MovieChat Forums > Hawaii Five-O (1968) Discussion > episode in season 4 or 5 with young lady...

episode in season 4 or 5 with young lady dying possibly from toxic waste

posted 9 years ago by entersignin
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I don't own any DVD's. I'm trying to identify a particularly creepy episode from my memory of watching it forty years ago. Can anyone help please?

It probably is in Season 4, 5, 6 or 7. I don't remember anything about the criminal who is actually causing trouble, but I vividly recall that the criminal has some connection to a middle-aged man who is caring for his grown daughter who is terminally ill and bedridden.

The daughter's illness causes her to breathe noisily, as if every breath is a gasp. Father and daughter speak English with heavy accents. Because the daughter's name is Teresa, I suspect their main language is Spanish, and they might be Filipino. This definitely is an episode of Hawaii Five-O. I'm not confusing it with another 1970s crime series, I promise.

All I recall about the episode are the scenes with the father tending to his daughter in a bedroom. Occasionally, a third person is there, but the father sticks in my memory the most. The episode switches from the young lady's deathbed to scenes with the criminal causing trouble, then it switches to McGarrett, then back to the deathbed. The terminally ill young lady, who has long straight dark hair, dies approximately midway through the episode, and that scene constitutes my strongest memory as follows:

When the father and daughter are the only people in the bedroom, she is breathing noisily, then the noise stops suddenly and her face freezes with her eyes open. I don't know if the show's technical crew used a computer for this. The father, who already was distraught, becomes apoplectic when the noise of breathing stops, and -- I'll never forget this -- he uses the daughter's hairbrush to brush her long hair in several different directions with the hope that doing so will wake her up. It doesn't. The music swells and the picture switches to the familiar commercial bumper where the tidal wave is rolling. Can anyone help me find this episode? I'm not sure, but I suspect the daughter's illness might be caused by toxic waste or poison.

[–] ringfire211 9 years ago

It sounds like "Charter for Death" from season 6. Nehemiah Persoff plays a Corsican gangster whose daughter is dying after being exposed to the bubonic plague. There's a scene at the beginning which shows rats (which carried the plague) on a boat. Bert Convy plays his duplicitous Caucasian son-in-law (the daughter's husband) who cares more about his criminal schemes than his wife's health.

I don't remember the details (like brushing her hair with a hair brush) but this sounds like the episode you're thinking of.

Connery, Moore, and Brosnan! Accept NO substitutes!

[–] entersignin 9 years ago

Thanks very much. That would have to be the correct episode. I'm going to buy the DVD for Season 6 and check it out.

As a child watching TV throughout the 1970s, I saw Bert Convy on several different shows, so I knew who he was. I listened to the Broadway cast album of Cabaret in which he sings as the male lead. (The album dates from 1967, but our family kept it throughout the 1970s.) But I have a memory block of Mr. Convy in the same Hawaii Five-O episode with the bedridden young woman dying. He probably was in it and my childhood brain couldn't match him with evidence of him in other places.

TV.com lists the original CBS broadcast date of "Charter for Death" as September 25, 1973. You can click below for that TV.com page.

http://www.tv.com/shows/hawaii-fiveo/charter-for-death-34640/

I was too young to tune in to CBS on that Thursday night in 1973. It was a syndicated rerun that I watched a few years later. Even at that late date, I was so young that I couldn't understand what the bubonic plague was, but I became mesmerized by the father brushing the bedridden woman's long hair in different directions in a futile attempt to save her life. I wondered, "Do paramedics ever do that if they are trying to save the life of a person who has long hair?" (I had seen young men with long hair.)