Forever: Final Thoughts
Yeah, this post is about a month late. But I figured I might as well make one last post about Forever, considering that that was pretty much all my posts consisted of from September onwards. Better late than never, right?
Anyway, a quick recap for those who weren't involved in the fandom; Forever aired its final episode on May 5th. Two days later, ABC announced its lineup for next year, and Forever wasn't on it. The show wasn't so much cancelled as it was not renewed. Some fans were outraged by this, and have been campaigning hard to either get ABC to change its mind, or to have some other network (Warner Brothers, Netflix, and Hulu are the popular suggestions) pick up the show.
For my part, my opinions are decidedly...mixed.
Now granted, I am sorry for the people involved that the show got cancelled. It can't be fun to have the show you put so much time and effort into to just be dismissed like that. I do feel especially bad for Ioan here, not just because he's my favorite actor but because, a little while before he got the role in Forever, he admitted in an interview that he was getting a little worried about being too old for the "handsome young leading man" roles and was actually seeing a therapist about it. So to get this part and then have it taken away has to sting.
But I'm not as broken up about the show's lack of renewal as a lot of fans are. In the first place, TV shows have a lot of trouble making it past the first season, and since Forever aired at 10 pm on a weeknight, it was already in a precarious position. So, pessimistic as it sounds, I pretty much went into the show bracing myself for a cancellation. I was delighted we got a full season out of it, but I wasn't holding my breath for Season 2, though I certainly wouldn't have protested if we'd gotten one.
In the second place, though...well, blasphemous as it sounds, I kind of hated the finale.
Up until the finale, the show had been pretty consistent, quality wise. Sure, some episodes were stronger than others, but that's the nature of a TV show. Overall, though, the show had a fairly light, happy tone, which was weird considering the fact that it's a show that revolves around murder, but the actors had great chemistry with each other and played off each other well, and there was always this feeling of "there's always good to be found". I liked that, and while I probably wouldn't have watched the show if Ioan hadn't been in it, I wasn't just watching the show because Ioan was in it, if you get what I mean.
But then the show started having to wrap things up. I was concerned, even early on, that the episodes seemed more focused on the "case of the week" than the three overarching story arcs that had been set up in the pilot; namely, Why is Henry immortal, what's the deal with Adam, and what happened to Abigail. The episodes would dole out information here and there, but they never really dug into the matter, except to finally reveal who Adam was right before the winter break. As I said, I liked what the show was doing, but to my mind, the creators had no idea if this show would get another season. It was in their best interests to tie up all the loose plot threads, so that if the plug was pulled, they wouldn't leave the audience hanging. But since they preferred to reveal details bit by bit, all that meant was that they were going to have to rush things, which would be unsatisfying in a different way.
Sure enough, round about episode 17 or so (the one where they found the ship Henry first died on) it became obvious that the creators finally realized their situation and had to scramble. The moment I saw the teaser for the next week's episode, I became 80% sure the show was in trouble. They'd just introduced a literal Chekov's gun, and someone they had billed as a "special guest star" the week before (played by an Oscar winner, no less) was going to be coming back. Now, to the show's credit, they did mostly manage to balance out the important plot stuff with the individual cases, as usual. The one really weak spot was rushing through Jo's potential romance with said special guest star. Even the episode where we finally find out what happened to Abigail (and for the curious who read my last post, I wasn't entirely wrong that Adam was involved. We were, however, denied Henry breaking down over it, which for someone with a Cuddle Reflex like mine was a bit disappointing.) was handled pretty well. But the finale...
(WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD)
If things had gone just a little differently, I probably would have been ok with the finale. The basic plot sounds fine on paper; Henry, greiving over Abigail, decides to get revenge on Adam, which may become easier because someone just found the knife that originally killed Adam. There are complications, of course, but in the end, Adam is incapacitated, and Henry can move on, as symbolized by the heavy implication that he's going to tell Jo his secret*. It's a good way to tie up most of the plot threads--sure, we still don't know why Henry's immortal, but at least there's a promise that things will be all right for him.
*As an amusing sidenote, some people called the ending of the show a cliffhanger. Personally, I think it's pretty obvious that, if Henry didn't tell her, Abe would smack him upside the head and tell her himself.
