It's enough to make McGarrett crave a simpler life as his loved ones continue to drop in violent ways around him.

Steve's mother Doris was the latest to fall on Hawaii Five-0 Season 10 Episode 7.

Doris hadn't been seen since Hawaii Five-0 Season 7 Episode 7.

And being a CIA agent who disappeared for long periods didn't qualify her as the mother of the year.

But that didn't matter to McGarrett. When Doris's honor got called into question, he was there to race south alone to finish her unsanctioned mission and bring her back alive.

So both he and Doris were pawns in some shadowy person's game since no one wanted to take responsibility for this plan to kill Lucia. Not that Lucia didn't deserve killing, as would become evident.

First, Steve made sure to protect his team from any fallout, letting them know what he was up to but telling them to stay away unless he called for help.

Christine Lahti has been an inspired choice to play Doris in a handful of episodes over ten seasons.

Lahti has made a career of playing hard-edged, borderline unlikeable women ranging from Chicago Hope to and her current co-starring role on EVIL.

Her Doris was fortunate to have made it this far, considering her line of work and willingness to take on the most difficult assignments, regardless of what havoc that played with her family life.

Is it any wonder that Steve hasn't managed to make a relationship work and is content to build his own surrogate families instead?

Like his father and mother, he runs toward danger. As the public face of Five-0, he lives in a world where it would be dangerous to have a family.

Everyone else on the team can have a private life, but less so McGarrett.

That's why he can do something such as drop off the grid at a moment's notice to attempt to extract Doris and kill a tightly protected druglord.

Of course, it's questionable if Doris deserved that loyalty.

We have viewed a handful of scenes of blissful family life. But Doris has brought Steve quite a bit of heartache through the years, and the two don't balance out.

But that's McGarrett. He doesn't weigh pros and cons. He's loyal and he does the right thing, consequences be damned.

Too bad he was operating in regions with such transactional loyalties.

His DEA contact first got shot then blown up after they raced through a police checkpoint.

(It's been a hard week for Benito Martinez as his character on Jack Ryan also got gunned down.)

That left McGarrett considered dead but just on his own in a strange land.

He was able to hop a plane in Panama to get to Sinaloa, but he did have to play dead after he got there while formulating a strategy.

Especially after Doris violently rebuffed his first attempt to "rescue" her. He so wanted to be there for her even after all those times she wasn't there for him.

Steve recruited a couple of former military buddies and compiled a cache of primitive weaponry.

Then Junior showed up, uninvited but eventually welcomed.

No way Junior was letting his housemate take on such a suicide mission by himself. (Thankfully, he left Eddie at home.)

It was Junior who discovered that McGarrett was still alive, looking like a long-haul trucker with that beard while in hiding.

Junior also convinced Danny to go against Steve's orders with a spirited speech, although Danny going against Steve's orders is rarely a stretch.

So Junior got to be a part of McGarrett's ill-considered crusade.

Sure, military precision overcame overwhelming odds at the meet where Steve had chosen to attack.

But when has he ever gotten his mother to do the safe thing instead of following through on her current scheme?

No, not this time either, to her ultimate detriment.

It appeared at first that Doris was spouting what she had to to get Steve to leave without her.

But no. Doris believed what she was saying, in essence, that she was too old to be doing this spy shit and had crossed over to the dark side for that one big payday she needed to escape.

And Steve had screwed that up for her by staging his extraction effort.

Doris refused to tell McGarrett where Lucia was, and Lucia rewarded that loyalty by shooting Steve and fatally stabbing Doris.

In the end, Steve had to take consolation in some stirring words about his mother's death. Her bad choices late in life got swept under the rug by the bureaucrats in charge.

The last scene was touching, with Danny flying to D.C. to be by McGarrett's side during another debilitating time in his life.

Steve waxed philosophically about how death and Five-0 had always been tied together in his mind.

His father Jack's death led to Steve's founding of Hawaii Five-0. Then his surrogate father Joe White got killed in a gun battle with assassins on Hawaii Five-0 Season 9 Episode 10.

And now Doris. Who's left? Catherine?

It will be intriguing to see how well Steve bounces back from the death of his final parental figure.

How well could the team function under Danny's command if McGarrett ends up in a dark place for a time?

To follow the key moments in McGarrett's life, watch Hawaii Five-0 online.

Are you sorry to see Doris go?

What effect will it have on Steve?

Did Doris care for her family in her way?

Comment below.

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Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on X.