Channel Surfing: 'Hawaii Five-O's' Choose-Your-Own Adventure Monday night's episode of "Hawaii Five-0" had two different villains -- a greedy academic if you watched it on the East Coast, a feckless student if you watched it on the West -- but just one victim: the audience. In what was called the "Hawaii Five-0 Alternate Ending Vote," the public was allowed to cast online ballots on which one character (from a choice of three) would be the episode's murderer. The killer having been tabulated after about 40 minutes of voting, the appropriate ending was then queued up. Viewers in the Pacific time zone chose a different killer; unlike those to the east who had watched and voted earlier, westerners also had the chance to see all three endings at cbs.com before making their choice. "Endings," however, was an exaggeration. The entire difference among the three alternate story lines was contained in a two-minute stretch at about the 51-minute mark, and even there the shots and editing were virtually the same, except for a few seconds of the winning villain running through the jungle brandishing a rifle. All of the fuss amounted to about 75 words of alternate dialogue, shot in identical set-ups or dubbed. If you took a bathroom break just after 10:50 p.m., you missed the whole thing. The question a viewer might have had going in -- will the vote result in the best "ending," or most logical murderer, being chosen? -- turned out to be moot. "Hawaii Five-0" is already one of the most formulaic shows in network prime time. The effect of the stunt was to force the writers to come up with an even more simplistic, gimcrack plot than usual (involving a dead professor named Cutler whose valuable research could have been discovered by any of the three suspects). If the experiment is deemed a success -- that is, if more viewers than usual watched the broadcast live and sat through the commercials because of it -- then we can make justifiably dark predictions about the future of TV drama. Will we be voting for the winner in "Good Wife" court cases during the May sweeps? And from a critical standpoint, the notion of the audience choosing among multiple endings destroys the essential pleasure of a mystery or crime procedural -- the intellectual exercise of solving a puzzle that requires our attention from first moment to last. The vote makes everything that happens before the ending meaningless; it turns a mystery into a video game. But it didn't matter so much on Monday night because it was just "Hawaii Five-0," a series whose appeal is based on the smart amalgamation of off-the-shelf parts: attractive and likable actors (often in bathing suits), a joky we're-not-gay central bromance, beautiful scenery and a great theme song. The whole show is already a stunt. And you had to give the writers credit for a little wit when Scott Caan's Danno Williams pulled out his phone at 10:46 -- just after online voting had closed -- and announced to Alex O'Loughlin's Steve McGarrett, "We just figured out who killed Cutler!"