And reveals a behind-the-scenes story you won't want to miss.
Gordon Katsumoto (Tim Kang) is back on the case on Magnum P.I. After losing his badge for breaking a convict out of prison in order to save his ex-wife, Beth (Shawna Christensen), who was being held hostage, the detective of the Honolulu Police Department made his case in front of the disciplinary board that was convened to determine his future in law enforcement.
Following a heartfelt conversation with his teenage son, Dennis (Lance Lim), who decided to skip his trigonometry class to give his father moral support, Katsumoto urges his fellow officers to put themselves in his shoes and recognize his commitment to the police force. "You don't know me—and not just you. My son says that I can be scary that way," Katsumoto says off the cuff. "It's hard to tell what I'm thinking. I'm not a guy who opens up easily. But the job, that always came easy to me, more so than anything else—being a husband, a father. Those things had a much steeper learning curve, I guess, because it requires a vulnerability that I've never been comfortable with.
"I always felt most at home when I was doing my job, so I put it first above everything, including my family. I just started to make things right when those bastards took my ex-wife, the mother of my child," continues Katsumoto, whose impassioned speech is enough to get him reinstated. "Even if it means giving up the job, I'd do what I did all over again."
On a recent Wednesday morning in Hawaii, Kang sat down with TV Guide to discuss Katsumoto's reinstatement at the HPD, his relationships with his teenage son, ex-wife, and protagonist Thomas Magnum (Jay Hernandez), and the episode this season in which he suffered a hilarious wardrobe malfunction. Initially, what's going through his head is the words that he heard from his kid five minutes earlier in the hallway. I think that's sort of what gives him pause, because [Katsumoto] really knows how he wants to do things, he knows how he wants to approach an investigation and certainly how to approach this issue of getting his job back. But talking to his kid really stuck in his head.
And I think during the course of that speech that he gives to the review board, he reveals why he got into the job in the first place, right? Thus far, he's been by the book, he wants to just clear cases and get them off his desk, and [law enforcement] became a machine for this guy. It's like, one [case] came in, one went out. It was just an assembly line of trying to figure it all out, but I don't think that was why he got into law enforcement in the first place. He got into it simply to help people—that was it—and I think he gets back in touch with that reasoning.
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