The Steve McGarrett Story – No #100 (What is real and what is not?) #H50 5:07

We continue our story from here

So we made it – Steve is 100!! 🙂 And Wo Fat gave us a good old Steve strip show – best villain ever (RIP). But before I continue with Steve’s story I just want to emphasise that this was wonderful entertainment and all in all a great episode and what I have to say about Steve’s story in no way reflects how good I think the episode was. (If that makes any sense) It had it all, fun, laughter, familiar stuff, fantasies, loads of BAMF-Pretty and all-around great acting from everybody (especially Alex of course)……It was all in all a great episode to celebrate the occasion.

But I have to stay with the facts of Steve’s story, so here we go …………

For some weird reason, Steve was driving with his dads’ old car in a white vest, overshirt and jeans to a stakeout with the team, when Wo Fat decided that it is time for their meeting, that he wanted to have a few months ago already (maybe he was waiting to steal the old family films first, before he could do it 😀 ). He’s got more faith in Steve’s ability to know stuff, than in Doris.  He is sure Steve knows what happened to his father more than 40 years ago and he needs Steve to spill the beans.

This whole abduction and torture scene not only gives us some answers to our Wo Fat questions, but it also gives us some answers about what Steve subconsciously “dreams” about (or maybe not 😉 ). So Wo Fat is giving him some gas and other chemicals to get him to talk,  and this is their effect:

• Steve experienced that HPD made it on time and saved John from Victor Hess.
• Detective Danny Williams is happy-go-lucky, living in Hawaii with his wife and daughter. He believes his wife is the greatest woman on the planet and he actually chose to move to Hawaii, because he likes it there.
• Grover is a tourist complaining about crime in Hawaii.
• Duke is just himself.
• Chin is a Captain at HPD and about to become Chief of Police.

• Hess is alive and wounded in the hospital.
• Jerry is homeless and not of sound mind.
• At least his subconscious mind believes he is dating someone. (Who that is, we can only guess – Cath of Ellie)
• Jenna is eternally looking for her fiance who was in a motorbike accident – wearing her little cross around her neck.
• Kono is a very seductive, world champion surfer girl. (This was part of my big wish for this alternate universe. I actually wanted them to meet in person and with Steve responding positively to her ‘seduction’ #ClosetMcKonoMe 😛 )
• Danny threw the ‘book’ on police work away during his experience of 9/11 and will do anything to get answers.
• Max is a Dr in hospital, amongst the living and not the dead.
• Kamekona is in jail, but still a snitch. (Wonder if Steve believes Kammie should actually be in prison?)
• And for some weird reason, Wo Fat had those burn scars when Steve shoots him in a gunfight. (I personally fail to see the meaning behind alternate Wo Fat looking like present Wo Fat)
• And he would like to be driven around…. (I sincerely doubt that is something that he really wants 😀  )

Let us summarize Wo Fat’s woeful story:

Shortly after he was born, his mother was killed in a botched assassination attempt on his father. His father was captured and everybody presumed him to be dead. The agent who killed her was Doris (code name Shelburne) and she felt so bad about the mistake, that she took the woman’s child in as her own. Where she lived while she raised him is unknown to us. After several years of raising the boy, her bosses learned of this and forced her to give the child up. I guess she then left the agency and married policeman John McGarrett and moved to Hawaii. She then had her own children with John. First Steve and the 5 years later, little Mary (rebound kids, after the one she lost?). She worked as a school teacher and in 1992, she faked her own death. She did this because she learned that her once “adopted” son was looking for his father’s “killer”. She believed that if she was not around, he would never get to the truth and it will keep her family safe. What she did not anticipate, was that John would send their children away to the mainland and that he would then try to catch her “killer” for the rest of his days (18 years from thereon).

After John was assassinated in 2010, their son Steve came back to live on the Island,  to hunt his dad’s killer and in the process realises that there is a person, with the name Wo Fat, around. He only learned about Wo Fat’s existence, once Wo Fat sends a “spy” to infiltrate Five-0 to learn what Steve knows about what John knew about Shelburne. For some reason, Wo Fat believed that Steve knew where Shelburne was and with Jenna’s help, he captured and tortured Steve to get the information. (In retrospect that is a bit weird, because Jenna knew what Steve knew and she could have told Wo Fat that Steve did not know anything about Shelburne or where the person was)

