BWW Recap: History Doesn't Last FOREVER, Even if You're Immortal

Déjà vu can be a cruel experience. If you've ever walked into a place or a situation and had a sharp stab of recollection, you can understand what a hard experience it can be. That unsettling feeling of familiarity; that sometimes vague yet profound sense of loss or, even worse, disconnection. Now, think how déjà vu must feel to a 200 year old man. Perhaps, if you're in those old shoes, it's time to start letting go of the past.

Tonight's episode of FOREVER, entitled either Another Dead Junkie or Pugilist's Break (I suspect there was a bit of an argument between the network and the cable provider, since one title was attached to the coming attraction and the other showed up on my DVR playback), is really about Henry's coming to terms with the fact that he's a physical and emotional pack rat (and rats do figure in this episode). He's pulled into an apparent death by overdose in the Alphabet City section of Manhattan, in the same building he treated people suffering from cholera in the 1800's. (Brief historical note: Alphabet City is on the Lower East Side of NYC, taking over a bump on the bottom of Manhattan Island, where the founders added Avenues with letters like A, B and C to a part of the Island that extended beyond First Avenue and the other numbered avenues. It was a Mecca for immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became haven of drug culture in the 1960's and 1970's. Now it has really cool bars and good Asian and Latino restaurants.)

While the dead body is found in a gentrifying apartment, adjacent (we are told) to a state of the art playground currently being built, we the audience know the man did not die from an overdose, since we saw him, moments earlier, practicing boxing with his Little Brother at a neighborhood rec center. Moments after Henry and Jo are brought to the scene of the man's death, Henry recognizes that the corpse was not merely a junkie who shot up and died, but was a person who's body was moved and who had unusual marks on his body and clothes, such as a batter mark on the back of his skull and some rubbery substance on the soles of his shoes. Even more compelling is that Henry remembers the apartment as the home of an immigrant Jewish family stricken with cholera, which he couldn't save.

The theme of the episode is about the destruction of the past for the future and whether it is better to preserve the past or make way for what's to come. A cute point in the episode establishes that Abe's antique shop, which serves as home to both Abe and Henry, is filled with items Henry amassed over his long life, some of which he retains sentimental attachments. These attachments eat into Abe's sales ability and the profitability of the shop, which apparently isn't great.

However, the key theme in tonight's show relates to giving up the past. The old neighborhood, filled with poor and ethnic families, is threatened by renovations that favor the rich. The dead man was opposing the developer who was gentrifying an area populated by bodegas and boxing clubs and replacing those stalwarts with high-rise condo complexes and comfy playgrounds. Henry, for his part, is forced to watch his old possessions sold and made to relive a fairly brutal period of his past, where he was too weak to help afflicted people against slum lords of the last century.

It's rather an odd shift for FOREVER, since, tonight, the show felt more like a standard police procedural than it ever had before. Sure, there were flashbacks, but they felt like very small pieces of his long backstory, rather than vital parts of his personal history. Again, he didn't have to die. Rather, the show centered on the Mystery of the Week, which wasn't especially unusual, although it did make you question whether your heart was into renovation and improvement or restoration and reclamation. It's a very New York dilemma.

Tonight was short on the philosophy that has become an important aspect of the show. And while the Mystery of the Week was kept sprightly by the interplay between Jo and Henry, with able aid by Lucas, Henry's assistant in the morgue, who is becoming one of the most engaging characters in the show, it was pretty standard fair. Except for Lucas. Tonight, poor, ill-used Lucas was stuck in the badly lighted murder scene, tasked with collecting the rats who ate part of the dead man's face and body in order to run tests on their stomach contents. What does Lucas do? He performs GI surgery on a particularly ill-appearing rat to ease its suffering. How can you not love a character who performs emergency humane surgery on an ailing rodent? Mickey Mouse would be proud!

And next week, God bless us all, we're being introduced to Jack the Ripper. And it only took six weeks. So, which character are you growing attached to? Sound off in the comments below.

Photo Credit: ABC

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