Forever S1 E2: Look Before You Leap

I have grown to accept that 90% of the time pilot episodes just plain suck. They are there to whet your appetite and make you keep coming back.  The second episode of Forever is probably 75% better than the first which means the third episode should be even better.

The episode begins with a girl in a taxi cab crying, freaking out and trying to reach someone on her cell phone but who isn’t answering. As starts go, this one is extremely vague and makes you wonder what the hell is going on.  She demands that the taxi driver stops the car and runs to the side of the bridge before climbing over the edge.  Next thing you know, you hear her scream as she falls and then see her body wash up.

In the morgue Henry is telling Detective Martinez and her partner that the guy with the ax in his head was an accidental death where as the woman found in the river was murdered.  The woman from the river being the young girl that we previously saw in the cab freaking out that had washed ashore.  Of course Martinez and her partner don’t believe him because the evidence at the moment is showing that she jumped and was not pushed. Jo is willing to look into it from what Henry has told her but her partner is still skeptical.

Back at the police department the Lt. (Lorraine Toussaint) asks Martinez why she is saying the jumper was a homicide when they have witnesses saying she jumped.  Martinez says it is because of Henry that she is looking at it as a homicide.  The Lt. tells her that they’ve got a whole board full of real homicides to investigate.

Lucas tells Henry that the police want to rule the jumper as a suicide but Henry refuses to do that.  Lucas also tells him that the girl’s parents want to talk to him but he doesn’t like talking to the families but before the discussion can go any further, he notices her parents coming through the morgue. Lucas quickly covers her up so that the parents don’t see her.  Her parents ask Henry what happens and he tells them that it looks like she has fallen from the bridge but they refuse to believe she would have killed herself.  Henry tells them he understand the pain they are going through and the girl’s father asks if he has any children and Henry hesitates before saying no, and her father tells him than he has no idea what they are going through.

In a flashback Henry and Abigail are talking about the baby they found in one of the camps and how they haven’t found any of his family yet.  He holds the baby and how the baby is attached himself to Henry and Abigail tells him that he’s in trouble because the baby isn’t going to let him go.

Back in the present Henry and Abe have this great interaction about feelings and emotions and getting involved with people’s lives.  Abe tells Henry he needs to make himself scarce for a few hours because he has a date coming over from e-harmony.  They have this great father son interaction that is sort of mind boggling since in reality Judd Hirsch is older than Ioan Gruffudd but on the show its suppose to be reverse.

Henry goes to the bridge where Vicky died to try and get some answers and he realizes that there was someone else on the bridge as well as what looks like the kind of ring one would use for mountain climbing.  As Henry gets back over the ledge of the bridge, after almost falling, he drops the metal rig and as he bends down to pick it up, he gets hit by a truck.  When the driver goes out to check on him, Henry has died and is now back in the river.

Henry has to call Abe to pick him up interrupting his date.  He tells Abe that being hit by the truck that way is the 22^nd most terrible way to die but he can prove that Vicky was killed now. The next morning at the office Lucas tells Henry that he was right about the paint chips under Vicky’s nails as well as finding skin particles.  Lucas also tells Henry that someone left a gift for him on his desk. Henry opens it to find a letter written to him from his ‘fan’ offering his condolences about his painful way of ‘dying’ the previous night.

Henry tells Martinez he can prove that there was someone else on the bridge with Vicky previous before hurries out to talk to Abe.  He tells Abe about the letter and showing it to him and goes on a mini rant about how he knows nothing about this man but he seems to know everything about Henry and how he is taunting him.  Abe tells him that he should be able to track where the paper the note was written on for him.  Martinez shows up at the shop to tell him that Vicky had checked into her flight which seems odd for someone that was planning on killing themselves.

Martinez and Henry go to Vicky’s school to do some digging and run into her parents in her dorm room.  Vicky’s parents tell them that she didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, that she was an outdoor enthusiast and how she had been busy working on a paper about a codex that her professor and a few other students had been working on.  Henry tells the mom not to worry because they would solve the case of who did this to Vicky.  As they leave the dorms, Martinez gets on his case about promising that even though they aren’t suppose to be working on it officially.  It’s a nice change to see Henry so gun ho about trying to solve it after denying wanting anything to do with the case previously.

Martinez and Henry go to met with her professor/advisor about the codex they are working on.  The student that takes them to meet the professor tells them that professor Browning is somewhat of a genius. Professor Browning tells them that Vicky was one of his brightest students and they were set to publish a paper about their findings when Vicky ‘died’.  After Martinez and Henry leave the professor, Henry tells her that they were having an affair. He knows this because she was wearing the professor’s scarf in the picture that was taken in her room and because of the cigarette stains on her sheets and since she wasn’t a smoker it figured that her lover must be.  The professor had admitted to him that every now and then he gave into his vices i.e. smoking. Martinez and Henry go to talk to the Professor’s wife about his alibi and it comes out from his wife that her husband never actually showed up to the opera. They test the DNA from the pen he was chewing on to the skin samples under Vicky’s nails and find a match.

