Hawaii Five-0 season 8 episode 12 review: Adam’s spotlight episode

Hawaii Five-0 season 8 episode 12 started off in part with a bomb, and from there gave us one of the more heartbreaking sequences we’ve ever seen at the morgue. Even though it’s fictional, there’s something about seeing a whole family die — including a little girl — that guts you right in the heart. It was difficult to see, but it almost motivated Steve McGarrett more than ever to get answers.

Gang violence has, as of late, overtake Hawaii. That’s why the FBI was in town, and that was also why Adam’s name was starting to circle out there. They started to wonder if he was deeply involved in what was transpiring, largely because much of the gang activity started to pick up steam the moment that he arrived back in Hawaii. Also, he had those ties to the Yakuza that were a little too substantial for the feds to ignore. This was a problem, and McGarrett was not having his friend being treated as a suspect.

Steve was so willing to stand up for Adam that, at one point during the episode, he barged into the interview with Adam to try and help his pal out. This is where things got complicated, as Adam decided to pay the old Yakuza leader Michelle in prison. While there she did everything that she could to bait him with a secret — one that he did not take. Still, Adam really should have told Steve about their meeting given that he set him up in a position to be very surprised by the feds.

Nonetheless, Adam did everything that he could to help, opting to use some of his own Yakuza connections in order to help. He went to one of Michelle’s lieutenants in Brandon Kenzo who was now running the show, and he basically put him in a very specific position: Either he die at the hands of the Five-0 or give himself up and get a better deal.

What did the team get out of Kenzo once he decided to give himself up? Well, not a whole lot — it turns out that he may not have been all that involved. He was still a criminal, but nonetheless he wasn’t responsible for much of what happened with the gang uprising.

Instead, it was someone else who was ready to take down most of the gang members and there was a heavy loss of lice, including law enforcement and Tani’s ex, a prominent gang member in his own right.

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Is this story over? Far from it. This was one of the toughest episodes of Five for McGarrett in quite some time. The murder of Agent Fisher and that whole family at the start of the episode remains unsolved. Meanwhile, the assailants seemed to be hired from elsewhere to take down the gang members. As a result of all of this, Steve decided to hire Adam in the closing seconds to lead a special division to take down the gangs in Hawaii.

Final Verdict

We anticipated an episode with this much gang activity to be crazy and chaotic, but what we didn’t expect was for there to be such an emotional undercurrent. This was a powerful, action-packed hour that sets the stage for a lot of great Adam storytelling to come.

What did you think about Hawaii Five-0 season 8 episode 12 overall?

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