"Deathwatch" is right...the viewer of this episode will watch death happen 5 times and laced with utter improbabilities.
A boxman, i.e., safecracker, breaks into the courthouse and cracks the safe in the office of an assistant prosecuting attorney, who is prosecuting a local crime boss (James Shigeta) and steals the evidence against this defendant. The assistant prosecuting attorney happens to enter his office at this very moment and the boxman shoots him to death. Although it seems that this prosecutor unfortunately walked-in on this burglary, as the episode unfolds it seems as though there was a contract out on his life as well. First-of-all, if organized crime were to steal evidence from a prosecutor's office in a courthouse, it would be an inside job; they would never send a boxman for a risky job like that! Second-of-all, organized crime would never kill a prosecutor no matter how strong the case against them, because another prosecutor is just going to pick up where the dead one left of, ergo it would be a waste of time! Furthermore, the whole scene of the prosecutor's pregnant wife seeing his lifeless body and going into premature labor is totally needless!
The girlfriend of the right-hand man (Nehemiah Persoff) of the aforesaid crime boss gets into her boyfriend's car to drive home and get her bathing suit and is killed by a car bomb meant for her boyfriend. This bomb was planted by Shigeta who feared that Persoff was going to inform on him to the authorities about racketeering and murder. Persoff goes on the lamb, then confronts Shigeta and says he is going to testify against him, and then goes to Five-0 and tells McGarrett he is going to help them nail Shigeta. For the latter sequence to have had even a shadow of creditability the confrontation between Persoff and Shigeta should have been erased! A career criminal like Persoff would never have confronted the crime boss who just attempted to have him killed...that would have been committing suicide! Additionally, it is not creditable that Persoff would have lived long enough to go to Five-0 after confronting Shigeta, because even if Shigeta could not have him killed in the open when they met, he easily would have sent men to follow Persoff and kill him at any opportune moment before Persoff reached Five-0!
McGarrett takes Persoff to a hotel to hide out until Shigeta's trial. The moment McGarrett opens the door to Persoff's room a contract killer who was lying in wait starts shooting wildly at them. McGarrett shoots the contract killer dead and Chin goes out to the balcony and finds a rope hung from the roof that the contract killer presumably used to enter the room and would have used to exit the room after killing Persoff. This had to have been the dumbest scene in the entire episode! In the first place, a contract killer is not going to start shooting until his target is dead in his or her sights, and since he obviously could not see through that hotel room door, he had no idea whether Persoff would open the door or not in order to target him! No contract killer would ever be that brainless! In the second place, a contract killer always has a foolproof escape route planned after a hit and the only way for that contract killer to have escaped that room was to use that rope to scale the building either up to the roof or down to the sidewalk! But the with the time it would have taken to scale the building either up or down, in the meantime the cops would have had the roof and the sidewalk covered, hence whether scaling up or down he would have been caught! Also, even if he had by dumb luck killed Persoff and/or pinned the cops down with his gunfire and managed to reach the rope, in all the commotion he created he have might fallen to his death while scaling the building up or down! Persoff recognized the contract killer and referred to him as a "good gun" but it is plain to see that the evidence does not bear any of that out! On the contrary, he comes off as the stupidest contract killer on the face of the earth! Plus, that McGarrett still has Persoff stay in the hotel despite this botched hit is completely stupid! It is obvious that Shigeta knows where Five-0 has Persoff holed-up, so would they not move him pronto? And Steve McGarrett is not stupid!
The boxman who stole the evidence and murdered the prosecutor is cornered by Danny and Chin and tries to shoot his way out. Then Shigeta's men drive up and gun him down. It turns out that this boxman was a heroin addict! As mentioned before organized crime would never be moronic enough to try to crack a courthouse safe to steal evidence or kill a prosecutor, but even if they did execute such a job, they would never be so moronic as to employ a junkie to execute it! That would be nothing but self-destructive!
Persoff's character wants water for his scotch and an HPD officer goes to get some. He tests the water and falls dead from poison meant for Persoff! At this point you are crying out loud: "Not another dead body...for Pete's sake!" It appears that Shigeta has even poisoned the water supply of the hotel! Again, would not it have made sense to find someplace else to hide Persoff after the botched hit, not only for his safety (which at this point you can care less about) but for the safety of the authorities protecting his worthless life! Despite all the dangerous circumstances here, that police officer's death could have been prevented if not for the uncharacteristic stupidity of Five-0!
In all, "Deathwatch" is a totally improbable episode that is unequivocally not worth viewing.
By the way, 8 years earlier Jack Lord and James Shigeta played antagonists in the movie Walk Like a Dragon (1960), albeit that time Shigeta's character was actually a good guy.
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