fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4659 ]

[ SECRET POST #4659 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4659 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[The Great British Bake Off, series 10]

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03.

[NCIS]

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04.

[Stinz]

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05.

[Forever]

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06.

[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]

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07.

[Masters of Sex, Broadchurch, Prodigal Son]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #667.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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05. https://i.imgur.com/K5vVzUc.png
[Forever]

Image: At the top of the secret, the logo for the 2014 TV show "Forever", which features pictures of the New York skyline, transitioning from black-and-white to sepia to color. On the bottom right, a picture of main character Henry Morgan from the show, a grey scarf prominently wrapped around his neck.

Text: Secret because I think I go against most of the fandom on this.

As much as I enjoyed most of this show, I thought the finale was awful, and Matt Miller's tweets revealing his future plans for the series make me kind of glad it was cancelled before the quality suffered a massive decline.

Bonus secret: That being said, I'd be curious to hear Miller's explanation for Henry Morgan's obsession with scarves. It was such a huge part of his wardrobe that there has to be a backstory behind it.

Who cares, I loved his whole aesthetic in this show.

I agree with you! After reading where things would've gone if the show hadn't been canceled, I was...I won't say glad it was canceled, but not really upset anymore, because that sounded awful.

A Forever secret!!!

for those of us unaware of this show+the plans for it, does anyone have a run-down on the terrible plans? i'm not saying they weren't, i just like hearing about adverted potential train-wrecks.

Glad to be of service, though this may turn into a minor rant. And obviously, SPOILERS for the show are to follow.

For those unfamiliar with Forever, it was a show that ran for one season in 2014-2015. The premise was that Henry Morgan, the man in the secret, was a doctor who had somehow gained immortality and had been alive for 200 years. However, he's not invulnerable; he can get killed, he just comes back naked in the nearest river. In order to try to figure out why he's immortal and how to cure it, he takes a job as the medical examiner at the New York morgue to study various types of death. Along the way, he befriends a police officer named Jo Martinez, and the two of them work together to solve crimes, though he's keeping his immortality a secret from her. The show was basically a police procedural mixed with flashbacks to events in Henry's past, and it had a small but devoted following because the cast all had a great rapport with each other.

Then the finale happened. One of the recurring elements in the show was a second immortal named Adam, who'd been around for 2,000 years and was responsible for the death of Henry's wife Abigail, whose fate had also been a mystery for most of the season. When Henry found out, he tried to go on a revenge quest of sorts, leading to him doing some unethical things. Since Henry had said repeatedly he was a moral person, this didn't sit well with me. I could have tolerated it if he faced consequences for his actions, but all he ever got that we saw was being chewed out by Jo, even though by all rights he should have been suspended from work. At the end of the episode, Henry proves he's still better than Adam because he doesn't kill him (they think they've found a way to permanently die, which turns out to be wrong), but by jamming a needle full of air into Adam's neck, causing him to go into a paralytic coma. This didn't strike me as the "better" option, but the show seemed to think so. There are some decent moments in the episode and it ends in a reasonable enough way, especially given the cancellation, but I consider it the worst episode of the show.

When the show got cancelled (or rather, not renewed for a second season), fans tried to get it picked up by another network, or somewhere like Hulu or Netflix, but nothing came of it. So later in 2015, Matt Miller, the show's creator, held a twitter Q&A to answer some of the questions fans had, though he kept some things secret just in case. And it really suggested to me that the badness I saw in the finale was probably going to continue.

*They were going to introduce a third immortal, who would be female. I don't have a problem with this in theory, but you just know she was going to either become Henry's love interest or turn out to be evil and help Adam escape his coma.

*We were going to learn about Henry's previous families, even though an episode in the show strongly suggested that Henry had never had children.

*Jo's father would turn out to have been a criminal, which just feels like a cliche.

*Henry would eventually find out why he was an immortal, but "he would never achieve death". I don't know if that means by the time the show ends or if he was doomed to immortality forever, but I had a feeling it was the latter, and that just felt cruel.

*And the big one. The very end of the show has Henry inviting Jo in to his house, with the strong implication that he's about to tell her the truth about his immortality (she has an old photograph of him from the 50's that he need to explain). But when asked who was going to be the first person to learn Henry's secret, Miller said it was going to be Lucas, Henry's assistant down in the morgue who was the buttmonkey comic relief. Now, I had no problem with Lucas learning the secret, especially if he figured it out on his own, but given the setup with Jo at the end, I had no idea how Miller intended to retcon it. Was Henry going to lie again, thus spoiling the feeling of the end of the prior season? Were they going to be interrupted before he could tell her, and Jo would just forget? Was that female immortal going to show up and convince Henry to keep his mouth shut? None of these were appealing, and it was enough to convince me that it may have been a good thing the show wasn't continuing.

I don't know, it probably doesn't seem like much when I put it that way. This may be a "you had to be there" moment. If any other Forever fans want to chime in to try to explain it better (or politely disagree), feel free.

This is pretty much what he said, but I will have to amend that Jo's father being a criminal was implied throughout the series itself so it would have worked, and the show did gain a reputation for doing cliched things in a non-cliche way.

I did feel the paralytic coma didn't make any sense from a moral standpoint (Henry is such a good and interesting character for his morals; I really disliked that he turned violent in that way) and also from a logical one, simply because a hospital is going to notice if their patient just never, ever ages or dies. Ever. Was Harry going to shuttle Adam around like a macabre piece of baggage over the centuries? I mean. Ugh.

I hadn't heard those other details about where they were going with the show, but about the only thing I liked about the finale was Henry was finally, finally going to tell Jo. I wonder if there's any good fic with that? :)

an episode in the show strongly suggested that Henry had never had children.

You mean other children, he already had one son.

My previous post was long enough as it is that I didn't want to get into the whole situation with Abe, but you're right. I probably should have clarified that I meant biological children.

Forever is the fandom that got me back into fandom, so I have a lot of feelings about this. I loved the finale, in fact I think it is one of the best series finales... ever, really. It wrapped up every major plot point of the series while still leaving questions for the fans to explore, and also found time to tie into the first episode in ways that showed how much the characters had grown over the 22 episodes.

HOWEVER. Matt Miller's plans for the second season, at least in the way that he described it in his tweets, sound absolutely awful. The show borederline said that Henry had never had kids before Abe, and also implied that Henry's trauma over Nora putting him in an asylum meant he wasn't able to have a long term relationship before Abigail. Him having a family in between Nora and Abigail feels to jammed in, plus it does wonky things to the timeline of his life. (And Matt Miller described her as a 'latin lover' in the tweet which just... doesn't sit right with me).

Also, the biggest complaint I've seen in the show is that Henry delays the reveal to Jo for too long. I like the way it was done, especially because it implies the voice over was him talking to Jo in a way, but if you delayed it any further it would have been an absolute shambles. It's one of the biggest hold overs from Miller writing for Chuck and I don't think he realised the secret keeping was one of the worst parts of Chuck as well. I'm fine with Lucas finding out, but Jo needed to find out after that finale.

I will forever (heh) maintain that this show is the perfect mini series, but that I will always wish it was a British series so we could get the occasional Christmas special. The main plot feels largely finished but there's plenty of room for little misadventures along the way.

I disagree about the finale (glad that it was enjoyable to some people, though), but I agree with you on everything else. I see no reason why Jo couldn't know, and have Lucas find out later. If it turned out he'd put the pieces together on his own, it would have been a great redeeming moment for the character. As it stands, I'm left wondering what Miller was thinking.

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