Magnum, P.I.

“The Big Squeeze”, Season 5 Episode 20

What do I know about this series going into it?

It’s a remake of the show of the same name from forty years ago, which I also never watched. I want to say Tom Selleck was in it? The blurb while clicking through to the episode says the main character is a former Navy SEAL.

Previously On

A man in a kitchen chopping vegetables talks about expanding his business, called Island Hoppers. A woman warns her subordinate about some homicide he did that shouldn’t be traced back to him. There’s a prisoner trade.

Recap

A couple are in bed, post-coitus. The woman has a British accent and I think she might be the evil woman from the opening. They’re late for dinner with “Rick”. While the man goes to shower, she finds an engagement ring hidden in his dresser.

Opening credits. The man and woman have first and second billing, which makes him Magnum and her probably not evil; maybe I completely misunderstood the Previously.

After the credits, it’s the following morning. The woman is talking to a Wise Older Mentor; she says she had a panic attack after seeing the ring and was in a terrible mood all evening. Magnum calls her: they have a new client they need to meet.

If the clouds are to be believed, their new client is Sauron.

On the way into the client’s house, Magnum asks her some pointed questions about where she disappeared to, which she dodges. At the door I get their names: He’s Thomas Magnum, she is Juliet, and the client is a Michael Reeves. But it’s not Michael Reeves, it’s a guy named Bedrosian, whom the score says we should know and whom I think I recognize from the Previously. He wanted to kill them after the prisoner exchange, but now he has a better idea: he wants to hire them. But not for money; he’s got a recording of a conversation in which they discuss an impending prison escape and decide not to warn the police about it. If they don’t investigate something for him, he’ll release the recording and they could go to jail. (Is a no-party-consent tape recording admissible evidence? Is failure to report this type of crime itself a crime?)

In return for not releasing the recording, Bedrosian wants Magnum and Juliet to investigate the murder of one of his “associates”, a lawyer named Gavin Larsen, which needs to be done without involving the police or doing any lab work. From examining the crime scene, the PIs quickly conclude that Larsen was forced by a burglar to open a safe, in which he had something the burglar wanted but also a gun. He pulled out the gun instead of the valuables and tried to shoot the burglar, but the burglar shot him twice. But who was the burglar? Magnum uses Larsen’s finger to open his phone, revealing a text message from “Mac” who said he needed to come by immediately, shortly before the murder.

Thank you, Mr. Magnum, we all know how to read.

Magnum also finds a bit of blood on a counter in the kitchen, which he scoops up to smuggle out of the house with him, under the theory that Larsen managed to wound Mac and the latter went to the kitchen to clean up. “As soon as we leave they’re going to scrub everything and remove the body, and that will make us party to a cover-up,” Juliet says, which is also not how being a party to something works.

Elsewhere, the guy from the Previously who wants to expand his business is talking to a friend who I think owes him money (it’s not clear). He’s calling in the debt so he can buy that second helicopter he needs, so I at least now know what “Island Hoppers” is. The friend, Rick, fakes being perfectly okay with Helicopter Guy’s request but confesses to the Old Mentor Woman, named Kumu, that this means he’s financially screwed. “Maybe you can get money from Robin (somebody)?” Kumu suggests, but Rick is as unhappy with that as he is with the prospect of refinancing.

Somebody anonymously calls in to the cops the Larsen homicide, before the two cleanup guys have removed the body. A female cop drives up to the house and rings the bell. The cleanup guys prepare to have to shoot her if she comes in, but she’s smart: she sees the moving shadows inside and fakes calling in to Dispatch that there’s no disturbance, which calms them down. She’s not that smart, though, because she breaks in through the back door alone. They hear her, get the drop on her, and shoot her.

Magnum, it turns out, is also friends with Rick, and the latter has a friend in the police department who will run the blood sample he picked up from the kitchen. In the meantime, he and Juliet have tracked Mac’s phone. While driving to its location, Magnum confronts Juliet about her being weird and distant since last night, then figures out she saw the ring. He clarifies that it’s not his ring, it’s Rick’s: Rick is going to propose to his girlfriend Suzy.

Mac’s phone is in a hotel room, where the PIs find a guy blindfolded and tied to the bed. I think for a moment it’s Bedrosian, but it’s not. He tells them his story: Mac is “Mackenzie”, an escort; she had him tied up for funtimes when somebody barged in, demanded to know who she works for (Larsen), used her phone to send the message to Larsen, and then took her to Larsen’s place. Since the guy was blindfolded, he can’t describe whoever it was who barged in. Thanks for your help! They leave, cruelly and pointlessly leaving the guy tied up.

