By its tenth season, Hawaii Five-O was beginning to show its age, as there are only so many criminal syndicates, communist spy rings, and serial killers to go after on an isolated island in the middle of the Pacific. But in this season's premier, the show's writers and producers at least made a game try at playing out the string a bit longer, with an unexpected enemy -- terrorists from Northern Ireland.
The episode opens with a heist reminiscent of many others on the show -- a military squad that has just received a new kind of high explosive is ambushed by a group of frogmen, who disable the soldiers long enough to escape with the cache of munitions by boat. But a soldier who is farther away manages to read the craft's registration numbers, giving McGarrett and Co. a solid clue to the hijackers. Then a commander from Naval Intelligence informs McGarrett that among all of the possible places the ordnance could go, it's probably been stolen by a splinter group of Irish Catholic terrorists.
Most of the episode thereafter focuses on the relationship between Casey Fogarty (Elayne Heilveil) an heiress from Boston whose father is reputed to be funneling money to this group, and her contact in Honolulu, Fr. Daniel Costigan, aka Sean O'Rourke, played by Stephen Boyd. Boyd excelled at playing rogues and doesn't disappoint here, investing the character with his usual charm even as he dispatches his former partners one by one, eventually leaving the naive Fogarty in the lurch, too. And he also manages to catch Steve McGarrett off guard when he rattles off the occasional Latin or Gaelic phrase.
Though the episode is well-done and enjoyable to watch, there's a sense of sadness hanging over it today because of two things that wouldn't have been known when the episode was filmed. First, Boyd died of a heart attack less than a month after filming this episode, making this his final filmed appearance. (Indeed, it wasn't broadcast until three months after his death.) Boyd had had a moderately successful career, usually in second leads in major motion pictures (e.g., as Messala in 1959's "Ben-Hur"), as well as leading roles in smaller films during the 1960s (the brooding mystery "The Third Secret" in 1964, 1966's "Fantastic Voyage," or the delightful 1967 heist film, "Caper of the Golden Bulls"). His career had declined somewhat by the late 1970s, however, but it seemed to be coming back thanks to roles like this one, when he died suddenly at only 45.
It was, however, a fitting last role for Boyd who, though effortless at playing an American, actually *was* from Northern Ireland (raised, ironically for this role, as a Protestant), and in his first motion picture had played a similar character, in 1956's "The Man Who Never Was." In that film, Boyd's Irish character is sent to wartime England to determine whether a ruse the British concocted to mislead Germany is real or not. And just as in this episode, he isn't above romancing a young woman to get what he wants.
The other sad point about "Up the Rebels" is that it marks the end of Harry Endo's long run as Che Fong, the master criminalist who aided Five-O during the middle years of the series. During that run, Che Fong demonstrated skills in metallurgy, chemistry, ballistics, bacteriology, acoustics, electronics -- or just about whatever other field of scientific inquiry McGarrett needed. Endo originally played a bank employee in an episode of the second season (amusingly, his real-life job) -- at one point whipping out what would become his trademark telescoping pointer to describe a security diagram.
Once assigned to the part of Che Fong, however (which had been played by other actors to that point), Endo's natural charm elevated what could have been a potentially dull role into more than just a guy in a white lab coat. Like several other continuing roles during those years, his presence gave viewers the sense that this universe wasn't populated just by the three or four regulars. Sadly, unlike District Attorney John Manicote (Glenn Cannon), who was wounded in a shootout trying to save his daughter in his last appearance the previous season, Endo had just a couple of scenes in this episode, a too-brief swan song for an actor who made the role his own, and whose face had become as familiar as many of the show's nominal stars.
The episode opens with a heist reminiscent of many others on the show -- a military squad that has just received a new kind of high explosive is ambushed by a group of frogmen, who disable the soldiers long enough to escape with the cache of munitions by boat. But a soldier who is farther away manages to read the craft's registration numbers, giving McGarrett and Co. a solid clue to the hijackers. Then a commander from Naval Intelligence informs McGarrett that among all of the possible places the ordnance could go, it's probably been stolen by a splinter group of Irish Catholic terrorists.
Most of the episode thereafter focuses on the relationship between Casey Fogarty (Elayne Heilveil) an heiress from Boston whose father is reputed to be funneling money to this group, and her contact in Honolulu, Fr. Daniel Costigan, aka Sean O'Rourke, played by Stephen Boyd. Boyd excelled at playing rogues and doesn't disappoint here, investing the character with his usual charm even as he dispatches his former partners one by one, eventually leaving the naive Fogarty in the lurch, too. And he also manages to catch Steve McGarrett off guard when he rattles off the occasional Latin or Gaelic phrase.
Though the episode is well-done and enjoyable to watch, there's a sense of sadness hanging over it today because of two things that wouldn't have been known when the episode was filmed. First, Boyd died of a heart attack less than a month after filming this episode, making this his final filmed appearance. (Indeed, it wasn't broadcast until three months after his death.) Boyd had had a moderately successful career, usually in second leads in major motion pictures (e.g., as Messala in 1959's "Ben-Hur"), as well as leading roles in smaller films during the 1960s (the brooding mystery "The Third Secret" in 1964, 1966's "Fantastic Voyage," or the delightful 1967 heist film, "Caper of the Golden Bulls"). His career had declined somewhat by the late 1970s, however, but it seemed to be coming back thanks to roles like this one, when he died suddenly at only 45.
It was, however, a fitting last role for Boyd who, though effortless at playing an American, actually *was* from Northern Ireland (raised, ironically for this role, as a Protestant), and in his first motion picture had played a similar character, in 1956's "The Man Who Never Was." In that film, Boyd's Irish character is sent to wartime England to determine whether a ruse the British concocted to mislead Germany is real or not. And just as in this episode, he isn't above romancing a young woman to get what he wants.
The other sad point about "Up the Rebels" is that it marks the end of Harry Endo's long run as Che Fong, the master criminalist who aided Five-O during the middle years of the series. During that run, Che Fong demonstrated skills in metallurgy, chemistry, ballistics, bacteriology, acoustics, electronics -- or just about whatever other field of scientific inquiry McGarrett needed. Endo originally played a bank employee in an episode of the second season (amusingly, his real-life job) -- at one point whipping out what would become his trademark telescoping pointer to describe a security diagram.
Once assigned to the part of Che Fong, however (which had been played by other actors to that point), Endo's natural charm elevated what could have been a potentially dull role into more than just a guy in a white lab coat. Like several other continuing roles during those years, his presence gave viewers the sense that this universe wasn't populated just by the three or four regulars. Sadly, unlike District Attorney John Manicote (Glenn Cannon), who was wounded in a shootout trying to save his daughter in his last appearance the previous season, Endo had just a couple of scenes in this episode, a too-brief swan song for an actor who made the role his own, and whose face had become as familiar as many of the show's nominal stars.
