‘Hawaii Five-0’ season 7, episode 17 review: Madison Gray, Alicia Brown, and many shocking twists
When we last saw our “Hawaii Five-0” team, they were enjoying a little bit of fun in the sun for a Valentine’s Day special … or at least that was the case for Steve, Danny, and their girlfriends. By the end of the episode, we saw Danny nearly ruining the entire trip because of his obsession with finding some sunglasses! Even Chin and Kono had a fairly lighthearted mission, one where they did their part collectively in order to ensure that a death connected to a pickup artist was resolved.
Tonight, we veered into a different direction … and a violent one to boot. This episode brought us the return of Dr. Madison Gray (Elisabeth Rohm) and Alicia Brown (Claire Forlani) to the mix, and in a fashion that was surely unexpected. Dr. Gray turned up at the station and willingly turned herself in; however, she claimed that she was not Dr. Gray at all, but someone else. It wasn’t until they determined that she had Alicia’s blood on her that things started to get TRULY crazy.
Was she dead? That was the first question that McGarrett and Danny had, but they eventually determined that not only was Alicia still alive, but that she was fine and completely unaware of what was going on. Yet, Madison had her blood, and seemed to even know that she had cut her arm. At first, we then thought that Alicia was going to kill her overnight in the interrogation room, only to be convinced by Gray instead to let her out. She pulled a razor on a prison guard, broke Gray out, and the two parties embarked on a journey to Wisconsin — which just so happens to be where she was staying the past several months in hiding. She’d been visiting a prisoner there, a serial killer who just so happened to be connected to what happened to Alicia’s daughter.
Eventually, the Five-0 team managed to sniff all of this out, but upon their first visit to prison, Steve made a bad choice since he gave said prisoner all the tools he needed for him to kill himself. By that team, Alicia and Madison were already far ahead, really to the point where she was already tracking the real killer and was ready for revenge … maybe.
Was this all a game? This was the part of tonight’s episode that will probably divide most people out there, given that Alicia is a criminal profiler and it’s feasible to wonder how she could be tricked by someone so manipulative as Gray. Well, it just so turned out here that her promise of having a “valuable secret” just so happened to be true, since it turned out that her daughter was alive the entire time. Maybe Madison thought that the man there was going to do away with her — it’s tough to say. The one thing we do know is that the reunion for Alicia was powerful, and seeing them escape their alive was even more so. She got a chance to erase some of the pain from her past. Dr. Gray was still out in the wind, and that can back to bite her in the end when Alicia showed up to her place with a gun. Apparently, this “favor” that she gave Dr. Gray was all just a game in order to ensure that she tried to do her bidding. This time, her “bidding” specifically was trying to get Alicia to kill her.
Did she actually kill her? Consider that your CLIFFHANGER, and a brutal one. We’re left waiting to know exactly what happened, but watching Alicia on the phone with 911, while holding a gun in her hand pointed at Gray, was an incredible way to end the hour.
Episode grade: B+. You can still make the argument that Alicia should never have listened to Dr. Gray given the downside to trusting her would’ve been pretty darn bad. Yet, it worked out for her to a certain extent … at least until the cliffhanger. This is such a complicated episode for the show since it is so dense and you can argue many choices one way or another. The biggest thing that we can say is that this was all sorts of intense.
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