A Thousand Pardons, You're Dead (#24) -- Danny, working under cover and posing as a soldier on leave from Viet Nam, is with Yoko Collins (Barbara Luna) on the beach. He's playfully chasing her and demanding, when he catches her, that she yield by saying, "Uncle." She does so, then she yells "Ho Chi Minh!" Ho Chi Minh (known derisively by US troops as 'Uncle Ho') was the hard-line communist leader of North Viet Nam during the Viet Nam war.
To Hell With Babe Ruth (#25) -- The title comes from phrases Japanese pilots shouted into their radios as they staged the bombing of Pearl Harbor: "To Hell with Babe Ruth! To Hell with Franklin Roosevelt! To Hell with Roy Acuff!" (Roy Acuff was a country singer known as the King of Country Music; he was a fixture at the Grand Old Opry for many years.) This verbal attack on American cultural and political icons was supposed to be demoralizing to our troops.
Forty Feet High, and It Kills (#26) -- Wo Fat tells the captive Professor Lochner (Will Geer) "It has to begin. And somewhere. That's the Yin and Yang of it." Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy denote opposing cosmic forces, not in the sense of direct opposition or antagonism, but more in the sense of balance or completion. Yin represents the feminine, dark, earthy, cold, and passive. Yang is the masculine, light, bright, active. The symbol for Yin and Yang is a circle divided into light and dark with an S-shaped curve. Khigh Dhiegh, though not Chinese himself (his ancestry was Egyptian and Sudanese), was deeply knowledgeable about Chinese philosophy, particularly the I Ching. He had taught philosophy at UCLA for several years and owned a Taoist shrine in Arizona, where he lived until his death in 1991.
When Wo Fat continues, telling Lochner that the rest of the world will provide workers for his society of geniuses, Lochner says, "-- to support the Master Race. It seems to me history's gone down that road before." Of course, he's referring to Nazi Germany (1933-1945).
Just Lucky, I Guess (#27) -- In McGarrett's office, the Five-O team discusses the death of 18-year-old Angela Carlson (Elaine Joyce). "Out, brief candle," McGarrett says. That's from Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act V, scene 5. [It's part of a longer soliloquy which is given in more detail at Trouble in Mind (#50).]
Reluctant witness Marty Sloane (John Randolph), eaten up with fear, asks his friend Willie (Herb Vigran) what he'd do if in deep trouble. "I'd...look everyone in the eye -- and pack my bags for Siberia," Willie says. During the seventy years of the Soviet Union, Siberia, in the far north of the country, was the place where dissidents, malcontents, and other misfits were sent to harsh prison camps. The cold, forbidding climate made the place a synonym for the direst kind of exile.
At the end, when Marty has finally identified Charley Bombay (Albert Paulsen) as the murderer of Angela Carlson, McGarrett givesa mini-speech on citizen involvement, the theme of the episode. He ends with "I read somewhere: 'Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.'" The 'somewhere' McGarrett read this sentence is Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, No. 6., by John Donne [1572-1631]. The entire passage is probably Donne's most famous:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Sweet Terror (#30) -- Looking at a photograph of terrorist accomplice Marianna deNava (Linda Marsh), McGarrett asks Dan Williams, "So how come someone from Five-O missed a pretty girl, huh?" Dan says, "I was thinking of the Beast", meaning Erich Stoss (Theodore Bikel). Steve replies, "Well, as of now we think of Beauty and the Beast." Long before Walt Disney got hold of it, Beauty and the Beast was a fairy tale. The plot was much as Disney presented it in the 1991 hit movie: a young lady saves her father's life by volunteering to stay with the Beast in his castle. The Beast, an enchanted prince, returns to that form as he falls in love with the girl. In this episode, The Beast is no prince!
All the King's Horses (#33) -- The title, of course, comes from the nursery rhyme:
Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall.According to William S. and Ceil Baring-Gould in The Annotated Mother Goose, this rhyme was originally a riddle. The answer, of course, was "an egg." In the original version, published in Gammer Gurton's Garland in 1810, horses weren't even mentioned: "Threescore men and threescore more/Cannot place Humpty-Dumpty as he was before." At the end of the episode, the dying Mike Finney (James Gregory) says to McGarrett, "All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Mike Finney back together again."
