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An assistant district attorney is killed when he finds a ''box man'' i.e. safecracker rifling through the attorney's office on a Sunday. The assistant DA was preparing to prosecute Matsukino, a local mobster. The key piece of evidence, a handgun, is now missing. McGarrett brings in Matsukino and his right-hand man, Cardonus. McGarrett does a bit of psychological game playing by letting Matsukino go and keeping Cardonus in the lawman's office. The Five-O leader reminds Cardonus that Matsukino doesn't like to leave loose ends. After Cardonus is released, his car blows up. Cardonus, knowing that Matsukino wants him dead, goes to Five-O. McGarrett wants Cardonus to testify at the upcoming trial. The question is whether Five-O can keep Cardonus alive to make the court date.

Despite a rather conventional story, this episode is well written and enjoyable

&quot;Deathwatch&quot; begins with an Assistant D.A. being killed when he unexpectedly goes to his office on the weekend. It seems that a local mobster has paid a scum-bag to break into the office to steal some evidence and the Assistant D.A. just happened to walk into the middle of it. Because McGarrett knew the man and his pregnant wife, he&#39;s making it his personal mission (once again) to convict the man who ordered the break-in. The most obvious man who could have ordered the robbery/murder was Joseph Matsukino and in a move typical of the show, McGarrett brings him in to question him--though never in the history of the show did that result in any of these mobsters admitting anything. However, what it did do was plant seeds of doubt in Matsukino about his partner, Harry Cardonus--and soon, attempts are made on Cardonus&#39; stinkin&#39; life. So, in an odd twist, it&#39;s up to Five-O to actually protect one of these evil men from the other--so that they can eventually get Cardonus to testify against his &quot;friend&quot;. Unlike many early episodes, this one was tightly written and consistently good from start to finish--no loopholes or logical errors here--just good entertainment. Perhaps one other reason it was so good was that Cardonus was played by the always interesting Nehemiah Persoff--a character actor who had a particular talent for playing hoods on this show.

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Deathwatch

An assistant DA is murdered when he walks in on the robbery of his office paid for by gangster Joe Matsukino who wanted the incriminating evidence against him retrieved. The DA&#39;s wife goes into premature labor as a result, and McGarrett, who was a friend to them both, is taking this personally. Matsukino becomes worried that his longtime associate Harry Cardonus (Nehemiah Persoff) might rat on him and attempts to have him killed. But Cardonus escapes and offers to turn state&#39;s evidence. And McGarrett needs Cardonus&#39; testimony as Matsukino&#39;s trial is coming up in a few days and his is the only evidence that they have against him after the breakin at the DA&#39;s office. The interesting thing is that Cardonus doesn&#39;t expect to live through this experience. He believes Matsukino will kill him. He just wants to get back at him for the betrayal. Cardonus is a very amoral person who doesn&#39;t have any regrets for the things he&#39;s done while working for Matsukino, and this makes it hard for McGarrett to even be around him. Matsukino does come up with some very elaborate plans to try and kill him. Will he succeed? Watch and find out. Things get a bit far-fetched here, from hiring somebody to break into the D. A&#39;.&#39;s office in the first place to the lengths Matsukino goes to kill Cordonus before he can testify - it starts to get into Batman territory at times. Odd factoid - Nehemiah Persoff and Jack Lord were just a year apart in age. To look at the two of them at the end of 1968 and to wonder who would outlive the other, I&#39;d bet on the thin Jack Lord versus the somewhat overweight and out of shape Persoff. And yet Persoff outlived Jack Lord by 24 years, living to the age of 102.

&quot;Deathwatch&quot; 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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s trial. The moment McGarrett opens the door to Persoff&#39;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 &quot;good gun&quot; 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&#39;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&#39;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: &quot;Not another dead body...for Pete&#39;s sake!&quot; 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&#39;s death could have been prevented if not for the uncharacteristic stupidity of Five-0! In all, &quot;Deathwatch&quot; 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&#39;s character was actually a good guy.

User reviews

Deathwatch

Hawaii Five-O

Despite a rather conventional story, this episode is well written and enjoyable

This time it's personal for McGarrett

"Deathwatch" is right...

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