In a surprise step, Wo Fat let Steve capture him after he brutally killed Hiro Noshimuri (something we and seemingly the writers sometimes forget – Adam also had an axe to grind with Wo Fat). And his plan worked, because once he was behind bars, Shelburne (Doris) felt save enough to come forward and expose herself. And with it, Steve learned that his mother was actually still alive. When Wo Fat and Shelburne face each other for the first time, he realises that the person he has been hunting for all these years, was actually the woman who raised him. (That must have been a shocker)

For some reason, Wo Fat then suddenly just started to lay low. Once, when he tried to bribe a politician they nearly caught him, but as usual, he got away. Soon after that, he tries to steal some printer plates to print US currency. Surprisingly the team manages to capture the ever-elusive Wo Fat, but only after he got severely burned in a helicopter crash. Now is a cripple and behind bars.

Steve could not understand his mother’s connection is to Wo Fat, so he ran a DNA test, to see if they might be related. The test confirmed that they are not, but he never thought about emotional connection. Connections between adoptive parents and children are just as strong.

And here we are, Wo Fat kidnapping and torturing Steve for a second time about information he does not have ….. and in the end leaving Steve no choice but to shoot him for his own survival. And Steve can at long last sigh with relief, because the one person who took everything away from him in his life, is finally dead!

 

My thoughts:

• Interesting that Wo Fat was looking for a father he never knew and who went missing when he was a boy. Other than blood, they had no connection. He would not even know it if his real father stood in front of him. The last photo’s of him would have been taken more than 40 years ago, close to his own birth.
• Interesting that Wo Fat would think Steve might know where his father is. In the past, Steve was always the last one to know anything. Doris, who is actually working in the spy community and Joe, they have a lot of better connections than Steve. I mean Wo Fat himself was able to find Ian Wright so quickly and he always had better connections than Steve.
• Interesting to see on social media that people who do not follow the show as closely as some of us, believe that this was the grand finale – the main villain dying and the montage at the end. I personally still stand by my feeling that by killing Wo Fat, they are wrapping up the series – but I am usually wrong about these things.
• Interesting that Wo Fat was always hunting the person who “killed” his father, but what about his mother. She was also gone. 😕
• I really do not understand what is so bad about raising Wo Fat, that Doris can’t face Steve. In fact, that should show what a good person she was at heart, to do it. It was not her fault that he was taken from her and that later in life he became who he is. According to Jenna, he was actually a good guy for the first part of his life.
• From comments on social media, it looks like a lot of people misunderstand why Wo Fat killed John. Wo Fat killed John, long before he knew that he was related to his adoptive mother. He killed him, because John was closing in on him and the governor with his investigations – it had nothing to do with Doris. Wo Fat never knew how John was connected to her until he came face to face with Doris in the beginning of S3 and realised that she was not only the person he has been hunting, but that that same person also raised him. I think the writers and alternate Steve created this confusion, with Steve’s words of, ‘What did my Dad ever do to you that you wanted to kill him?‘.
• I think the show-off between Steve and Wo Fat was great and well done and worthy of Wo Fat’s stature, but too soon. I know a lot of fans got tired of the Wo Fat thing, but handled correctly, I think it should have lasted till the finale. (Kind of like killing the main villain in a movie long before the ending of a movie? What is the point to continue?)
• I also want to add that I think Mark Dacascos gave his best performance as Wo Fat ever. In the past, he was maybe a bit too aloof and wooden to me. But I think he really nailed it this time.
• And even though the make-up to cover Alex’s tattoos for Steve must have been difficult, I think the make-up people did not do bad. Fight scenes stunts with it were great and editing also good. (Although with the big high kicks and hits with the stick and moves between Steve and Wo Fat it was visible that they were not really making contact. At some stage, it felt to me that Wo Fat was missing Steve when he was actually supposedly making contact 😀 )
• And at the end when Steve and Wo Fat shoot each other at the same time – I missed it the first couple of times I saw it. I kept thinking Wo Fat’s gun was empty, when in fact it was not and that he was just in a worse position than Steve, who had a two-handed grip – he still did give Steve a flesh wound on the side of the forehead though. So Steve actually did not have a choice but kill him.

Sorry, but this is already far longer than what I wanted to do, and I am sure with in the next few days, there will be even more that I wanted to say…….

– Hawaii Five-0: Episode 507 –

Ina Paha (If Perhaps)

Written by: Peter Lenkov

Directed by: Larry Teng

Broadcast: 7 November 2014

To be continued here

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