Hawaii Five-O - Season 9 (1976)

A group of university students and their professor are examining a volcanic crater when they discover the bodies of five men in an inconspicuous location. Doc Bergman is initially unable to determine the cause of their deaths, so he enlists the aid of cantankerous physicist Grant Ormsbee, with whom McGarrett and Five-O are already familiar (from the previous season's "The Defector"). Five-O eventually learns that most of the dead men came from a variety of foreign countries, and that all of them died from exposure to radiation - creating an even bigger mystery for ...

A plane arrives in Hawaii with 300 passengers aboard, including a tour group of 40. After everyone has left the plane, however, a stewardess discovers that one remaining passenger is dead, the victim of a stabbing with a thin instrument of some kind. Then a woman is discovered dead in a tropical park with a similar wound. Because the victim on the plane turns out to have been a CIA agent, McGarrett contacts Jonathan Kaye in Washington, and learns that the killer may be a mysterious hit man known only as "Raymond." With little information about either the killer or his...

Someone breaks into Five-O's temporary offices at the Territorial Building and, for the most part, manages to avoid the burglar alarms. When the alarm is triggered, the guard who responds is decoyed by a small music-playing souvenir doll long enough for the burglar to escape. The next day, however, Five-O's staff can find nothing missing, even though there is evidence that the lock to one of the cabinets was picked. What was taken they only learn later -- a single sheet official requisition form that is used to steal about $14,000 in state money -- the first step in ...

In an episode based on a real-life case (the villains on this show are even WORSE than their real-life counterparts), a gang of hijackers sign on as crew members of luxury yachts, then murder the owners and steal the boats to sell in South America. Danno and Sandi Welles go undercover to track them down, but Sandi is taken hostage on one of the boats. The title of the episode comes from the particularly sadistic gang leader flipping a coin to decide whether Sandi and the other hostages, whom he's going to throw overboard, will be given a life raft (this is also taken ...

A man named Jim Spier breaks out of prison, shortly after refusing to accept parole for the second time. Spier had been convicted of the murder of his wife, but had always claimed to be innocent of the crime. With assistance from a beautician friend of his, Spier changes his appearance and begins to investigate the case against himself anew. McGarrett and Five-O also look into the crime again, even as they search for Spier - and find that upon re-examination, at least some of the evidence against Spier doesn't appear to be that solid.

An extremely violent episode in which two seriously loco mobsters wage war on each other, with Danny's photographer girlfriend -- who snapped a picture of one of the two sneaking back into the Islands -- caught in the middle. The only show for which Seth Sakai received guest-star credit (he plays the second mobster, who snaps his fingers to get ice cream literally on call) is the one that debuts his shaved head (it was filmed after "Target: A Cop"); he would use the cue-ball look for the rest of the series.

The top financial aide to Chang Liu, the head of one of the islands' crime syndicates, is ambushed and killed when he tries to return to Hawaii surreptitiously via helicopter. The killers are all members of a street gang that normally wouldn't take on a criminal organization like Chang Liu's, but the gang members have inside information given by someone close to Chang Liu - his daughter. Then Chang Liu and Five-O each try to find the $4 million in laundered money that Chang Liu's aide was bringing with him when he was ambushed.

A sniper targets police officers.

After a young woman has died from a drug overdose, Johnny Kling moves to avenge the death by killing those who sold and distributed the drugs. Kling performs the killings in such a way to evoke scenes from old movies. For his final target, he intends to copy the explosive ending from "White Heat."

McGarrett has been dating a fashion designer named Cathi Ryan. He receives an urgent telephone call from her one afternoon, and arrives at her house to find her apparently having just been killed. Then he is hit on the back of the head, and awakens to find neither the telephone nor his police radio working. He manages to report the crime, but then discovers that there are a number of clues suggesting either that he committed the crime -- or that he has been the victim of an elaborate plot to frame him for murder.

