'Hawaii Five-0' Honors Original Series with Season 9 Premiere Tribute

Hawaii Five-0 kickstarted its ninth season with a tribute to the original series's 1968-aired [...]

By Jose Bastidas

Hawaii Five-0 kickstarted its ninth season with a tribute to the original series's 1968-aired pilot episode.

After Steve McGarrett's friend from the CIA gets murdered, the leader of the team allows himself to be kidnapped by the group he believes to be responsible, in order to get justice.

The mission involves him wearing a unique suit and being tortured in a particularly creepy-looking deprivation tank.

The hour kicked off with the complex scene featuring McGarrett submerged in water, when they take him off the water and take the mask off, McGarrett's eyes look dead. And the second time his eyes are glued shut with a white paste.

"Are you ready to talk?" The mysterious bad guy tells McGarrett. The show then flashes back to Steve and the team finding the dead body of his CIA friend, who helped him catch the person who murdered his father.

The show touched fans' hearts when Steve used the classic line from the original series: "Book' em, Danno" to his partner.

The investigation leads him to the mysterious tank, known as the Cocoon, which they find out is a torture technique to get spies to leak intelligence. So the team comes up with a plan to give the bad guys fake information through McGarrett. The shocker comes when he is captured and finds out that the mole within their organization is McGarrett's ex-girlfriend Greer, who is set to be this season's Big Bad.

After a few hours of torture, Greer drives away from the location of the Cocoon and the team gets into a shootout, and as the bad guys plan their escape McGarrett breaks free and fights the bad guy, but before he is drowned to death Danny saves him.

"How long have you known me?" Danny asks making sure his brain still works after the torture.

"50 years," he says, an ode to the original show's 50th anniversary.

Fans of the series were praising the nod to the original Hawaii Five-O in the season premiere.

The special episode pays homage to the original Hawaii-Five-O's pilot episode titled "Cocoon." The show recreated the deprivation tank scene, involving Steve McGarrett.

Just ahead of the episode airing, Alex O'Loughlin opened up to Entertainment Tonight about filming the tank scenes, which he did himself without a stuntman.

"They just had me in the most ridiculous suit of all time," O'Loughlin told the outlet. "It was kind of strange. I kept feeling like some sort of sex gimp in this, and they had to keep covering me in this lubricant and I could smell it. It was just a weird experience."

"But I think we did a good job. I don't know, I'll never see it," O'Loughlin said with a laugh, the admitting that he has only watchful about four episodes of the CBS crime procedural.

"I don't like watching myself," the star told the outlet. "I feel like when I watch myself I end up thinking about myself more than I already do — which is a lot, 'cause I'm a self-obsessed actor. I prefer to leave work at work."

Hawaii Five-0 airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on CBS.

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