The good guys, ladies and gentlemen.

More cops have arrived at the murder house; the first cop is in critical condition. One cop I recognize from the opening credits notices discoloration on the floor and the smell of bleach. They also find drops of blood on the floor near the back door, that the cleaners apparently missed. (It’s so hard to find good help these days.)

Magnum and Juliet go to Amelia’s house, Amelia being Mackenzie’s real name. They find her brother Dan there, who says she’s missing and he’s worried.

Meanwhile, Rick gets a call from his friend the lab tech. The blood sample matches a recent parolee named Neil McRae. From the soundtrack and camera cuts, it’s clear Neil is the guy pretending to be Dan, but the show makes it painfully obvious so even us prosopagnosics can figure it out. (Even rewatching it, though, I can’t tell they’re the same person.) Magnum and Juliet also make it painfully obvious: when Rick sends them the picture by phone they look down at it, look back up at Dan, down again, up again, until Neil finally gets tired of waiting for them to say it out loud and pulls a gun.

What ensues is a very long fight scene with about four camera cuts per second. I feel genuine nausea by the end of it.

Neil briefly holds a woman hostage, using her to get to her car. He drives away. Magnum and Juliet both stop to ask her if she’s okay instead of one of them stopping and the other giving chase. They’re terrible at their jobs.

Searching Amelia’s apartment, Magnum and Juliet conclude that she must have fled when the shooting started, that she must have been up to something illegal with Larsen since she hasn’t gone to the police herself, and that her bag must have had a camera hidden in it to film her clients for blackmail purposes. (Kudos to the set dressing and props people: I actually had noticed during the original scene in the hotel room that the bag was weirdly positioned!)

“It’s got a false bottom,” Magnum helpfully tells Juliet as he removes the bag’s false bottom in front of her. “Like the kind that houses a hidden camera,” she helpfully responds after they’ve both seen the hidden camera. The dialogue in this show is awful. They very helpfully spell out, yet again, that she’s blackmailing her clients with Larsen’s help, because the show assumes its viewers are idiots. Whoever shot Larsen wanted to get their blackmail information back, because this is a world where there is no such thing as backup copies of digital information.

Magnum and Juliet confront Bedrosian: he must have been running the blackmail operation, and Larsen and Amelia were both working for him. The real reason he wants them to find the killer is because he need to get all the blackmail material back. (Why, though? Who says he needs to tell the blackmail victims the info is gone?)

Whoever wrote this line deserves the electric chair.

Since McRae is clearly not a blackmailee himself, he must have been hired by one of them. But Bedrosian won’t give them the list and in fact informs them he doesn’t need their help anymore.

Meanwhile, the detective from the opening credits is told that the lab ran a sample on the blood the police found, and it’s a match. What do you mean, a match? To the other sample they ran earlier today. What other sample? Uh-oh.

The detective’s name is Katsumoto, and he somehow tracks down Magnum and Juliet while they’re driving down the highway. They bring him up to speed, and he in turn says that the governor himself wrote a letter convincing the parole board to release McRae early. (Why didn’t he just issue a pardon? Or even better, issue pardons to a couple dozen people so that there’s no bright flashing personal connection to McRae?) So clearly Amelia seduced the governor and that put him under Bedrosian’s thumb.

Magnum espouses a theory that makes it sound at first like people around the governor got McRae released, not the governor himself, in order to help the governor out. That would explain why it was a letter and not a pardon. But unfortunately I’m giving the show too much credit: turns out he meant they were working at the governor’s orders. So never mind.

Katsumoto has a meeting with “Ms. Lee”, who works for the governor and was clearly responsible for both the parole letter and the hiring of McRae. This is stupid of the governor, of course; you want to assign each bit of your evil plan to a different underling so that no one person knows the whole thing, and have the person being interviewed by the police be a different underling entirely. As soon as Katsumoto leaves, Lee calls McRae, which Katsumoto listens in on (how did he get a wiretap warrant on the governor’s aide, both secretly and at such short notice?). She wants the thumb drive with the evidence, but McRae refuses to hand it over because he has a “better offer”. Which is stupid of McRae too: why not make a copy of the thumb drive and sell one copy to each of them? Ah yes, I forgot, copying files doesn’t exist in this world.

Juliet, being the good guys’ designated hacker, breaks into Amelia’s account at a local pharmacy and finds the new phone number she left there when she picked up her son’s Gaucher medication. She pings Amelia’s phone and track her down. (I briefly think that I recognize Amelia’s actress from somewhere, but it turns out I don’t.) Amelia spills the details of the whole scheme, which is everything we already knew, plus one detail: Larsen told McRae before the shooting who owns the thumb drive and that he’s making a huge mistake.

