A Bullet for El Diablo

Criminals in the 1960s and 1970s in Hawaii had some ingenious plots. It's really not fair that none of them worked, but they were up against Steve McGarrett and 5-0, so they didn't stand a chance.

This plot was more ingenious than most ... how to assassinate the well-protected dictator of, evidently, a Central American country. They were able to take advantage of his legitimate daughter's illegitimate half-sister to choreograph a fatal substitution.

The accuracy of their plan and attention to detail is impressive. How will 5-0 run then down and save the daughter? And how will they live down delivering an assassin to the assassination?

To be fair, I have to rate this episode as poorly as I did Murder She Wrote's 'The Last Flight of the Dixie Damsel' that is because both episodes have a plot element that belongs in a Sci-Fi show not a crime drama.

As many reviewers have said, the criminals' plot is ingenious and the pace of the show really moves. Steve is at his most intense going up against apparent kidnappers and having a staring contest with El Diablo, a dictator from an unnamed Latin American country that clearly is a useful ally of the State Department.

One of the more fascinating scenes is a time machine trip to 1974 Hawaii when the state had a "may issue" policy for concealed handguns. (According to Wikipedia, at the time the "may issue" policy was a mostly never issue policy for the permits.) Steve stares down El Diablo and forces his henchmen to surrender their weapons, because Hawaii didn't even honor the concealed permits from other US states, much less a Latin American dictator's country. Pretty refreshing to see a more common sense era when the SCOTUS had set 200 years of precedent that guns could rightly be regulated. (Of course, today's SCOTUS had no problem ruling that 230 years of Supreme courts simply "didn't really understand the Constitution" like us modern folk.) I thought it interesting that before the SCOTUS gutted such laws, Hawaii had one of the lowest gun death rates of any state in the union. Today they are still second lowest. That makes them an interesting data point, since they are separated from states with more permissive laws by 2000 miles of ocean. Smuggling weapons to Hawaii would be much more difficult. So a strong case could be made that strong gun laws DO work, as long as you can prevent the flow of weapons from states that are swimming in guns.

I thoroughly enjoy watching old shows like this when America had many common sense consensus ideas that kept things more safe and less chaotic than today. It is a welcome respite from the current craziness.