Hawaii Five-0: “Nalowale (Forgotten/Missing)” 

Another dark outing this week and they’re starting to plant seeds for who the McGarretts are beyond the surface. The episode opens with kids on a submarine tour spotting the body of a young blonde woman in the water. The Coast Guard is called and the next thing we see is McGarrett indeed waking up beside the lovely lieutenant Catherine Rollins from last week (Michelle Borth) and there’s some flirty discussion about her still being owed dinner and them never quite getting to it. So they’ve been seeing other for a while.

His phone starts to ring and it’s the governor so off he goes—his Saturday now a work day. He and Danny (who bitches a bit because it was his visitation weekend) convene at the coroner’s office to meet the governor, who’s badly shaken because the dead young woman is the daughter of two of her close friends, the U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines and his wife, and to complicate matters, her sister is also missing. We meet the coroner, Max Bergman (Masi Oka), and he has some twitchy-isms that she finds endearing and they find distracting but we don’t spend very long with him.

Next stop is the Ambassador’s residence, where the governor is comforting the parents—Michael and Sarah Reeves (Kyle Secor and Jacqueline McKenzie)—and promising they’ll find her daughter. They discuss whether Michael has enemies, and Danny points out that Sarah just cashed out her business for $12 million, so that’s a possibility, too. Outside, Kelly is meeting a security expert who says he was called in after the abduction. The parents deny any ransom requests have been made.

Back at the coroner’s, a blacklight reveals that the girls were clubbing so McGarrett (of course) taps the security feed and he and Danny descend on the club and grab the guy who roofied the girls to sell into the sex trade. They force his own roofie on him and then McGarrett brings him around with an airhorn. They send in Kono as a plant but don’t find the Reeves’ daughter. Kono, however, strong-arms the Chinese woman running things by threatening her Pomeranian (McGarrett seems to disapprove of her methods, but I’m thinking Kono just got herself a dog) and learns that Reeves girls were a direct hire $50K job. They then find out that the security expert Kelly met is specifically a ransom retrieval specialist, the Reeves have agreed to a ransom, and the kidnapping is politically motivated. Danny and McGarrett intercept the retrieval mission and along with Kono and Kelly get the girl and take out a handful of guys along the way.

As they wrap up, the governor is shaken and grateful but not open to discussing that with McGarrett. We never do find out why the first girl was killed. Elsewhere in the episode, Mary finds the toolbox (while looking for batteries for a remote—um, no) and when McGarrett tells her to leave it alone, she of course meticulously unpacks its contents and takes pictures of everything with her phone. Dun. Dun. DUN. She also calls out Catherine for being rather vocal. While McGarrett’s working the case, he calls in another favor to Catherine with another promise of dinner, which he actually delivers on, at sunset on the beach, with a bottle of Yellow Tail red (which I recognize because it’s vegan, good, and cheap) but then they decide dinner can wait.

I’m not sure what they’re doing with the tone shift. Maybe we’re just going to be a little darker and the lighter episodes were the lure (sneaky!). There was some minor goofiness as Danny kept trying to figure out why McGarrett was smiley all of a sudden and about the time I’m ready to shout at the TV “You’re a detective!” he actual said something close to that out loud, which was amusing to me. I was glad to see Jean Smart. Secor, McKenzie, and Oka didn’t have much to do. I hope we’re not going to find out that Mary was some way involved with James Marsters’ character (who I believe hasn’t been found) in the murder of her dad and is just nosy and prone to do the exact opposite of what Steve tells her to do. As for the previews vs. the actual episode—not so much with the smoking love story—it was very chaste by 10 pm standards and I think we saw more in the teaser (fakeout!). See you next week.