The Stand
Tonight’s Hawaii Five-0 was a little at odds with itself. It demanded that viewers think about the current American gun control debate while also showing cool action sequences and an amazing battering ram bulldozer. We revel in the goofy destruction of the gun range and the team’s finely honed training, but are also left to wonder whether or not all this gun glorification is good for us. I think that perhaps Hawaii Five-0 was the wrong show to handle this particularly delicate topic, but they found a good emotional beat to the end of the story.
But first, the show starts with the return of Adam. He has been released early with a new mission, to reunite a cancer-stricken inmate with his estranged daughter. Kono is happy to help. She’s happy in general and practically glows when she first sees her husband as a free man. The team understandably tries to let Adam and Kono have time together, but the situation becomes too dire to leave Kono on the sidelines.
The scene cuts from a happy reunion to a great hook – a huge, armored bulldozer causing havoc in the streets of the city. The bulldozer was featured pretty heavily in the promotional material, and with good reason. I could have watched an entire episode with the bulldozer on a rampage around the island. While even Lou, Danny, and Chin are throw by the appearance of the giant machine, Steve sees it and immediately decides the best course of action would be to throw a flash-bang grenade through the window (note for future killer bulldozer builders, if you want your vehicle to be impenetrable, don’t keep the windows). This has the potential, as Danny notes, to go horribly, horribly wrong and only doesn’t because the perp has already fled the scene. He opened up the hatch at the bottom of his homemade tank and fled through the sewers, like a ’60 Batman villain.
While the gun range owner claims that nothing was taken in the attack, Steve’s and Danny’s crack detective skills of asking the witnesses questions reveals that the owner had a secret stash of weapons in the basement and didn’t seem very discrete about it. The team thinks the bulldozer driver was after the special weapons and can only offload them to a few collectors, or, as Steve insists they be called, aficionados on the island. Matty McConnell, aka Papa Firearms and a bunch of other not-as-funny aliases, would be the most likely buyer of the half-a-million dollar M134 minigun that was the premiere weapon in the stash. As the team enters the house, Lou notes with foreboding that the door is open, and nothing good ever happens when the door is open. It only took seven seasons for the Hawaii Five-0 characters to become aware of the kind of show they’re on. Lou is indeed right, and Papa Firearms is found dead from his coveted M134.
Papa Firearms seemed like a shady jerk in real life, but in death the sketchiness literally avenges him when the team sees the reflection of the killer in his sunglasses. The killer is posting pictures of the violent murder on social media in the hopes of sparking a conversation about gun control. He does trigger one (couldn’t resist), but maybe not the one he hoped for.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m delighted to see Steve’s and Danny’s conversations not involve the liver donation for once, but both of their arguments are a bit toothless. Danny is vocally pro-gun control while Steve believes that guns are useful in the right hands. Both repeat the same rote points everyone makes about gun control and the show isn’t committed enough to make it a full-on argument. Instead, like always, they simply bicker until it’s time for the scene to be over.
Steve tracks the killer down to a support group for loved ones of victims of gun violence. The leader recognizes the man in the reflection and finds a registration sheet for him. We’re going to learn that the killer, Kyle Kane, is not the brightest star in the sky, but giving the support group a false name and real address is a pretty big mistake to make.
Kyle Kane, however, has nothing left to lose. As the team breaches his home, he is holding up the state courthouse and taking half a dozen hostages. It’s serious business now. Time to call Kono.
Unlike a few weeks ago, the team doesn’t have to smuggle Kono in in a bag, but with a microphone. Kane wants an audience to his delusional rampage and wants the entire state of Hawaii to share his grief and pain (why he picked Hawaii and not Virginia, where his son’s incident took place, is never explained). Kono and Lou go in as a news team, but their plan is derailed by a trigger-happy judge.
Steve had found out that one of the hostages had a concealed-carry permit and worried about this happening. The hostage manages to injure Kane in the arm, but gets a bullet in the chest for his trouble. When Kono and Lou rush to apply first aid, Kane immediately realizes they’re cops. This causes him to break down even further and Steve decides that they need to make a move immediately.
While Steve wants to go in guns blazing, it’s Danny who saves the day. Kyle Kane ends up being the father not of a victim of gun violence, but a perpetrator. His son was bullied and went on a shooting rampage through a Virginian mall. Kane blamed himself and the lawmakers and the corporations – everyone but his son.
I found this twist to work very well and added a layer of complexity to the episode. Danny had previously pointed out the hypocrisy of going on a violent rampage against gun violence and he uses this very argument to talk Kane down. He urges Kane to realize that he has to acknowledge that his son made a very evil decision, all on his own. No one forced him to. In trying to come to terms with his son’s actions, Kane only added to the death and destruction.
It’s a credit to the actor and the writers that I genuinely didn’t know whether or not Kane would go quietly in the end, but he does, to a dulcet song and montage of him and his son in happier times. The episode wraps up with Adam getting through to the inmate’s daughter and convincing her to visit her father. A happy father and son transitions to happy father and daughter.
“Ke Ku 'Ana” couldn’t really handle the politics, but got the human emotion correct.
It still could have used more of that bulldozer, though.