Where it all fell apart was in the execution. Specifically, in what they did to Henry's character. And I don't think this is just my bias for Ioan characters talking, I genuinely think the writers/creators didn't think this through. Again and again in the show, we were told about Henry's strict sense of morality. It's even brought up in the finale itself. And what happens in the finale, the last we may ever see of Henry Morgan? Not only does he straight up drug/poison a suspect in order to get information out of him, he incapacitates Adam by putting him into a coma, and then taunts Adam while he's lying in his hospital bed.
Now, even this I might have been ok with, if it wasn't for one tiny little detail; there are no consequences for either of these events. To go on and on about Henry's morality, to the point where earlier on in the show he holed himself up his his lab for three weeks out of guilt for accidentally killing somene in self-defense, and then have him feel barely any remorse whatsoever about his actions here just feels massively out of character. This might have worked if the show was going down a darker path of Henry becoming like Adam, but that's not the sense I got.
Some will argue that Henry did suffer consequences for the poisoning, considering the way Jo chewed him out. Yeah, but that was it. Henry never expressed guilt over it, and what's more, he wasn't actively punished. If something like that had happened in the real world, do you think the police force would let him get away with that? At best, he'd be called on the carpet by the police chief and probably have a mark in his record for it. But more likely, he'd be suspended barring an inquiry, straight up fired, or even arrested. In the show? He walks into work the next day, and if he hadn't been so focused on getting Adam's knife out of Evidence, I think he would have been allowed to continue as normal. Which means one of two things;
1. Jo didn't report what happened to anybody, primarily because she wanted to know what was going on with Henry. In other words, she covered up criminal behavior to satisfy her own curiousity.
2. Jo did report this to Lieutenant Reece or maybe the police chief, and they just shrugged and went "Eh, he's our best M.E., and the guy was never in any real danger, so we'll let it slide."
Short version; nobody's covering themselves with glory here, regardless of which scenario played out.
This also ties into what the show was doing with Lucas. As I said in other posts, the poor guy was there as comic relief, never really taken seriously by the characters. I felt he deserved a moment where people treated him with respect and he did something awesome. And the show does deliver...but it's never in a particularly positive way, when you think about it. Observe Lucas' three big moments...
*He helps find out where Abigail is. How? By pretending to be Henry and obtaining the information illegally.
*He figures out how Abigail died, because Henry's emotionally compromised. This is good, but the audience isn't going to appreciate it, because it just means more pain for Henry.
*He steals the knife out of evidence and sneaks it to Henry, despite the very real risk that he will get fired because of it. The scene plays out as "Henry finally sees Lucas as an equal", but the whole thing is steeped in bad decisions and consequence free bad actions. Granted, maybe Lucas did immediately get fired, but we don't actually see that.
So great, now we've got three major characters who have violated ethics. The only two "good guys" who get out of this unscathed are Abe and Hanson, apparently (and then either Jo or Reece, depending on which of the two above scenarios played out).
As for what happened with Adam...look, Henry wanting revenge is understandable. And weird as it sounds, if he had actually stabbed Adam with the knife, I probably wouldn't have had much of a problem with it. The way I was envisioning things before the finale, either they would both kill each other (thus taking "an eye for an eye" to an extreme), or it wouldn't work, so Henry got out all his anger but didn't actually do anything except make Adam smug over the fact that Henry lost control. But no, in an attempt to claim that Henry is still more moral than Adam, what does he do? He jams a needle into Adam's neck, which puts him in a paralytic coma, where he's aware of his surroundings, but can't move or speak.
First off, where the hell did he get that needle from? There is no scene where we see him put the needle in his pocket, or fiddle with a needle, or any sort of foreshadowing. So already we have a deus ex machina going on.
(By the way, when Henry stabs him and declares "I'm a doctor!" I got massive Dr. Who vibes, and I don't even watch that show. Someone might be a fan on the writing staff, that's all I'm saying.)
Secondly, the show does not explain why Adam went into a coma. It wasn't until I read an interview with the creator that I found out that Henry had stabbed him with an empty needle, thus putting air into Adam's brain. Up until that moment, I thought Henry had injected him with some sort of magical coma drug. And for the record, I might have actually been ok with Henry injecting him with a knockout serum. That's where I thought things were going; Adam would pass out, Jo would find him and arrest him for shooting Henry, and thus Adam would be in jail. Sure, he'd figure out how to get out of it eventually, but that equally fulfills the "Adam out of the way" requirement the show needed.
