushed back even further than he had the previous two seasons (I noticed in Season 10 but others' mileage may vary). As well, were they really prepped to have no less than 6 members on the Five-O team including McGarrett? That's a lot of folks to keep in engaged.

I have found it interesting to contemplate the last few days.

I could say I know the story of how things happened in the real world but I believe I only have an inkling.

Any ideas on any of the angles? :)

I don't think the show would have made Season 13 either way.

They had run out of ideas, the writing went into the toilet, and Jack Lord took too much creative control.

Seasons 1-7 had a lot of great episodes, and relatively few bad ones.

Season 8 was decent, but was the first season where there was a noticeable overall decline.

Season 9 was again decent, but also was inferior to seasons 1-7.

Season 10 was substantially worse than 8-9, and the show honestly should have ended there.

Season 11 was clearly the second-worst season, only better than 12.

Season 12 was mostly an abomination, with a few good episodes here and there.

I do wonder if James MacArthur was becoming aware that the show was circling the drain, and jumped off the ship before it was finally going to sink. Not a bad idea, actually. His mother had a lot of show biz experience, so perhaps she advised him to do so.

I agree with your assessment Todd. Season 9 is my favorite, I'm not sure why but I think it's because we see other aspects to the characters and it was obvious the cast were really comfortable in their roles. However, I will agree it doesn't measure up to the first 7 seasons.

The show should have stopped at 10. It was also obvious, at least to me, Jack Lord was trying hard to put himself in as positive a light as much as possible. What I mean, he/McGarrett swoops in to save the day in more episodes in the last three seasons than probably any other and it really wasn't needed.

I also agree with your last point, I'm sure James MacArthur saw what was going on and he strikes me as somebody who was pretty smart about such things.

Holy cow! This is my 100th post!! :cool:

Bobbi, congrats on being the first "Officer" on this forum! (Look at the rank underneath your name!)

Woo-hoo!! That's cool. :cool:

To stay on topic :) I forgot to mention in my reply, I knew 13 wasn't going to happen. The show had definitely run it's course.

So as I continue on my projects.. I'm eyeball deep in Season 12 but hopefully not much longer.

Today's choice is "Who Says Cops Don't Cry" where Kevin Wilson, Five-O's latest recruit, is gunned down as he and Lori try to stop a check-cashing robbery while they're just going about their day. The situation stinks.

Anyway, the first time we see McGarrett in the episode he's talking to Kimo in his office about Kimo joining Five-O. This sequence is very interesting in a couple of respects:

First, McGarrett mentions he's been thinking of expanding the team for awhile. I still scratch my head thinking "When did this come up?" Seriously, did you think about this after Chin Ho was killed? What the heck happened with Danno!? Is he on special assignment or did he throw in the the towel? (Again, I have an inkling at what occurred in real life).

Second, Kimo says something to the effect of still feeling a little lost. McGarrett's reaction is priceless and to me, speaks volumes. Did he and Danno have such a disagreement and McGarrett is feeling lost himself? It's interesting to ponder, at least from the angle of story.

I reply to this thread because I feel like my post fits here. I'm such a nutcase :p

I wrote a long review of this one when Mike briefly ran the phpBB forum, but unfortunately it's not accessible online now.

I remember that the actor paying Lori's husband (who was gunned down early) didn't do a good acting job at all.

I'm forgetting what other comments I made about the episode at the time, other than it being decent for Season 12, but still quite flawed. I'd have to watch it again (or see the review I wrote) to remember.

Regarding the Five-O taem and its reconstruction, another episode in Season 12 (I forget which one) had a news report talking about how Five-O "had several recent resignations", which was the only reference I ever heard as to why Danno left. I wish they had gone into more detail.

Todd, I am working on archiving some stuff from the phpBB forum, including your post about Who Says Cops Don't Cry. You can access it here:

http://www.fiveohomepage.com/phpBB-archived/Classic50/

Thanks for bringing it back, Mike. Here's the post:

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As part of my recent Season 12 tour, I watched "Who Says Cops Don't Cry" tonight.

This was a better episode than the high-potential but uneven "A Lion in the Streets", but was not without flaws.

