TV Review: Forever 1×01, “Pilot” & 1×02, “Look Before You Leap”

The fall season is here, and as always, I’m a sucker for most things supernatural/sci-fi, but even I can’t be fooled by ABC’s Forever.

Dr. Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd) is not your typical New Yorker. His accent aside, he is actually an immortal who has been living (and dying) in New York for about 200 years. We witness his trick in the beginning when he is part of a train crash that ends up killing him and everyone else on board. Luckily for him, he is somehow resurrected naked in the Hudson River. What happens to his body or the clothes he was wearing remains a mystery for now. What isn’t a mystery is that you can’t walk around a major city naked without drawing attention to yourself. After getting arrested, Henry is then bailed out by his longtime (we’ll reveal just how long soon enough) friend and confidante Abe (Judd Hirsch). Abe is the only person who knows about Henry’s “condition” (or so we think). Since Henry has been around for centuries, he has picked up a thing or two. More specifically, I’m talking about his vast knowledge and powers of perception/deduction. You may think I’m talking about Sherlock, but I’ll come to that later.

Henry leads a semi-normal life until that train crash. That’s when everything changes. Detective Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza) is put on the case to investigate the mysterious train crash, and meets Henry (the local medical examiner) for the first time. Not the last time, of course, since Jo finds evidence that Henry was on the train but somehow survived. Her suspicion leads her to get to know Henry more, and even find out about his past since he was able to deduce so much about hers. We find out some history on Henry, being on a slaver ship and refusing to condemn another human being to death, and so was killed and dump in the ocean for it. Then we also get a glimpse of the love of his life, Abigail, who knew about him and didn’t care. Through flashbacks, we meet Abe as a baby and can only assume Henry and Abigail adopted him and were a family for a short time.

Back to the story, the train conductor was believed to have had a heart attack, which led to the train’s crash. Henry reveals it was poison. After reviewing the train footage, Jo arrests Henry believing he may be responsible for the murder, but then realizes that it is unlikely Henry would reveal the death was something other than a heart attack if he were the killer. Henry, being impatient and immortal (not like he has all the time in the world or anything), decides to figure out what poison it was by injecting himself with the dead conductor’s blood and examining what symptoms he has before he dies. After a naked resurgence in the lake, he find out what poison was used, finds the entry point on the conductor’s body, and also discovers a finger print that leads them to the killer’s house. Unfortunately, the killer isn’t home, but his garage is full of poison and his plans are all too clear. The killer’s wife was killed by a subway car and he plans on getting his revenge by releasing an airborne version of the poison at grand central station. After a struggle and Jo getting shot, Henry throws himself and the killer off the roof. He lives to sleuth another day.

Good thing, too, because he has a girl show up in his examining room who died from a suicide (jumping off a bridge), but Henry sees something more. Skin under her fingernails shows there was a struggle, so he investigates those closest to her. She was working on a very old codex translation that was a great historical find with her professor and his assistant. Henry deduces (correctly) that the professor and the deceased are having a secret affair, and finds out that the skin under her nails is his. The professor denies it, saying that he loved her more than anything. Henry, knowing too well about love, believes him and decides to examine her body closer. He discovers skin between her teeth, but before he can examine it, he is notified that the professor was dead from an apparent suicide. Henry realizes right away that the slits on his wrists and the suicide letter were all done by another person. Discovering the missing cover page on the research pamphlet, he goes to the assistant, who it turns out had lured the deceased woman to the bridge by claiming he was going to commit suicide. The assistant holds Henry hostage by knife point, but is then rescued by the police. Another job well done.

Honestly, these cases feel secondary to the over-arching story. They come off as something to keep us busy while we find out who exactly is watching Henry. In both episodes, Henry receives several calls and letters from a man who has seen Henry die and disappear more than once. This is the Moriarty character to Henry’s psuedo-Sherlock. His intentions have yet to be revealed, but the two things we know for certain are that he wants to be called Adam, and that he has been around for 2,000 years. If this premise sounds a bit familiar, you might be thinking of the failed FOX show New Amsterdam, which was very close to the premise of Forever. That not withstanding, the show is flawed in a greater way.

The fact that this show is trying to cash in on Sherlock‘s successful formula is obvious, and even the writers know it since they threw in a line in the second episode basically referring to Henry as Sherlock. I don’t blame their attempt, since Sherlock did win the most Emmys this year, even beating out Breaking Bad. What I do find hard to pardon is how unengaging the show is. The show could be fun if it didn’t try to take itself so seriously. Sherlock succeeds because it presents almost everything to us, only to reveal we weren’t paying as close attention to the details as we should have been. Sort of like an I, Spy detective game. Forever just gives us a barrage of answers which there would have been no way we could have figured out on our own. We are left nodding every time Henry is explaining something because, most of the time, they were answers only he could have known.

Sure, Ioan Gruffudd is charming enough, but he alone can’t carry the dead weight of this procedural show. With a premise as potentially fun as this, and all past 200 years of history to play with, the show shouldn’t come off as a listless, by-the-numbers rehashing of a Sherlockian knock-off. If the show remains on its current course, I expect Forever‘s life to be decimally shorter than the title would suggest.

RATING: ★★★★(4/10 stars)