Because the country of Japan has very strong restrictions on handguns, smugglers can turn huge profits by buying or stealing them in Hawaii and seeking them on the Tokyo black market. A Tokyo police officer, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on the Tokyo street and picked up the assailant's weapon, traces it to Honolulu. He arrives there and tells McGarrett of his find, and the two of them form a task force to find the leaders of a Hawaiian smuggling ring.

Glenn Cannon's final episode as Attorney General John Manicote gives him a major role as his daughter disappears into a rain forest on the windward side of Oahu, just as a maniacal serial killer breaks the prison van and heads into the same area with a shotgun.

Officer Sandi Welles has a younger brother about whom she is VERY protective. With good reason: the brother is a chronic gambler fighting a losing battle with addiction and heavily in debt. While trying to sneak into an illegal casino through a back garage, the brother hears a policeman coming in to cover the escape route. The brother hides in the bushes -- and watches in horror as a mobster and his car barrel through the door and run over the cop, who is fatally injured. The brother runs away as McGarrett and his team arrive on the scene. The brother does not want to...

A retired chemical engineer, after fighting City Hall and the state government over the proposed demolition of his housing complex for the elderly, wears a bomb into a Jimmy Borges concert and demands that the Governor cut through the red tape -- but doesn't count on the psycho girlfriend of a mobster about to be shipped to the mainland crashing the party and taking HIM hostage. This episode features Richard Denning in a larger-than-usual role and is the only acting role for director Sutton Roley, who appears at the beginning as the judge signing the extradition order.

Thugs kidnap a singer and spirit her off in a boat - but then the boat is caught in a violent storm and driven northwestward, where it wrecks on the north coast of Kauai. The coastline there is known as the Na Pali Cliff region and is so rugged that there are no roads and only a few trails. Everybody survives the wreck, but the kidnappers realize (from their radio) that the boat has been reported missing and is presumed destroyed -- and the kidnappers and the victim with it. To avoid losing out on the half-million-dollar ransom, the kidnappers engage the help of a ...

A mainland mobster arrives in the Islands planning to buy a semi-pro football team and skim the profits. When his brother, who has lived in Hawaii for some years, warns him that "they do things differently here," the mobster sneers: "This place is just Cleveland with coconuts!" Big mistake. McGarrett puts surveillance people on the mobster's trail and tells them to make the surveillance so obvious that anyone the mobster tries to threaten can just point to the cops and laugh in the mobster's face (sometimes the trackers do it too). The mobster tries to bribe Chin Ho ...

A year after a Soviet submarine was sunk near Hawaii, pieces of what appear to be key components of the sub's computer begin washing ashore. McGarrett suspects that devices have been planted to sabotage other parts of the sub's computer that were already in the hands of the U.S. government - but cantankerous scientist Grant Ormsbee insists upon going ahead with testing of the components despite McGarett's concerns.

With Five-O on the verge of a major crackdown on illegal gambling, McGarrett is approached by Susie Wainane, an old friend now in college in California. She has returned to Hawaii over concerns that her brother, Billy, who worked as a rider in a Hawaiian rodeo, seems to have disappeared. McGarrett agrees to assist her in investigating Billy's disappearance - and finds that everyone he questions at the rodeo seems oddly reluctant to discuss the Billy's whereabouts.

Sunny Mandell, a teenage runaway, holes up in Honolulu with a man who helped her back in Los Angeles. But the helpful man is a gangster with a grudge against Sunny's father, a Los Angeles cop who sent him to a California prison. The gangster takes Sunny to a hotel where he murders an associate and forces Sunny to take hold of the murder weapon, leaving her fingerprints on it. Sunny's father has meanwhile arrived in Honolulu and consulted with McGarrett about the connection. With the unlikely help of a Peeping Tom who witnessed the murder with his telescope, they clear...

After an attempt to hijack an Army vehicle carrying M-16 vehicles goes awry, an arms dealer and his underlings recognize that the bases and transports with small arms will be more heavily guarded. But then one of his men gets an idea how to get onto an Army base using an unorthodox approach -- when two men slip into the penthouse of a hotel and make off with King Kamehameha's golden feathered cape -- using a hang-glider.