With its Season 10 premiere, CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 gained a familiarly resourceful helping hand, before saying a bittersweet farewell to a longtime team member.
Picking up right where the finale left off… yes, it was Jerry whom the would-be assassin’s bullet hit. Flash forward two weeks, and he is in the hospital recovering just fine, though the brush with death, he hints during some Battleship with Junior, has led him to wonder: Is a life spent immersed in D&D campaigns a life well lived? Tani (looking 😍) arrives, to accompany tuxedo-clad Junes to the opera, where she plans to get in a solid three-hour nap. But in reality, we later see that she, like Vivian Ward, was transfixed by the music and costumes and staging… until some commotion over a slumped body in a box seat catches her eye. Tani and Junior leave their seats to investigate, and in the lobby draw fire from the exiting sniper. McGarrett — hot off a first date with single mom Brooke (not played by Olivia Munn) — arrives on the scene and gives chase, across rooftops and down fire escapes and ultimately leaping across a chasm to grab hold onto a skinny drain pipe. The sniper, though, gets away.
The opera victim is ID’d as a Triad boss, while a sketch of the sniper matches up with a photo that some woman recently passed around a VFW hall. Tracing the burner number she left behind, Steve and Danny meet-not-so-cute (i.e. guns drawn on the side of a highway) with CID “Sergeant” Quinn Liu. After Danny — feeling more than a bit of déjà vu to his own meeting of Steve — talks everyone into lowering their guns, Quinn discloses that the sniper was one of two vets under her watch, as an MP, to have gone MIA. Steve and Danny cut things short to chase a lead on the sniper, only to find him dead, at his own hand, after he kidnapped a local doctor to suture his GSW. Adam, meanwhile, gets himself an audience with Tamiko Masuda’s father and other Yakuza bigwigs, to hear any theories on who would want the Triad boss dead. Their discussion is interrupted by the arrival of a badge-brandishing Quinn, who has tracked the sniper’s accomplice to this area. Realizing what that means, Adam quickly orders everyone to get down, but it’s a second too late, as sniper fire from outside zings through the dining room windows and fells many. While this second shooter mows his way past bodyguard after bodyguard, Quinn hustles Masuda to safety, getting winged along the way. To flee the scene, the shooter commandeers a veritable “monster truck” parked in the driveway, but McDanno are soon enough on his heels — though they can do little but watch as he slips away by climbing up and over a row of oncoming cars stuck in gridlock.
The team regroups at HQ, where everyone nudges Quinn to get her bullet grazing looked at, but she says she has endured worse. Adam walks us through the new intel on the assorted hits — how the Triad and Yakuza bosses back in the day were enforcers for Zhang, a local loan shark. The third member of their crew recently wrapped a 15-year stint in prison, and was found tortured to death not long after, having apparently given up the locations of his partners. The last target left is Zhang himself, and Five-0 gets to his place just as the shooter has breached the house and wasted his security team. A brutal brawl between Steve and the shooter follows, with the fellas even toppling off a first floor balcony at one point onto a pretty ouch-y looking table. The baddie gets the upper hand and whips out his pistol, but Quinn gets a bead on him and allows every opportunity for him to drop his weapon. He doesn’t, so she puts a bullet in him.
Still, Five-0 was able to glean who was behind these hits: the high-profile guest star glimpsed early in the episode, Rob Morrow, playing Wes Cullen, a real estate developer who in the 1990s reneged on a loan from Zhang and accidentally got his wife and kid killed for it. Cullen “remade” himself in the wake of that tragedy, while also spending the 15 years waiting for the one enforcer to get out of prison. He then enlisted two war vets from a PTSD treatment study he was financing to hunt the others and execute his revenge plan.
We then cut to the next day and a beach party being hosted (but not paid for!) by Kamekona, to celebrate Jerry’s return to the fold. Quinn stops by and gets an update from Steve, on how there’s not enough to charge Cullen just yet — so he hopes she’ll stick around to help see things through. Jerry then arrives, only to break the news that while he will forever love his Five-0 ohana, he needs to step away and embark on the next chapter of his life — writing a book connecting the Federal Reserve to the escaped Alcatraz prisoners sinking of the Titanic. But he’s always around for the occasional consult, he says. (Get details on Jorge Garcia’s status with the show.)
As everyone, Quinn included, gets pulled into a group hug, we see that over at Steve’s house, in the cellar, someone is planting a bomb inside his trusty tool box….