Thirdly, again, there are no consequences. Henry seems positvely gleeful about these developments, and obviously no one knows what he did (I'm not even sure if Abe knows). My only consolation here is that, had the show continued, there would eventually have been consequences, even if Henry never felt guilt or got called out by other characters. Because once Adam got out of that situation (and rest assured, he would have gotten out, even if it was at the very end of Season Two), he would immediately resume his screwing with Henry, only now he would either a) be able to taunt Henry about losing control, or b) be so pissed off over what happened that the gloves would come off and he would systematically destroy everything Henry cared about. It's not like I want bad things to happen to Henry, but, well, actions should have consequences, even for the hero. And those actions deserve some major consequences.
(END SPOILERS. THANK YOU FOR WADING THROUGH ALL THAT.)
Anyway, the point of all this long winded ranting is that, based off what I saw in this finale, I simultaneously want and don't want a second season. I want one to wash the bad taste of this one out of my mouth, either by giving Henry some consequences or by returning to "Case of the week" stories so that the last thing I saw of the show wasn't everybody violating moral codes. But I don't want another season because I've now seen what bad writing on this show looks like. And while some people can look at a cancelled show and imagine all the cool things that could have happened, a finale like that just makes me worry that subsequent episodes would have been at that level of quality. Ioan doesn't deserve that.
For all that, though, I did mostly enjoy Forever. A DVD has been promised, and when it materializes, I will buy it and watch/enjoy all the special features. But I will never watch the finale again, other than perhaps once with audio commentary just to see what the hell was going on in the creator's heads. In fact, I'm mostly considering the finale non-canon; all I'm taking out of the finale is that Adam is currently no longer a threat and that Jo now knows Henry's secret.
And to end on a positive note after all that belly-aching, I will say this to Ioan, Matt Miller, and everyone else involved in the show; Thank you for working so hard on what was, for the most part, a fun, cheerful show that I enjoyed watching every week. I'm very sorry the plug was pulled, and despite everything I've just said, if Forever does manage to be resurrected, I will happily watch a second season. If not...good luck with your future projects. Based off what I saw, you guys will do great.
Anyway, a quick recap for those who weren't involved in the fandom; Forever aired its final episode on May 5th. Two days later, ABC announced its lineup for next year, and Forever wasn't on it. The show wasn't so much cancelled as it was not renewed. Some fans were outraged by this, and have been campaigning hard to either get ABC to change its mind, or to have some other network (Warner Brothers, Netflix, and Hulu are the popular suggestions) pick up the show.
For my part, my opinions are decidedly...mixed.
Now granted, I am sorry for the people involved that the show got cancelled. It can't be fun to have the show you put so much time and effort into to just be dismissed like that. I do feel especially bad for Ioan here, not just because he's my favorite actor but because, a little while before he got the role in Forever, he admitted in an interview that he was getting a little worried about being too old for the "handsome young leading man" roles and was actually seeing a therapist about it. So to get this part and then have it taken away has to sting.
But I'm not as broken up about the show's lack of renewal as a lot of fans are. In the first place, TV shows have a lot of trouble making it past the first season, and since Forever aired at 10 pm on a weeknight, it was already in a precarious position. So, pessimistic as it sounds, I pretty much went into the show bracing myself for a cancellation. I was delighted we got a full season out of it, but I wasn't holding my breath for Season 2, though I certainly wouldn't have protested if we'd gotten one.
In the second place, though...well, blasphemous as it sounds, I kind of hated the finale.
Up until the finale, the show had been pretty consistent, quality wise. Sure, some episodes were stronger than others, but that's the nature of a TV show. Overall, though, the show had a fairly light, happy tone, which was weird considering the fact that it's a show that revolves around murder, but the actors had great chemistry with each other and played off each other well, and there was always this feeling of "there's always good to be found". I liked that, and while I probably wouldn't have watched the show if Ioan hadn't been in it, I wasn't just watching the show because Ioan was in it, if you get what I mean.
