Recap / Forever 2014 S 01 E 02 Look Before You Leap

• The '40s: Flashback to Henry and Abigail with baby Abraham, at the end of World War II, discussing the possibility of adopting him. Another flashback to Milan in 1945, when Henry tries to leave Abigail but she refuses to let him quit that easily.
• Accident, Not Murder: Henry is presented with a man with an axe embedded in his skull, who'd been heard fighting with a neighbor minutes before his death. He proceeds to explain point by point how the man's death was accidental.
• Age Cut: The scene cuts from baby Abraham's arm in a flashback to 1945, to focusing on the same arm on present-day Abe as he's cooking.
• Always Murder: Zig-zagged. In the opening the case of a random victim with an ax in his forehead looks like a clear murder but Henry rules it an accidental death (the guy fell off his roof and the ax fell down after him, Henry's Sherlock Scan determines), and the next case is a supposed bridge jumper whose death looks like a suicide but Henry determines she was murdered.
• Artistic License:
  • Everyone is asked to don white cotton gloves before going anywhere near a valuable palimpsest. In reality, such gloves reduce dexterity and make it more likely a book will be torn or otherwise damaged. Any book that has survived for centuries has been handled by bare hands for most of that time. Researchers just wash their hands before handling such texts. Justified because the killer had to be wearing gloves to hide a bite wound made by the victim, without it drawing suspicion.
  • A manuscript in which layers of writing are put on top of each other as the material is reused repeatedly is mistakenly referred to as a codex; the proper term for such a work is a palimpsest. (The book could also be considered a codex, but it was specifically the layers of reuse that was being described when the word "codex" was given.) It's also described as a scroll at one point, which is definitely not what is displayed later.
• Bible Times: Adam tells Henry he's been immortal for about two thousand years, putting him in approximately this era.
• Black Boss Lady: Lieutenant Joanna Reece, Jo's boss, is introduced in this episode having recently transferred to the 11th precinct. (There is a different black woman as Lieutenant in the pilot.)
• Disobeyed Orders, Not Punished: Reece tells Jo to accept the "bridge jumper case" as a suicide and focus on other homicides. Based on Henry's deductions and info she uncovers, Jo pursues the case anyway, eventually catching the real killer. Reece pulls Jo aside, and sounds like she's going to chew her out for disobeying, but instead praises her for going with her gut, which she says is the best tool a cop has.
• Distressed Dude: Henry is taken hostage by the killer in with a blade held to his throat, with the extra stress of security cameras that will record him vanishing if he dies. Jo ends up shooting the killer.
• Exposition Victim: Henry confronts the killer alone as soon as he's figured out his crime, explaining to him exactly where he went wrong, instead of bringing along backup or even telling anyone else what he's realized. It almost gets him killed on-camera, although the cameras are also what alerts Jo and Hanson to his plight and saves his life.
• The Faceless: Adam is shown watching Henry through the window from the street below as they talk on the phone, but Adam is only shown from behind, showing only his shoulder and the hand holding the phone.
• Gaussian Girl: Used in the flashback in Milan when Abigail catches up to Henry after he tries to leave her at the hotel. Probably done here because Abigail is supposed to be at her youngest and it helps blur out any signs of age.
• Gratuitous Greek: The professor tosses around ancient Greek repeatedly, and Henry proves he's equally fluent, spotting an ungrammatical error in a Greek quote in a supposed suicide note which was written by one of the professor's grad students who presumably had been studying Ancient Greek. Justified in that, in the era Henry was first educated, learning Greek and Latin was considered a basic skill for the wealthy who could afford a real education.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: Henry is using an old pizza box to cover himself when Abe arrives to give him a ride home.
• Hanging by the Fingers: Henry climbs down onto a ledge on a Manhattan bridge to search for clues. When he discovers a carabiner attached to the ironwork and tries to pull it free, it gives way suddenly and Henry nearly falls. He not only manages to catch ahold of an edge and save himself, he does it without dropping the evidence he just collected, holding onto the ledge by one hand while just barely catching ahold of the carabiner and then sliding his fingers through the carabiner so that he can cling by his fingertips with both hands. Eventually Henry manages to climb back up to the roadway, still without losing the evidence.
• Heartwarming Orphan: Baby Abraham is absolutely adorable, especially in this episode, smiling and laughing despite the bleak circumstances of having just been orphaned and rescued from a concentration camp — a little bit of joy when Henry and Abigail doubtless really needed it.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Adam starts out as The Voice on the telephone, then becomes The Faceless to the audience for a few seconds at the end of the episode.