Look, dude, I’ve been in prison for the last five years and never heard of this guy. Is he like a famous golfer?

So now the assumption is McRae reached out to Bedrosian to offer him the drive back. I’d have loved to hear that conversation: “I murdered your friend and stole something from him, how much will you pay me to give it back?”

But Bedrosian’s goons have somehow tracked down Amelia too and enter the house with submachine guns. Magnum hits one over the head with a painting and takes his gun; Juliet shoots one with her shotgun (I somehow missed where she got the shotgun from), Magnum beats up the third with a cookbook, and finally Juliet shoots the fourth.

Interesting that Juliet killed both bad guys she encountered while Magnum only beat his two up. I wonder if this is some consistent character trait they have across the series.

Denouement. Kumu will pay Rick the money the latter needs to pay the helicopter guy. This somehow makes her a co-owner of Rick’s club. Katsumoto arrests McRae and finds the thumb drive with all the blackmail material, but can’t trace any of Larsen’s blackmailing activity to Bedrosian.

Here’s a wild idea: Make a list of people who did these sorts of favors for Bedrosian and also just happen to have secrets about them on the thumb drive.

Katsumoto instead steals the thumb drive from the evidence locker and gives it to Magnum and Juliet, suggesting they use it to get out from under Bedrosian’s thumb: give the drive to Bedrosian in return for the blackmail material he has on them. (Because neither Katsumoto nor Bedrosian can make a copy of the drives: as established, this is a world where copying files was never invented.) But Magnum and Juliet apparently refused, and instead the material is given to the FBI, which forces the governor to resign and investigations of other officials to be opened. Bedrosian sees this on the news and is furious. Rick and Suzy are engaged. Magnum makes a speech that makes no sense. Juliet and Magnum slow-dance and she says she’s sorry for her reaction, and she’d be willing to marry him if he wanted.

Gollum has entered the chat.

Unresolved questions

• What will Bedrosian do with the recorded conversation?

• When, if ever, will Silicon Valley invent a way to make copies of digital files?

• Why does the actor who plays Magnum seem so familiar? I looked it up, and I’ve never seen him in anything else, but I keep thinking he reminds me of someone. Kind of like Mark Wahlberg with Jonathan LaPaglia’s voice.

Ratings

Story: 3/10. An extremely simple plot, docked points for the fact it was only made possible because every character involved, from the governor to McRae to Bedrosian to Magnum, is an idiot.

Writing: 2/10. Terrible writing. Terrible writing. The show assumes that the audience needs literally everything spelled out to them, slowly and painfully and repeatedly, so that even if you were listening to only one word in ten you could still understand what was going on.

Then there’s this line, which I replayed a couple of times so I could copy it down verbatim:

…to do his bidding, there is no bigger fish to land than Hawaii’s chief executive.”

I’m sure the actress died a little inside every time she had to say that.

Production: 3/10. The show makes good use of the Hawaii scenery available to it, and I already praised the props department for their excellent placement of the handbag. But the fight scenes were literally – and I mean literally literally, not figuratively – painful to watch. The director’s decision to show us the same things over and over again, and tell us the same things over and over again, were probably constrained by the fact that it was all in the script and the show needed to be a certain length. But still, they could’ve done something better.

Characterization: 3/10. The show tried to make something out of the engagement fake-out, but it was a shallow imitation of characterization. I’m tempted to mark this even lower but that would be cruel.

Clarity: 10/10. How could I not understand what was going on? The show spent more time reexplaining it to me than advancing the plot.

Closure: 2/10. I don’t think this was intended to be a finale at all; it felt like just another episode. I even double-checked afterwards to make sure I had watched the series finale as opposed to accidentally bringing up an episode from the middle of the season. The threat posed by Bedrosian neither ended nor reached a new height; in fact, it seemed to be exactly where it was at the start of the episode. Even the engagement subplot went nowhere. The only thing that felt ending-worthy (season-ending, not series-ending) was the fact that they took down a corrupt governor. But since the governor made no actual appearances except in the background footage of the news clip, it didn’t feel like the culmination of anything.

Do I want to watch the series now?

Definitely not. This quality of writing is a waste of anybody’s time. This show was created to keep your ears busy while you’re doing the dishes or the laundry: it’s written so that you can follow the story even if you’ve missed half of the scenes. Watch something that respects your intelligence a bit more.