“Hawaii 5-0” wasn’t the first detective show set on America’s only island state, but it’s the one that seeped into the water table of pop culture. As recently as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, someone referred to the police as 5-0 and somewhere out in real life someone probably still uses the term. Who can forget the deathless closing line, “Book’em Dano.” And if memory serves me, the police command “Freeze!”—short for “Stop in your tracks or I’ll blow your head off, you bastard!”—was popularized by the program.
The existence of Season Nine (out on DVD) is proof of the series’ long-running popularity. But nine would prove the end game for the stalwart Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord), an indomitable lawman who could be called no-nonsense except for the twinkle in his eye when a pretty woman entered the room. As usual, he was pitted against a plethora of crooks and sociopaths, and like Holmes himself, McGarrett had a perennial arch villain in the form of Wu-Fat, a courtly but cruel shaven-headed scion of Fu Manchu. Wu-Fat always looked as if amused by a private joke he was unable to share.
In 1976 when the “Nine Dragons” episode aired, the plot was probably considered farfetched. It involved a stolen biological toxin, “behavior modification” (torture by another name) and a taped for TV denunciation by an imprisoned and abused McGarrett of American crimes. Much of what was fantastic has gone on to become the nightly news.
“Hawaii 5-0” can be enjoyed as a time capsule of terrible men’s fashions (and casual, unthinking sexism), or studied for its reflection of the siege mentality of Nixon’s Silent Majority. But several episodes, especially “Nine Dragons,” were surprisingly well filmed and edited, with startling camera angles, circular plot construction, slow motion and disorienting evocations of a bad drug trip.
