In “Ka Pa’ani Nui”, the team splits up to take on two cases about two very different types of hunts. Kono, Danny, and Lou tackle a shallow case about animal rights, shark-finning, and the mano, while Chin, Steve, and Eric take on a much more substantial and emotionally-focused case involving a concentration camp and a leper colony.
But first – poor Lou. His imaginary rivalry with Chin for Father-of-the-Year is not going well. Chin may impress little Sara with differently shaped pancakes, but Will isn’t thrilled with father-son bonding time. He’s too busy playing with his phone to care about Lou’s amazing pineapple papaya pancake surprise. The heresy of putting pineapple in pancakes may be gross, but it’s a certain photo that turns Will and Grace off their breakfast. Someone has gutted a man and hung him up in the harbor for all to see. It’s going to be difficult keeping this quiet on the island.
The victim, Sam Harrison, was somewhat of an online sensation before he turned up gutted on Oahu. He was a big game hunter who loved killing exotic animals. He came to Hawaii to bag his latest trophy, a great white shark. When Danny and Kono examine the dead man’s social media, they know how many enemies he would have had among the locals. In addition to upsetting the animal rights groups, Harrison received threats from many native Hawaiians who objected to him trying to kill an animal revered as a god on the islands.
The main suspect is “Shark Whisperer” Lily O’Neil. She sent some nasty hate-mail to Harrison, but she tells Kono and Danny that killing him wouldn’t have helped her cause.
Noelani uncovers some new information that shifts the focus from those who wanted to protect the mano to those who wanted to harm them. Harrison has a huge shark bite in his abdomen and was only gutted to cover up the bite. Kono and Lou set off to find “finners,” aka people who could arrange a shark hunt. They talk to Kamekona, but he has problems of his own.
Kamekona is dealing with a full-on worker’s strike. He calls Steve and Danny down, citing an emergency, to break up the strike, but the two refuse. Danny “Man of the People” Williams also isn’t about to cross a picket line to patronize the shrimp stand.
Kono forces Lou to apologize to Kamekona for inspiring Flippa to strike, although every bit of the former police union rep is resisting, and Kamekona gets them a list of suspects.
Kono and Danny narrows it down to a man named Reynolds, who sneers when they interrogate him about Harrison’s death. He isn’t smiling when they reveal that they’ve found blood in his boat and that, while Harrison wasn’t a saint, no one’s going to be crying for him either.
The other victim of the episode is harder to identify. When a body is found in the ocean, the only clue to her identity is a tattoo on her arm. Chin recognizes its similarity to concentration camp tattoos, but the victim was only in her thirties when she was bludgeoned and dropped into the ocean.
Jerry contacts the Shoah Foundation and quickly solves the mystery. The victim was Leia Rozen, whose grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. She had gotten her tattoo in honor of him and was visiting Hawaii to do volunteer work. The hunt for Leia’s killer takes Steve and Chin to the island of Molokai and into a piece of its past.
Leia was specifically doing work at the former leper colony in Kalaupapa National Park (an actual place). As Chin and Steve discuss with the sheriff, Alana, leprosy (or, as Alana prefers to call it, Hansen’s Disease) has been cured but many of the patients of the colony had a difficult time going back to normal society after being ostracized as freaks.
Leia, however, wasn’t only on the island just to volunteer. When Steve and Chin find a Glock 26 in her living quarters, they first think she’s on the run from someone. There are only about 100 people in Kalaupapa and travel is restricted into the colony. It would be a great place to hide.
Conducting an investigation at a leper colony requires compassion and tact, so it’s a bit beyond belief that Steve and Chin would think that Eric is a good person to call to help out. While Steve and Chin got a nice helicopter ride down to the colony, Eric has to endure the mule ride. He balks when he sees the hands of Billy, the volunteer coordinator, and gets a death glare from Steve for his idiocy.
Eric does try to make up for it by cheerfully showing Billy how to dust for fingerprints. The two make a connection when Eric realizes that Billy hasn’t been out of the colony in sixty-seven years, since his parents first sent him there at the age of eight. Eric also manages to find a fingerprint belonging to a local bartender who takes off running the second he sees Chin and Steve.
Chin and Steve catch up to him (no amount of parkour is going to stop Steve from catching you) and question him about Leia. The bartender, Tony, says that he was at Leia’s bungalow to sell her a gun. His testimony makes Chin and Steve realize that Leia wasn’t on the run from someone, but actively hunting them.
Jerry looks into Leia’s travel itinerary and sees that she went from Poland to Rome to Genoa to Spain to Argentina. Chin immediately recognizes the route as the Nazi ratlines. After the war, Nazis in hiding would be smuggled through these countries and given new identities. Leia was hunting the SS guard who killed her family and tortured her grandfather. The sadistic, psychotic guard found a perfect hiding place in the leper colony.
Sheriff Alana doesn’t recognize the aged-up photo of the Nazi, Thomas Sauer, but Billy does. Not only does he identify him as a kindly missionary who spent decades on the island, but offhandedly mentions that he’s Alana’s father.
Chin and Steve are now on the hunt for both Sauer and Alana. They piece together the events the night Leia confronted him. Alana killed Leia when she saw her pointing at gun at her father and the two conspired to cover it up.
Billy is devastated about Alana and Sauer. They were two of his closest friends on the island. Steve and the others immediately head out of the colony to find them and Eric asks Billy for forgiveness for acting weird around him. Billy graciously accepts.
Steve and Chin keep their word and track Alana and her father down in Arizona. Alana is arrested for murdering Leia and Sauer is arrested for violating the Geneva Convention. As satisfying as it is to see Alana’s surprise when Chin and Steve show up at her door, it’s a bigger emotional moment to see them bag a monster and finally bring him to justice.
While the leper colony case had a strong emotional focus and something to say about empathy and kindness, it suffered by being connected to the fairly boring shark-finning case. The show would have been better if it had focused on Leia’s murder and brought the entire team into the investigation.
But enough about what I think – what did you think of tonight’s episode? Let me know in the comments! Also, was I the only one who thought It’s a Wonderful World was a strange music cue for a Nazi hunt?