McGarrett meets with the governor and Senator Oishi (Keye Luke). The Senator remarks that McGarrett has "a lot of friends, and a lot of enemies." McGarrett replies, "Well, my old man used to say the way to avoid criticism is to say nothing, do nothing, and to be nothing." In the September/October 1980 issue of ALOHA - The Magazine of Hawaii, Rita Witherwax interviewed Jack Lord. She mentions in the article a file of sayings and poems he keeps, one of which is attributed to Earl Keith: "Criticism is something you can avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing." While I can't positively identify the author of this saying, 'Earl Keith' may refer to George Keith, the Fifth Earl of Marischal (1553? - 1623), whose family motto was "They say. What say they? Let them say." That, too sounds like something both McGarrett and Jack Lord would appreciate.
Leopard on the Rock (#34) -- McGarrett quotes a poem he says his father taught him:
He had six honest serving-men;In Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories, this poem appears in "The Elephant's Child," worded:
I keep six honest serving-menThe Joker's Wild, Man, Wild! (#36) -- When Jo Louise Mailer (Beverlee McKinsey) takes her film to be developed, the name she gives the store clerk is Bonnie Parker. It's a name famous in the annals of twentieth-century American crime. With her lover Clyde Barrow, Bonnie conducted a mini-crime spree across Texas and neighboring states during the 1930s. Not even five feet tall, Bonnie was a cold-blooded killer. She and Clyde gunned down two Texas highway patrolmen outside of Dallas in 1934. Bonnie got out of the car, walked over to one of the dying men and unemotionally fired two more rounds into his head. On the morning of May 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde's career was ended on a remote Texas road by a party of law officers including legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (with whom McGarrett shares many traits: courage, dedication, intelligence, incorruptibility, and fearlessness). The exploits of Barrow and Parker were glamourized in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde; it is probably this glorified version of Bonnie which Jo Louise fancies.
Later, McGarrett refers to Jo Louise as "Lucretia Borgia." The Borgias were a notorious family of the Italian Renaissance (13th-14th centuries). Lucretia (also spelled Lucrezia) was the daughter of a Spanish cardinal who later became Pope Alexander VI. She was said to have borne a son fathered by her brother Cesare; some sources say Alexander, her father, was the father of the child. By his reference, McGarrett is saying he doesn't think Jo Louise is a very nice lady.
Having brought Jo Louise in for interrogation, McGarrett asks her, "Ever heard of Halawa?" Jo Louise says, "It's a candy, isn't it?" McGarrett says, "It ain't sweet; it's the state prison." Jo Louise is making a pun on Halawa (the prison, and the "w" is pronounced more like a "v") to Halvah, a candy of honey and ground-up sesame seeds, sometimes chocolate coated, found in both Jewish and Arab delicatessens.
Bored, She Hung Herself (#39) -- The story has a hippie writer (who also, apparently, fancies himself a painter) named Boswell. James Boswell (1740-1795) was of a waggish temperament and great intellect. His Life of Johnson, a biography of Samuel Johnson, is regarded as a benchmark in the field of biography. The hippie writer in the episode, who characterizes himself as suffering from "elephantiasis of the imagination," performs a biographical function in part: He provides an alibi for murder suspect Don Miles (Don Quine).
Killer Bee (#41) -- Chin brings in the service record of George Loman, now a prime suspect in a string of kidnappings. Looking at the file, Chin tells McGarrett that Loman's "got more decorations than Sergeant York and Audie Murphy." Alvin York was a Tennessee hill dweller who, though a pacifist, enlisted in the Army in World War I and became a much-decorated hero. He almost single-handedly captured dozens of German soldiers. Audie Murphy was a similarly-decorated hero of the Korean War who later became an actor, appearing in many war movies of the 1950s.
Three Dead Cows at Makapuu (#46-47) -- Blind scrimshander Abel Morgan (Karl Swenson) refers to Alex Kline (Ed Flanders) as "suffering and convinced of his martyrdom," like Job. Job is the central character of the Book of the Bible of the same name. He's a man who struggles, as Alex does in this episode, to understand the calamities which have overtaken him.
Literate Five-O, part 1 Literate Five-O, part 3 Literate Five-O, part 4 Literate Five-O, part 5
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