The most interesting (and realistic) character in this one was Ben Dawson, the older brother of the leader of the 4-person gang committing check cashing place robberies around the country. Ben is clearly exasperated with his no-good sibling, Lloyd, and reluctantly patches up a bullet wound in his leg, sustained during the last robbery. Ben is constantly torn between helping his troubled brother (who trots out the usual "This was my last job" excuse) and steering clear of the whole thing.

Complicating matters is the fact that the last job resulted in two deaths -- one of a police officer just about to join Five-O, and the other a young woman who was part of the gang.

Sharon Farrell played Lori Wilson, the widow of the killed officer, and also an HPD cop herself. Lori spends much of the episode attempting to track down the killers. Oddly, she never brings Five-O in to help when she gets leads, presumably because she is grieving and wants to kill the men who killed her husband.

William Smith (Kimo), in his second episode, does a much better job in the dramatic scenes with Lori than he did in "A Lion", where his acting was quite poor. Kimo's character was used well here, as he essentially suffered the same tragedy (cop whose spouse was murdered).

The three bad guys were written fairly well, and Lloyd's two henchmen were menacing and scary, which was a far cry from the comically inept henchmen working for mob boss Alika in "A Lion". Lloyd himself was clearly a sociopath, shown near the beginning of the episode to have little care for the fact that two people died during the last robbery, including the woman in his gang who was apparently in love with him.

It was disappointing to see Lloyd arrested at the end, while his two henchmen were killed. I was hoping Lloyd would be killed, but he was left alive in order to provide the (rather predictable) dramatic scene where Lori has a chance to kill him, but instead chooses to make him drop his weapon and allow Duke to arrest him.

Sharon Farrell's performance was mostly good, though she's strangely smiling during the shootout in the first scene. As mentioned in Mike's review, we were shown a gratuitous shot of Sharon Farrell's nice legs as she undressed in her house (shown from an angle where we can only see up to her thighs), and she curiously left her high heels on during the undressing routine. Clearly the heels stayed on in order to make her legs appear more shapely for the camera. Jack Lord directed this episode, so it's very possible that this "peep show" scene was his idea!

There were a few problems with this episode.

The actor playing Lori's husband was awful, and seemed to have trouble saying his few lines. This was problematic, as it was tough to take them seriously as a couple while the actor was constantly stumbling through his sentences. He appeared to be a Hawaii local, so that probably had something to do with it. Five-O had a habit of hiring local actors with little prior experience.

McGarrett inexplicably had to "go to California to testify" in an unnamed case. It is not clear why this was written into the plot, as he returned not long after leaving, and in fact made a phone call back to the Five-O office from a pay phone in "San Francisco" (conveniently indoors, meaning Jack Lord never left Hawaii). This "trip" was referred to several times during the episode, and was pointlessly distracting. Perhaps this was written in order to give the temporary to spotlight to Kimo (still a new character to the show), but it would have been much better if they removed this nonsense "trip" and let McGarrett direct things, as usual.

Lori displayed a shocking lack of curiosity after being introduced to Lloyd via his brother Ben, who believed her to be the dead woman's estranged sister. When it became clear that Lloyd was being evasive, Lori simply walked out, "hid" in plain sight, and then panicked when she noticed Lloyd's limp (indicative that he was the one shot in the leg during the robbery). When Lori noticed the limp, she seemed shocked -- as if had previously believed that Lloyd was innocent!

As Mike mentioned in his review, it was also far fetched when Lori found a discarded shopping bag from the Island Market in Lloyd's trash, and deduced that was his next target.

Overall, this was still the best episode of Season 12.

I might skip watching some of the subsequent Season 12 episodes, because I remember them being really terrible.

For me, the artistic peak of Five-O was "Nine Dragons" and from that point on it was a downhill escalator ride that got steeper and steeper. You really couldn't use Wo Fat again as a viable villain once you have him engage in the high stakes of "Nine Dragons" because anything else, especially his caper in the last episode, seems like such a comedown (saving that for the last episode is the one saving grace). No more scripts from Jerome Coopersmith didn't help. Plus, the show just never seemed to fit in with the ambience of late 70s TV.

That said, it would have been nice to have seen Danno in the last episode so that maybe the final tag wouldn't have been that ridiculous one of Wo Fat in a ludicrously dated prison uniform, but instead Steve and Danno sharing some congratulations over finally nabbing him.