Forever: The Pugilist Break Review

Looking back on my own repeated mistakes is a tortured lesson in deja vu I never learn from. Replaying your own faults is bad enough, imagine having to see other people stuck in a loop for 200 years, never learning how to right their wrongs?

At the heart of Forever’s fifth episode, “The Pugilist Break,” is Henry’s insistence that seeing these mistakes isn’t the worst part about living forever. It’s not being able to change how people act that’s so crushing.

Abe calls bullshit. He think that history isn’t destined to repeat itself. Funny joke, Abe. Try living to 200.

I’m on Henry’s side, as it perfectly relates to my feelings about the show as it looks set up the story it wants to tell.

The mistakes made in the early going of the season didn’t cut deep enough to bury Forever. Falling ratings, however, are another story. In terms of the direction of the storylines, the last three episodes stray down an ordinary path, failing to venture off into mythology that can save the show. After they teased the second immortal character in the first two episodes, I expected a little more to come of it. I don’t need all of the answers right now, but I need a taste of something. Abandoning the inkling of what made the show unique in favor of mundane cases of the week is a quick way to dwindle your fan base. Or hell, just abandon it altogether and make it a straight up procedural show. That seems to work pretty well for anything on CBS. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that Ioan Gruffudd is charming enough to carry a series, that’s for sure.

I don’t have too much more to say that I haven’t already talked about in previous weeks. This is still an excellent cast, but they need to lean on the talent by getting Judd Hirsch out of the antique store and giving Joel David Moore something other than rats to collect. I had a chance to speak with the stars Gruffudd and Alana de la Garza and showrunner Matt Miller this past weekend at New York Comic-Con, and it seems as though there’s a concrete plan for the serialized arc of the series. We’ll have those full interviews up this week.

For now, my hope is Miller can deliver on his vision sooner rather than later because while his main character has all of eternity, the clock is ticking on Forever.

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