Wow, Alicia Brown is having a really bad week. First, some pushy guys want her to come out of retirement and investigate a sick serial killer, and then she wakes up to find a dead guy in her bed. Alicia is very unlucky. And a very sound sleeper.
Hawaii Five-0 juggled three different plots in the third episode of its season.
The plot-of-the-week itself wasn’t that interesting, despite the intriguing hook. Two people are found dead, one of a gunshot wound and the other of a drop from an airplane. Steve and Danny don’t have to do much detective work to figure out the mystery. An undercover DEA agent was secretly surveilling a drug lord, Frontera. Frontera was tipped off about Agent Evers, killed him, and parachuted to safety. Now, he’s hiding out on the island.
Steve and Danny follow the trail to Frontera’s associate, Sanchez. If there’s one thing Hawaii Five-0 absolutely nails, it’s chase scenes. There’s a hilarious jump-cut to Steve right in the middle of chasing Sanchez down in a parking garage. After another liver guilt trip (I’m expecting one per episode at this point), an exasperated Danny takes the elevator down, managing to halt Sanchez before he can drive off.
After some classic good-cop, bad-cop (why do the bad guys never catch on to this?) and contemplation of that worryingly mysterious drain on the floor of the interrogation room, Sanchez gives the team the next clue. It leads them to the home of another DEA agent, Raine. Frontera sees them coming, shoots Raine as a distraction, and drives off on a motorbike. That’s when things get confusing.
It turns out that Raine wasn’t working with Frontera the whole time. She slept with him to get him to stay at her house, so a cartel-funded kill squad could get in position and take him out. The cartel captures Frontera and attempts to ransom him to the team. Steve puts the cartel on hold before finally agreeing to the meetup. Needless to say, it’s a trap. Kono is hiding in the bag full of “money”, and manages to take out every cartel member with a single shot (making everyone else on the team feel bad that they couldn’t hit Frontera in the many times they’ve been chasing him in the episode). Frontera is captured, and everyone can go home happy.
Except there’s that whole serial killer thing…
Interspersed with the hunt for Frontera is Steve’s and Alicia’s quest to track down the chess piece killer. Alicia is understandably upset at finding the corpse in her bed. Steve is concerned. Danny is hilariously nonplussed. He tells Steve, “She’s invested now – which is good”. I’m sure there were better ways to get Alicia invested.
For someone who didn’t want to help them, Alicia becomes increasingly obsessed and manic about the case. She forges Steve’s signature to get the body of poor Detective Lau exhumed and discovers he did not kill himself. She also tracks down his police psychologist. Not only is she played by the icy Elisabeth Rohm, but she has a book about medieval chess in her office. It looks like Steve and Alicia may have solved the case, and from the glimpse we get of next week’s preview, this situation is going to get a lot more dangerous.
Although they do help find Frontera, neither Chin nor Jerry didn’t get a lot to do this episode. Chin is still trying to process Sara’s adoption and his one big scene in the episode is mostly a flashback to the previous episode. Jerry pops up with a fairly unrelated tangent on D.B. Cooper.
Meanwhile, Kono reconnects with an old surfing competitor. Her story with Rosey, a disabled Iraq veteran struggling to get her life back on track, was sweet, even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the episode. Kono and Rosey reminisce about their old surfing days, and Kono realizes that Rosey is having a difficult time dealing with the physical and psychological toll of the war.
The two talk it out and although Rosey is too proud to accept Kono’s offer of a spare room, she does agree to go surfing with her. The beautiful scene of the two surfing, friends instead of competitors, takes a bit of the bite out of the cliffhanger with the psychologist. But maybe we needed a break, because it looks like the serial killer storyline will take center stage next week.
What do you think of Alicia? Do you think the psychologist is the killer? Let me know in the comments!