As Martinez is questioning the Professor, Henry realizes that the Professor couldn’t have killed Vicky due to a skin condition and even though all the evidence points to him, Henry is sure he didn’t do it. Henry asks Abe why he made him get involved with this case because now an innocent man sits in prison and Henry put him there.  Abe asks how he knows his innocent because of all the lies he told but Henry doesn’t believe that because of how meticulous the crime was planned out.  If the professor had done it, it would have been a crime of passion not so thoughtfully planned.

Abe shows Henry what he has found out about the letter.  The paper was for a mill in Milan that got destroyed in World War II and the crest at the top of the page from a local hotel in the area, the Hotel Montoliogne, which has been closed for the last 60 years.  While the hotel’s name means nothing to Abe, it does to Henry.  In a flashback to 1945 Henry is writing a letter on the hotel paper (the same of his ‘fan’ letter) to Abigail as she sleeps in bed.  As he is leaving, she chases after him and tries to stop him from leaving.  She tells him that she doesn’t care how it ends, its about the journey and she won’t let him leave her so fast.  He grabs her and kisses her, which a truck full of soldiers passing by starting yelling and cheering them on.

Back in the morgue, Henry and Lucas look at Vicky’s body again to try and find out what signs might show she fault back against her attacker.  Henry finds some skin in her teeth (I know that as a self defense measure you should bite your attacker but ick) and wants Lucas to run it against the Professor’s DNA.  Martinez comes in and tells him not too because they’ve got another body.  The Professor is lying dead on his desk and while the cops believe he killed himself, Henry tells them his was murdered.

Martinez and her partner want to know how Henry came to that conclusion.  So Henry walks them through how the professor could have been murdered.  Thus convinced Martinez declares it a crime scene and goes to look at the video surveillance of the last two hours. Henry stays behind and looks at the desk only to find the paper that was to be published missing its title page.  Martinez and her partner Hanson see the professor’s wife on the video surveillance and send cops to pick her up while Henry is in the codex room talking to the student who had first brought them there.

Henry has figured out that the student was the one to have killed both Vicky and the professor because he wanted to add his name as co-author of a paper even though he got credit for the research.  He made Vicky think he was going to kill himself because he wasn’t going to get the co-authorship and instead he killed her.  It was slightly harder to “fake” the professor’s suicide but it all came down to a missed spelling of the word ‘amor’.  The student takes Henry hostage with a box knife and Martinez sees that on the cameras and they rush off to save Henry.  Henry knows that if he were to die in front of the cops and the cameras too many people would see him disappear so he knows he needs to do everything in his power to get away from the student without dying.  During the standoff, Hanson is able to shoot the student thus throwing Henry to the side with only a slight cut on his neck.

The episode ends with a sort of closure for Vicky’s parents, Martinez looking at a picture of her husband and Henry looking at a picture of Abigail.  Abe comes down and tells him that he misses her too sometimes.  Abigail would have been 94 that year and the way Abe and Henry talk about it, it sounds like she didn’t die but rather she left Henry.  Henry asks Abe if he’s enjoyed his life, and Abe tells him that it’s a little late to ask him but that they’ve had interesting times haven’t they.  As the episode closes, Henry receives a call from his ‘fan’ and he finds out that the man is older than Henry, has lived for about 2000 years and tells Henry that if he wants to call him something to call him Adam.

I have to admit I do like this second episode so much more than the first but I’m still not a fan of Martinez.  I like watching the relationship between Abe and Henry as well as watching Henry slowly shifts away from the life he was living before to a more interactive one.  I’m curious to know more about what happened to Abigail but I’ve got to admit I don’t particularly care about learning about his ‘fan’ or as he will be known as Adam.

Ways Henry has died in an episode:
* Bent over picking something up and getting hit by a truck

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Forever S1 E1: Pilot

Is it weird that the sole reason I want to see this show is because Ioan Gruffudd is the star?  I remember when I use to watch him in Horatio Hornblower as a child and thinking he was cute then, but now? Now, like a fine wine or very good bourbon or brandy, he has gotten even more attractive but I digress.

Forever is one of the new shows in ABC’s line up for the fall and its looks to be the child of Sherlock Holmes and a cancelled television show called New Amsterdam. For those of you who don’t what New Amsterdam was, it was a short lived television show about a Dutch soldier that saves a young Indian girl from being killed in battle. For saving her, she ‘saves’ him by bringing him back to life and telling him that he will remain immortal till he finds his one true love. It was an interesting and sadly short lived show that Forever definitely made me think of when I was watching the pilot.

The main character, Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd), can’t seem to stay dead and has spent the last 200 years trying to figure out why that is. 200 years (give or take some) earlier, he had been a doctor on a ship and was trying to prevent the crew from tossing a man overboard for no reason.  They shot him in the chest and threw him overboard as well, but instead of dying he woke up and now every time he dies he wakes up in the nearest body of water (river, lake, ocean).