But then the show started having to wrap things up. I was concerned, even early on, that the episodes seemed more focused on the "case of the week" than the three overarching story arcs that had been set up in the pilot; namely, Why is Henry immortal, what's the deal with Adam, and what happened to Abigail. The episodes would dole out information here and there, but they never really dug into the matter, except to finally reveal who Adam was right before the winter break. As I said, I liked what the show was doing, but to my mind, the creators had no idea if this show would get another season. It was in their best interests to tie up all the loose plot threads, so that if the plug was pulled, they wouldn't leave the audience hanging. But since they preferred to reveal details bit by bit, all that meant was that they were going to have to rush things, which would be unsatisfying in a different way.
Sure enough, round about episode 17 or so (the one where they found the ship Henry first died on) it became obvious that the creators finally realized their situation and had to scramble. The moment I saw the teaser for the next week's episode, I became 80% sure the show was in trouble. They'd just introduced a literal Chekov's gun, and someone they had billed as a "special guest star" the week before (played by an Oscar winner, no less) was going to be coming back. Now, to the show's credit, they did mostly manage to balance out the important plot stuff with the individual cases, as usual. The one really weak spot was rushing through Jo's potential romance with said special guest star. Even the episode where we finally find out what happened to Abigail (and for the curious who read my last post, I wasn't entirely wrong that Adam was involved. We were, however, denied Henry breaking down over it, which for someone with a Cuddle Reflex like mine was a bit disappointing.) was handled pretty well. But the finale...
(WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD)
If things had gone just a little differently, I probably would have been ok with the finale. The basic plot sounds fine on paper; Henry, greiving over Abigail, decides to get revenge on Adam, which may become easier because someone just found the knife that originally killed Adam. There are complications, of course, but in the end, Adam is incapacitated, and Henry can move on, as symbolized by the heavy implication that he's going to tell Jo his secret*. It's a good way to tie up most of the plot threads--sure, we still don't know why Henry's immortal, but at least there's a promise that things will be all right for him.
*As an amusing sidenote, some people called the ending of the show a cliffhanger. Personally, I think it's pretty obvious that, if Henry didn't tell her, Abe would smack him upside the head and tell her himself.
Where it all fell apart was in the execution. Specifically, in what they did to Henry's character. And I don't think this is just my bias for Ioan characters talking, I genuinely think the writers/creators didn't think this through. Again and again in the show, we were told about Henry's strict sense of morality. It's even brought up in the finale itself. And what happens in the finale, the last we may ever see of Henry Morgan? Not only does he straight up drug/poison a suspect in order to get information out of him, he incapacitates Adam by putting him into a coma, and then taunts Adam while he's lying in his hospital bed.
Now, even this I might have been ok with, if it wasn't for one tiny little detail; there are no consequences for either of these events. To go on and on about Henry's morality, to the point where earlier on in the show he holed himself up his his lab for three weeks out of guilt for accidentally killing somene in self-defense, and then have him feel barely any remorse whatsoever about his actions here just feels massively out of character. This might have worked if the show was going down a darker path of Henry becoming like Adam, but that's not the sense I got.
Some will argue that Henry did suffer consequences for the poisoning, considering the way Jo chewed him out. Yeah, but that was it. Henry never expressed guilt over it, and what's more, he wasn't actively punished. If something like that had happened in the real world, do you think the police force would let him get away with that? At best, he'd be called on the carpet by the police chief and probably have a mark in his record for it. But more likely, he'd be suspended barring an inquiry, straight up fired, or even arrested. In the show? He walks into work the next day, and if he hadn't been so focused on getting Adam's knife out of Evidence, I think he would have been allowed to continue as normal. Which means one of two things;
1. Jo didn't report what happened to anybody, primarily because she wanted to know what was going on with Henry. In other words, she covered up criminal behavior to satisfy her own curiousity.
2. Jo did report this to Lieutenant Reece or maybe the police chief, and they just shrugged and went "Eh, he's our best M.E., and the guy was never in any real danger, so we'll let it slide."
Short version; nobody's covering themselves with glory here, regardless of which scenario played out.
This also ties into what the show was doing with Lucas. As I said in other posts, the poor guy was there as comic relief, never really taken seriously by the characters. I felt he deserved a moment where people treated him with respect and he did something awesome. And the show does deliver...but it's never in a particularly positive way, when you think about it. Observe Lucas' three big moments...
*He helps find out where Abigail is. How? By pretending to be Henry and obtaining the information illegally.
