Watched Nine Dragons again

I hadn't watched Nine Dragons since the 1990s. Since I had read in Mike's reviews that it was his favorite episode (yet he downgraded it to 3.5 stars?), I decided to give it a watch.

I agree with Mike that the structure of the show was a bit strange -- with him first escaping from capture, with amnesia, then being chased by Wo Fat's goons, then the entire story gong back to the beginning, and playing out in linear fashion.

The female professor Barbara Dalton (Dina Merrill) is Wo Fat's "mark" in this episode, as he charms her into disobeying campus security policy, and letting him in to see the highly secure room where her colleagues would be handling a very dangerous toxin, which could potentially be turned into a chemical weapon.

Wo Fat selects Dalton because she's "a champion of minority rights" and very obsessed with social justice. There's zero chance that such a character would be made into the hapless dupe today, as Hollywood has great reverence for these type of "social justice warriors", and would never want to make them look foolish. They almost surely would make the mark a conservative of some type, most likely a religious Christian white male!

In any case, Wo Fat plays Dalton like a fiddle and gets what he wants. His plan does have some holes in it, where he manages to luck into it all working out. For example, she handed him the key to open the door (which he was able to make a copy of by surreptitiously pressing it into a mold), but how did he know she would do that? It would be much more likely that she'd simply open the door herself.

When Wo Fat and the bad guys get away in their truck, and McGarrett passes them unknowingly when driving onto campus, why didn't they lock down all roads out of campus when they realized there was a big problem?

I never understood why Wo Fat had his flunkies kill McGarrett on a boat. If the goal was to dump his body, why not shoot him first and dump him later, instead of simply knocking him out and bringing him alive onto the boat? This was Wo Fat's undoing. Had McGarrett not escaped, Wo's plan would have worked.

CID agent Blake is supposed to be like the McGarrett of Hong Kong, but he seems somewhat incompetent and befuddled, and indeed his most trusted assistant turned out to be a double agent.

I enjoyed the gag about the obvious Chinese spy office in Hong Kong being disguised as "travel agents", and how one of them ended up help save the day, with another "I'm just a travel agent" proclamation at the end, as he handed McGarrett the stolen toxin! It's just unclear to me why these "travel agents" weren't initially interested in relaying a message back home that Wo Fat was about to kill their government's leaders, and had to be convinced by Chin to do so!

Overall a very interesting episode, and I had forgotten how much I loved the Wo Fat character (and how bland the one on new Five-Zero was).

The travel agent in Nine Dragons was played by Ric (Eric in the credits) Young. He appeared in S01E09 of the H50 reboot as General Pak, an evil dictator from the bogus country of Sandimar. He also played one of the sons of Lao Che, the Chinese crime lord from the opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (https://indianajones.fandom.com/wiki/Kao_Kan). I thought Young had passed away, but if you do a Google search, it looks like there are other people named Ric Young who died...