I have re-viewed Time and Mamm ... er ... Memories from season 3.

http://fiveohomepage.com/5-0log3.htm#52

This episode is very well written and the acting is very good (and Diana Muldaur is gorgeous!), but there is a big goof at the end.

Part of understanding this episode is the "tie line" business that becomes Martin Sheen's character's downfall.

I still don't totally get this, but the basic idea is, you can phone the head exchange for such a line and then get it to call anywhere so it would appear that you are calling from the head office, wherever that might be. But this was in the days before call display, wasn't it?

To demonstrate how this works, McGarrett calls the San Francisco office where Sheen works and gets them to relay the call back to Honolulu. Sheen himself did this when he was in Hawaii murdering his employer and then calling his girl friend (the employer's daughter), giving the impression he was back in San Francisco when this was happening. This was around 12:30 in the morning Hawaii time ... would there have been an operator in the SF office who would relay the call back?

The big goof is ... the phone number for the San Francisco office is exactly the same as the pay phone at the Honolulu airport that Sheen used to call California before he got on the plane going back to the mainland! And you wonder how he would call the office through a pay phone. Could you use a credit card to do a long distance call like this in the early 1970s? Did he have a pocket full of quarters to put in the phone, and, based on a comment in the show, this kind of call would probably have been pretty expensive.