In order for me to properly review the season finale of Hawaii Five-0, it is necessary I tell you the following story: This last weekend, my brother graduated from the University of Rochester with a Bachelor’s in Biochemistry. Since the university is so large, there were two graduations: a big one where they had a “big” speaker, and a smaller, intimate one for the department where they all received their diplomas and their professors spoke. One professor, in particular, said something that’s been stuck in my head, especially since the season finale of Hawaii Five-0. No, he did not talk about Hawaii Five-0 in the graduation speech (though that would have made it way more interesting). He was talking about how the real world is different from college, and he made an interesting point about what we consider to be good or good enough in different situations. For instance, an 85% on a test is a B+, which is a good grade you can be proud of. But an 85% will not be good enough in the real world in many situations. Say these kids took their degree and went on to become doctors — they couldn’t perform open heart surgery if they only 85% knew what they were doing.
Season finales are the open heart surgery of television shows. They are extraordinarily difficult to make amazing. Good is easy, most episodes of TV shows are good. But to get an episode that says, “This isn’t just any old episode, this is a finale“, they need to go that extra mile. They need to both wrap a season up to a viewer’s satisfaction, but leave enough unanswered questions that everyone will tune in next season. And as if that wasn’t hard enough, they need to be the sort of episode that bears repeated scrutiny every time someone views it. They need to have the power to hold up. Because if you’re a crazy person (like me), you re-watch season finales trying to find itsy-bitsy clues you missed, or maybe just because you need to scratch that itch over the long summer hiatus. And the Hawaii Five-0 finale got it 85% right.
Now 85% still means there was a whole lot of good. Were this a regular episode instead of the season closer, I’d give it a gold star and call it a day. It was plotty, full of intrigue, answered questions while opening a billion new ones (too many new ones, according to the frustrated yelling of my siblings, who were watching on the couch next to me). Jenna and Kono were all sorts of kickass, Chin was deliciously morally gray (my theory, which is the popular consensus, is that he’s working on the inside of HPD to help Steve), and great acting performances were delivered by every single cast member. But there’s that fifteen percent, that niggling fifteen percent, and that lies in the characterization of one Danny Williams.
Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit that I have an unnaturally strong attachment to Danny as a character, and I am a shameless fangirl of Scott Caan‘s performance as him. I will forever be bitter that he did not win the Golden Globe he was nominated for, and I may or may not be considering starting an Emmy campaign for him, complete with posters made with glitter glue and puff paint. I also have an extremely strong attachment to Danny and Steve’s relationship insofar as they are my Bert and Ernie of crime fighting. They’re like my TV parents. I like to listen to them have their little “carguments” and snipe fondly at each other, and I like to know that they care about each other. That doesn’t necessarily translate into needing to witness a sexual relationship between them. (And, much like my parents, if I did see it, I would find it simultaneously deeply heartwarming and deeply awkward.) But anything that threatens their bromantic partner bond feels, on some level, like the powers that be are forcing my TV parents into getting a divorce.
So of course the entire Danny and Rachel storyline sat extremely badly with me. There’s almost no way it couldn’t have. But it didn’t sit badly with me because it felt threatening to Steve and Danny’s relationship — in fact, it doesn’t seem to me that the two relationships are mutually exclusive. In theory, I don’t mind Danny and Rachel having a relapse when it’s been so clear there are jagged, lingering feelings left behind. I like Rachel. I like how she’s been handled. And I am a strong advocate of Danny getting laid, not just because he’s my favorite, but because I also feel like it would probably help him with his rage issues.
What I don’t like is the handling. I don’t tolerate infidelity in relationships. No matter how badly I want that relationship to happen, if it’s born of infidelity, I’m turned off. And I don’t like how it ends up making Danny look as a character. Danny is, by design, the calm, rational one. He is the Ego to Steve’s Id. He is the one who cares about principles and rules. I can buy that he has a blind spot when it comes to Rachel. I can buy that his feelings for her make it so they may have slipped up and fallen into bed together. But I cannot buy that he would continue the affair without protest. And most of all, I cannot buy his disregard for Grace in this scenario. I find it impossible to believe that the same man who would move halfway around the world to be with his daughter would then turn around rekindle his relationship with her mother, then keep it a secret from her, then agree to uproot her when she’s just settled into Hawaii and he and Rachel have, as far as the audience can see, done absolutely nothing to fix whatever problems drove them to get a divorce in the first place. And my irritation with that is nothing — nothing — compared to my irritation with the baby twist.
Here’s the thing about television — as much as we want it to be realistic and believable, as much as we, as viewers, lose ourselves in the world of the characters and they become human to us, it’s impossible for anyone to lose sight of the fact that the world you are immersing yourself in is not scripted. If our own lives are scripted by some higher power is up for debate, but watching a show, you always know that curveballs are planned and written out by people in writer’s rooms, and that they exist only because it was considered a good idea, not because it was actually inevitable. In real life, yes, Rachel could have gotten pregnant.
It’s not that the twist is unrealistic, it’s that realism is not necessarily the same as good writing. The baby plot is a transparent ploy to raise the drama ante, and as a viewer it makes me feel resentful that a writer thought I needed that, like the whole main plot with the governor clearly wasn’t enough adrenaline for me as is. And what’s more, it puts Danny in a position where either way, he looks like a jackass. Either he can abandon Steve to rot in jail (and perhaps even face the death penalty) for a crime he didn’t commit, or he can abandon his family and his kid. Is it an interesting conundrum to put Danny in, as a character? Yes. It is interesting to ponder over what Danny would choose between when it comes down to the two most important things in his life. But there’s no narrative need for it. It’s clunky and uncomfortable and, between the tweets Peter Lenkov has been fielding on his twitter and the reactions of all of my friends are any indication, no one’s too fond of this twist. Everyone seems to be focused, instead, on how the hell to fix it. (My personal favorite method that I’ve heard suggested is that Rachel is not, in fact, pregnant, but rather lying to get Danny off the island because she was being threatened by Wo Fat. That would be awesome on pretty much every level. And if that did happen, I would take back everything I have said in this column. This is a promise.)
And this is where we get back to my 85% analogy. Because of everything that happened in the season finale, and of all the awesome things that went down, all anyone (including myself) seems to be dwelling on this hiatus is the question of Danny. Of course we know the rest of the team will be fine and eventually vindicated and go back to solving crimes — this is television, after all. But the Danny situation is the wild card, the random two of spades you have in a great hand of poker that keeps you from a royal flush. In the real world, you’d play the hand you were dealt. But in the land of TV finales, the deck is stacked, that two didn’t have to be there, and 85% is just shy of being great.
Clacked by Julia Hass 
on May 19, 2011 @ 16:30 EST5EDT
