Friday's show (S10E06) - preliminary thoughts

[Mr. Mike]

I hated every second the YouTube/Instagram stoners were on the screen. I kept saying, “Who wrote this garbage?” and “How could actors actually act this garbage?” One thing I do agree on — Dannoying was very restrained in this show compared to most previous ones.

The driverless car business was equally stupid. The guys behind this racket supposedly had lots of cars — someone says “these drug dealers got a warehouse full of these puppies.” Cars are not cheap, and I suspect neither is the fancy equipment that is installed in them so they can drive driverless. Yet these entrepreneurs are using these cars for $400 drug transactions? This is really not a viable business plan, especially when one of your cars gets cornered by the cops and another flies off a cliff and blows up!

Julia, the geeky girl, was suspected of giving the code for the driverless cars to the bad guys, but it turns out it was really her father — “these dealers … strong-armed him into it.” So did the father (who was never established as a geeky type) just download the code and give it to the bad guys? It seems highly unlikely to me that he would have been involved in programming the cars, considering Julia says that up until recently when he turned up "clean and sober," he was not living a exemplary lifestyle (exact details are not revealed). Even downloading the info might have been taxing. When I told a friend of mine about this plot line, she said, “If that guy [the father] is a lush or doper, he probably can’t operate a microwave, let alone program a driverless car”!

[Mr. Mike]

Here is my review of the show:

http://fiveohomepage.com/2010-log10.htm#6

[Todd]

I agree mostly with your review on this one, but overall I didn't hate the episode as much as you. It deserves at least 1.5 stars, in my opinion.

Right at the beginning, I laughed at these expensive driverless cars being used for $400 drug transactions. Why didn't the writers simply craft it around the cars being used for completing big time drug deals? That would have been a far more interesting angle, and would have made more sense, as such cars would prevent both law enforcement busts and drug-deal-gone-bad violence.

The entire setup of the second car was laughable. The whole purpose of the setup for for Five-Zero to do a fake drug deal and then surreptitiously follow the car to its source. Instead, McGarrett follows the car way too closely, gets spotted, and then they go on an inexplicable chase of the car, which clearly wasn't going "home" at that point. Not surprisingly, the operators of the vehicle purposely ran it off a cliff! Wouldn't it have been smarter to follow this car by air, or at least tail it in a more restrained manner?

The side plot of the two YouTube stars "Scooter and Skeez" was predictably annoying. The entire premise where they rode along with Tani and Quinn to do an HPD recruitment video was poorly conceived, and it's unlikely they would have been taken into a crime scene under active investigation. It made even less sense because they were recruiting for HPD, and not Five-Zero, so shouldn't they have ridden along in a patrol car or something?

Noelani is shown to be a fan of Scooter and Skeez, but I found that unlikely based upon both her age and personality. The actress is 39 (and presumably her character is near that age), and Scooter and Skeez's channel is clearly aimed at teens and college-aged kids. While there are popular YouTube channels with hosts as annoying and immature as Scooter and Skeez, their audience is almost entire comprised of young people.

I also agree that the ending of the driverless car story was stupid. In fact, the entire story didn't make sense once they explained everything. It would have been much better if the woman had cooperated with the drug dealers under threat of her father being murdered, and then when she saw they were about to kill him anyway when they knew the police were onto them, she used one of the cars to kill the bad guys. The way they actually did the whole thing was convoluted and nonsensical.