The episode starts with him boarding a subway and chatting up a woman next to him, first in Russian and then in English.  He deducts how she is Russian (chocolate) and her career (a musician) and they make a date to see each other after her performance when all of a sudden the subway crashes into a stopped car in front of them and everyone in that car appears to have died or is dying like Doctor Morgan.

He wakes up revived in a river and leaves it completely naked in the middle of the day in New York.  He is bailed out of jail by an older man, Abraham (Judd Hirsch) or Abe, and he seems to be the only one that knows the truth about Henry.  From there we see a woman leaving an apartment building and ends up having a mini discussion with her one night stand, and its only when we see her pull away do we find out she is a cop.  I do have to say that while I like seeing female cops on television shows, can we get some that actually look like an average woman instead of a supermodel?

She makes her way to the subway to investigate the collision of the subway and ends up finding Henry’s pocket watch.  She is sent to the M.E.’s office to get it signed off on and they all hope that it won’t turn out to be a murder investigation.  Meanwhile Henry and Abe are making their way to Abe’s shop discussing how Henry has never died in a train accident before and it’s something new for him. As Abe goes upstairs, Henry goes down to a basement and his basement is just a bit morbid.  He has become a student of death so to speak, writing out how he dies, the pain level and any other relevant information as a way to study his deaths.  He is trying to find a way for him to die permanently.

Henry works for the New York medical examiner’s office as a medical examiner.  One of his co-workers, Lucas (Joel David Moore), is telling him that the police are asking about cause of death for the subway conductor.   On a side note, for those who watch cop dramas on TV, you might recognize Lucas as the morbid intern from Bones. The female detective, Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza), stops by to get a sign off on the cause of death when Henry tells her that it was homicide not a heart attack. That it looked like he had died from being poisoned. As they are talking, a phone call comes in from a man that tells Henry that he knows that Henry had survived the subway crash this morning.

Henry is freaking out about the phone call and wants to leave but Abe is able to talk him out of it.  We find out that Henry hasn’t let anyone in since a woman named Abigail, a beautiful blonde woman that he has a picture of.  Jo Martinez on the other hand is busy looking at footage from the subway when she spots Henry on the platform of the train that crashed. The next day when Henry arrives at work, he finds an envelope from ‘his fan’ and inside it is a picture of Henry and Abigail (his wife) from 1955.

In the flashback memory we find out that Abigail knew that Henry couldn’t die and she accepted it.  When he comes out of the flashback its from Lucas startling him and they find a newspaper clipping about the subway crash.  Henry goes and withdraws a vial of blood from the conductor and decides he’s going to inject himself with it to find out what the poison was.  When Henry comes back alive and Abe has retrieved him from the river, he tells Abe that the poison was aconite. When they return back to the shop, they see the police outside of it.

Henry is brought in for questioning where he and Detective Martinez exchange banter about whether or not Henry could have poisoned the conductor where Henry lets it be known that he is pretty sure the poison is aconite. He leaves the station because he knows they don’t have enough to hold him.  Back at the morgue, he and Lucas look for an injection site which they find behind the conductors ear as well as a fingerprint which Henry takes back to the police.

The fingerprint leads to a Hans Koehler.  Detective Morgan and Henry go to his house and find a greenhouse full of monkshood aka aconite. They go to the garage where Detective Martinez catches Koehler doing something but before she can stop him, he throws a beaker full of aconite at her and makes a run for it.  Henry tells her that they have less than a minute to neutralize the poison or she will die.

The police find out that Koehler use to be a chemist until his wife was killed from falling off the subway tracks by the same conductor that he killed that caused the subway accident.  Henry and Martinez end up going to a bar and start discussing their past; how Henry “got” the watch and how Martinez’s husband died.  Martinez gets a call that they found vats of aconite and they realize that Koehler was trying to make the poison soluble so that he can use it at Grand Central.

At Grand Central Henry realizes that Koehler made it soluble so that he can put it in the air conditioning.  They get to the roof when Koehler shoots Martinez in the shoulder and he forces Henry to help him.  Henry refuses and they struggle for the gun before Henry is shot.  In a last ditch effort to prevent him from attaching the poison, Henry rushes at him and they both fall off the roof, killing Koehler.

At the hospital Henry tells Martinez the sanitized version of what happens and while at the hospital he gets a call from his ‘fan’ who lets it be known that he suffers from the same affliction at Henry in that he can never die.

We get a flashback to World War II where Henry was working as a doctor and we get to see how he first met Abigail as a nurse.  She is holding an baby that was recovered from one of the camps and they bond over the baby and as it flashes forward again we see that the baby is Abe.  Martinez stops by and gives Henry back his pocket watch and Abe wants her to come in but she is on the job and actually invites Henry to her most recent crime scene.

Overall I’m on the fence about this show. I love Ioan Gruffudd and he has ages amazingly but I’m just not sure about the show.  I have no love for the female lead detective at the moment and I really want it to veer away from the Sherlock Holmes had an affair with New Amsterdam and this is the result.  I may just stick with it to watch Ioan Gruffudd and I may just thrown in the towel in annoyance…its too soon to tell.

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