*He figures out how Abigail died, because Henry's emotionally compromised. This is good, but the audience isn't going to appreciate it, because it just means more pain for Henry.
*He steals the knife out of evidence and sneaks it to Henry, despite the very real risk that he will get fired because of it. The scene plays out as "Henry finally sees Lucas as an equal", but the whole thing is steeped in bad decisions and consequence free bad actions. Granted, maybe Lucas did immediately get fired, but we don't actually see that.
So great, now we've got three major characters who have violated ethics. The only two "good guys" who get out of this unscathed are Abe and Hanson, apparently (and then either Jo or Reece, depending on which of the two above scenarios played out).
As for what happened with Adam...look, Henry wanting revenge is understandable. And weird as it sounds, if he had actually stabbed Adam with the knife, I probably wouldn't have had much of a problem with it. The way I was envisioning things before the finale, either they would both kill each other (thus taking "an eye for an eye" to an extreme), or it wouldn't work, so Henry got out all his anger but didn't actually do anything except make Adam smug over the fact that Henry lost control. But no, in an attempt to claim that Henry is still more moral than Adam, what does he do? He jams a needle into Adam's neck, which puts him in a paralytic coma, where he's aware of his surroundings, but can't move or speak.
First off, where the hell did he get that needle from? There is no scene where we see him put the needle in his pocket, or fiddle with a needle, or any sort of foreshadowing. So already we have a deus ex machina going on.
(By the way, when Henry stabs him and declares "I'm a doctor!" I got massive Dr. Who vibes, and I don't even watch that show. Someone might be a fan on the writing staff, that's all I'm saying.)
Secondly, the show does not explain why Adam went into a coma. It wasn't until I read an interview with the creator that I found out that Henry had stabbed him with an empty needle, thus putting air into Adam's brain. Up until that moment, I thought Henry had injected him with some sort of magical coma drug. And for the record, I might have actually been ok with Henry injecting him with a knockout serum. That's where I thought things were going; Adam would pass out, Jo would find him and arrest him for shooting Henry, and thus Adam would be in jail. Sure, he'd figure out how to get out of it eventually, but that equally fulfills the "Adam out of the way" requirement the show needed.
Thirdly, again, there are no consequences. Henry seems positvely gleeful about these developments, and obviously no one knows what he did (I'm not even sure if Abe knows). My only consolation here is that, had the show continued, there would eventually have been consequences, even if Henry never felt guilt or got called out by other characters. Because once Adam got out of that situation (and rest assured, he would have gotten out, even if it was at the very end of Season Two), he would immediately resume his screwing with Henry, only now he would either a) be able to taunt Henry about losing control, or b) be so pissed off over what happened that the gloves would come off and he would systematically destroy everything Henry cared about. It's not like I want bad things to happen to Henry, but, well, actions should have consequences, even for the hero. And those actions deserve some major consequences.
(END SPOILERS. THANK YOU FOR WADING THROUGH ALL THAT.)
Anyway, the point of all this long winded ranting is that, based off what I saw in this finale, I simultaneously want and don't want a second season. I want one to wash the bad taste of this one out of my mouth, either by giving Henry some consequences or by returning to "Case of the week" stories so that the last thing I saw of the show wasn't everybody violating moral codes. But I don't want another season because I've now seen what bad writing on this show looks like. And while some people can look at a cancelled show and imagine all the cool things that could have happened, a finale like that just makes me worry that subsequent episodes would have been at that level of quality. Ioan doesn't deserve that.
For all that, though, I did mostly enjoy Forever. A DVD has been promised, and when it materializes, I will buy it and watch/enjoy all the special features. But I will never watch the finale again, other than perhaps once with audio commentary just to see what the hell was going on in the creator's heads. In fact, I'm mostly considering the finale non-canon; all I'm taking out of the finale is that Adam is currently no longer a threat and that Jo now knows Henry's secret.
And to end on a positive note after all that belly-aching, I will say this to Ioan, Matt Miller, and everyone else involved in the show; Thank you for working so hard on what was, for the most part, a fun, cheerful show that I enjoyed watching every week. I'm very sorry the plug was pulled, and despite everything I've just said, if Forever does manage to be resurrected, I will happily watch a second season. If not...good luck with your future projects. Based off what I saw, you guys will do great.