That's a good question Ron - was Jack Lord over the show? I don't think so and I say that based on some things in Season 12. He's the one swooping in to save the day on more than one occasion. However, I think toward the end reality was setting in and there was no way to keep it going.
Karen Rhodes published a book called "Booking Hawaii Five-O" and it's awesome! One thing she wrote was from a July 1980 interview with Jack Lord where he said, "We'd exhausted all the possibilities. We proved what we set out to do." Based on that, he knew it was done.
Even as horrible as Season 12 is there are nuggets of information to be pulled out about the characters. One example is Duke who completed two college degrees. Truck's cousin Joey who we meet in "Good Help is Hard to Find" (this is also the episode with the hint of why Danno split and somewhat of a closure with Kimo finding the man who killed his wife and daughter but again, that part could have been executed better). Another example is discovering quite a bit about Lori in "Who Says Cops Don't Cry".
"For Old Times Sake" and "The Flight of the Jewels" are worth watching in my opinion, we see flashes of the old McGarrett in both. On one hand, he wants to help the forger (I can't remember his name) because the guy went on the straight and narrow and when he did go back into crime, it was to assist a girl's home. The other end of the spectrum, he gets every way bent out of shape against the geniuses who pulled off a jewelry robbery with model airplanes saying, "What a waste".
Other than these episodes, I can pretty much do without Season 12.I also know Mr. Mike has been working hard on revamping his reviews and they're so well done, I don't have to re-watch the other episodes again!
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