• Human Shield: Near the end of the episode the killer takes Henry hostage with a scalpel blade over his carotid artery. Jo and Hanson pin him down and it's Henry who suggests they Shoot the Hostage (in the shoulder, at a range where the bullet would likely pass through into the hostage-taker as well).
• Identifying the Body: As in real life, it's normally done by photographs rather than seeing the actual body. In this episode the victim's parents barge into an area they aren't supposed to enter and wind up seeing their daughter's body directly.
• In It for Life: Henry's commitment to both Abigail and Abraham begins with the flashbacks of this episode. This is when Abigail first brings up the idea of adopting baby Abraham, so he won't end up in an orphanage. When Henry tries to leave Abigail before he gets in too deep, Abigail follows him and insists she's not letting him give up so fast.
  Abigail: What could be more simple than making an impulsive commitment for the rest of your life?
• Look Both Ways: While investigating the death of the apparent bridge jumper, Henry nearly falls off the bridge, himself. Though he would have resurrected, he points out that it's one of the least pleasant ways to die. He manages to climb back onto the bridge... only to be almost immediately hit by a truck. By the time the driver comes out to check what happened, Henry's body has already vanished to reappear in the river.
• Love at First Sight: Both Henry and Abigail seem to be immediately taken with baby Abe, ready to turn their lives upside-down to adopt him and save him from an unknown fate in an orphanage. He seems to fall in love with them just as quickly.
  Abigail: Uh oh, you're in trouble. I don't think he's going to let you go!
• Love Hurts: Defied in flashback when Henry tries to leave Abigail but she chases him down and tells him, "Who cares how it ends? Life is about the journey, no matter how long it lasts!"
• May–December Romance: The 22-year-old victim was dating her 57-year-old colleague. He tried to break it off because he felt she deserved someone her own age and wanted her to be happy.
• Mysterious Stranger: Adam, Henry's anonymous caller, is treated this way. He starts out only The Voice, then at the end of the episode Adam is only shown to the audience from behind.
• Never Suicide: Twice over. First a near-hysterical grad student climbs over the railing of a bridge in front of witnesses, then falls to her death. Henry finds evidence of paint under her nails from digging into the bridge to try to hang on, as well as a fragment of skin in her teeth; he also climbs out onto a ledge on the bridge and finds two different footprints and a carabiner the killer used to avoid falling themself. Her mentor, a much older professor, is accused of killing her. When he's found with slit wrists and a suicide note, Henry determines based on drugs in his coffee, the angle of the cuts, and a grammatical error in the Gratuitous Greek in the suicide note, that his death was also a faked suicide.
• The Precarious Ledge: Henry climbs down onto a narrow ledge under a bridge to investigate a death everyone else is ready to write off as suicide. As a medical examiner, he goes into gruesome detail about exactly how a person dies if they go into the water from such a height. He does find the evidence he was after that the victim was lured onto the ledge by a colleague claiming he was going to jump, to get her to try to talk him out of it and he then forced her off.
• Revealing Injury: The killer is typing with his right hand even though he's left-handed because the first victim bit his left hand badly. He'd managed to keep it hidden because everyone has to wear gloves when working with or around the codex.
• Slashed Throat: Threatened by the killer when holding Henry hostage with a scalpel right over his carotid artery. Henry escapes with only a small cut on the side of his neck.
• Soft Water: Averted with a detailed description of the consequences of falling from a high bridge, which invokes the analogy to landing on concrete.
  Henry: When you fall off a bridge, your body accelerates to an impact of roughly ten miles per hour per story. So, from here, the fall is roughly 70 miles per hour. The water is like concrete. When you land, the bones in your hips shatter and get driven into your internal organs. If you should survive, you can't stop yourself from sinking. All things considered, it's one of the worst ways to die, certainly in the top twenty.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: This is what the victim intended to do when she climbed down onto a precarious ledge below a bridge; turns out her colleague lured her there, safely anchored himself, so that he could push her off and make it look like she had committed suicide.
• Unreveal Angle: How Adam is shown during his final phone call at the end of the episode, clearly standing outside the antique shop / apartment and watching Henry through the window as they talk.
• Wartime Wedding: Henry may not have formally proposed until 1955, but the flashbacks show he and Abigail became a committed couple and parents to Abraham in the closing months of World War II. They likely would have had to use identities that were officially married in order to adopt and parent Abraham in that era.