This episode started off with potential, but it wasn't done very well.

The crime of the week focused upon a multi-level marketing scheme. The MLM company (Plum & Rose) was fictitious, but seemed to be similar to Avon (though not as large).

They actually did a very good job in their portrayal of the MLM intro video (it looked ridiculous and over the top -- but ACCURATE), and it was nice to see the show clearly explaining the decades-long scam which is MLM. Despite all the crime shows out there, we rarely see anything having to do with MLM, which is surprising. This week's case involved one of the company's top sellers and recruiters getting poisoned to death, in a weird scene where the poison took effect as she was doing a "synchronized mermaid swim".

Unfortunately, from that point forward, they didn't handle the plot very well. They had a red-herring in a woman who lost money and had threatened the victim, but of course she turned out not to be the killer. They had a second red herring that her husband did it, especially since she had drawn up divorce papers. However, he steadfastly denied it and said that his wife was about to quit Plum & Rose, due to "something shady" going on there.

At that point, it was easy to surmise that the owners of the company were the killers, as we had seen them earlier in the show and they were the only ones left. It turned out that the motive was absurd -- the MLM company was a money-laundering scheme for organized crime in Detroit. (Huh??) The female owner of the MLM scheme poisoned the victim when she was about to blow the whistle, which then made the Detroit guys nervous, and they came to Hawaii to get their money. However, the MLM owners were about to flee with that money, thus resulting in the male owner's death, their two kids kidnapped, and the female owner forced to go get the money to give them.

The Five-Zero team showed up at the money drop point and shot all four bad guys dead, though it's unclear how they were able to hide in the bushes at a remote location without being discovered on approach.

Laughably, this Detroit team of gangsters was two black men and two white men, in typical TV mixed-racial-gang fashion.

They didn't make it clear what would happen to the two kids, whose father was dead and their mother headed for what was to be a long prison sentence for the murder. Strangely, the murderous mother was made into somewhat of a sympathetic character by the end, since her kids were being held hostage.

Whole thing was a mess, and could have been done better.

There was a secondary subplot involving Adam helping a deaf homeless guy who once had an alcohol problem. This might have been a touching story if we previously knew the deaf guy, but he was a completely new character we were supposed to immediately care about. It seems that the producers are having a hard time figuring out what to do with Adam, now that Kono is gone.

There was a small third plot surrounding mermaid swims. Apparently this is a real thing in Hawaii, which I didn't know about until this episode. Tani claimed to be a huge fan of mermaids since watching "The Little Mermaid" as a kid, and had a fantasy of being one. Apparently these mermaid swims were a big bucket list item for her, but it's not clear why she didn't do it yet. The episode claimed that the mermaid tails "could cost $10,000", but a look at the webpage shows that's not true, as they are less than $200.

At the end of the episode, Junior bought a tail and a mermaid swim for Tani, though it was one aimed at little children. I think it was implied it was all he could afford. Tani was thrilled, and once again it looked like they were going to finally have their romantic kiss, but again it didn't happen. Clearly they are building up to this occurring soon. Recall that, in the episode where Danno hallucinated about the future, Tani and Junior were married.

I had always wondered about the ages of these two characters. Beluah Koale is 27, and Megan Rath is 32. I had assumed Tani was supposed to be early 30s, and Junior around 25. She's a little old for him, but not by that much.

I give the episode 1.5 stars, maybe 2 if I'm being generous.