After the excellent, action packed episode 17, we've now had two consecutive duds in a row.

Season 9, episode 19 had three stories, but the main and secondary one weren't executed very well.

The main "crime of the week" story had potential, but it progressively got sillier and sillier, and eventually ended up completely in the weeds. A middle-aged window washer was found dead next to a tall office building, with the ropes having been cut from his platform. Very quickly Tani finds out that the man's window washing company was fake, and he was clearly at the building late at night for some other nefarious purpose.

At the beginning, this purpose was assumed to be some kind of burglary. Jerry then uses a drone equipped with technology which can analyze footprints on the roof, and create modeling projections on the Five-Zero supercomputer. Like much of the technology on display in the show, this was completely fake and far-fetched, but let's just forget that for the moment, allowing the show its usual dramatic license.

The drone picks up various sets of footprints, including one which seems to "smaller and with lighter indentations". It's eventually surmised that the victim was on the roof with a female, gunmen burst onto the scene and shot at them, the victim attempted to escape down the building, at which point his ropes were cut. The female then apparently escaped.

A garage door clicker was found in the car of the victim, but there is no known address for him. In what was probably the most clever scene of the episode, Jerry uses various data (such as receipts found in the car) to figure out a small radius where the victim likely lived, and various officers (including Five-O members) are sent with cloned clickers to see which garage door it opens. This leads them to a warehouse where the victim was living.

After a booby-trapped motion sensor which appeared to be about to fire guns at Tani and Junior (but in reality only fired paint), it's discovered that the victim was a famous anonymous graffiti artist, known as "Brikz". He was clearly modeled after Banksy, though Banksy himself was mentioned in the episode as being similar to Brikz.

Career scammer/forger (now turned lovable nebbishy crime scene cleanup guy) Hirsch is brought on the scene to provide his art expertise regarding the matter.

I thought the whole graffiti angle was already a bit disappointing, as I was looking for something darker and more interesting to be tied to the victim. However, at that point I still found myself interested in the storyline. Who killed Brikz? Who was the female with him that escaped? Was Brikz targeted, or did he end up seeing something he shouldn't, when climbing the building to do his late-night graffiti art?

Turned out it was none of the above. They could have taken this storyline in various interesting directions, but instead....

... it turned out to be that Brikz was attempting to help a woman escape from Nicaragua after she suffered political persecution, and was attempting to get her story out to the world, before they were both located on Oahu and that plan was ruined. You see, Brikz had cancer (from inhaling a substance in the spray paint too many times), and was months away from death. So this was his one non-selfish good deed on the way off this planet. Lame.

The rest of the storyline involved Five-Zero tracking down the woman (in ridiculous fashion -- intercepting a "video feed" to Nicaragua), and shooting dead the kidnappers as she was facing a video "trial" being broadcast back to her home country.

Sound confusing and convoluted? You bet it was.

However, this was the better of the two crime stories.

The other was a pointless exercise of Adam and Grover attempting to figure out why a shirtless man was murdered. It was quickly determined by Grover (from a button left behind) that he was wearing a vintage 1950s Hawaiian shirt, and that was the reason for it being taken off his body (and perhaps the murder). After the usual red herring suspect and some investigation, it turned out that his wife had her boyfriend murder and rob him after he left a Pai Gow Poker game. This is never explained, and in fact during the investigation, it's revealed that he cheated on his wife often. So his wife was cheating on him, too? And she had him murdered after winning at Pai Gow Poker for what reason? Divorce wasn't an option? The whole story was a distraction and both poorly written and poorly edited.

As Mike mentioned, this secondary story had two especially ridiculous elements. First, acting on a wild guess that the shirt thief might show up at a specific store on the island, both Adam and Grover sit at the store waiting all day for the guy to show up. They really had nothing else to do to where such time could be wasted (and why were BOTH necessary to be there?)

Second, as the murderous boyfriend tried to escape out a window, Adam ran over and forcefully pulled him back in, and arrested him. The problem? This guy looked about twice Adam's size, and could have easily shaken or pushed him off. This was yet another case on Five-Zero of the hero characters having unlikely strength. The scene would have been better if Grover (who actually is a very large guy himself) was the one to pull the big dude back in.

I actually did like the third story, involving Junior and his dad. We've slowly been introduced to Junior's dad, and the trouble in their family. One of the difficult things they've dealt with was the (fairly recent?) death of Junior's sister Maya, who seems to have died in some kind of auto accident. Junior's dad finds an old bracelet of Maya's in the deck they're working on, briefly pauses, but then puts the bracelet in his pocket and pretends to get over it. His lackadaisical attitude bothers Junior, but as the episode wears on, it's apparent that Junior's father is still very broken up about it, and hasn't yet properly grieved. Junior's dad finally breaks down near the end of the episode, and Junior helps him take off his prosthetic leg, and puts him to bed. It was actually a touching scene, and unlike other pseudo-touching scenes in the series (where we're supposed to care about newly-introduced, one-episode characters related to the main characters in some way), this one seems like an ongoing storyline here to stay.

This was the rare episode where the non-crime-fighting segment of the show was better than the crime-fighting ones.

Overall, though, it simply wasn't a very good episode.

Mike gave it two stars. It's either 1.5 or 2 in my opinion, but I'll go with two.

Mike's review is here (scroll down): http://www.fiveohomepage.com/2010-log9.htm