1.14 Hitler On The Half Shell I’m not sure why, but this wasn’t the best Forever episode we’ve had recently, and it left this reviewer distinctly underwhelmed. The inspiration for the story is that of Cornelius Gurlitt, a man who hoarded more than 1,500 works of art, many stolen from Jewish people during WWII, and hidden until almost seventy years later. Except in that case Gurlitt made no effort to return the painting that his father, Hildebrand, acquired under the worst possible circumstances. And then, the writers went off on some curious adventure when they flashed-back to Henry meeting other English gentlemen in the Diogenes Club prior to his first fatality. (The snag, and it’s likely more of an in-joke, is that this location is an entirely fictional one created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his Sherlock Holmes stories.) Here, he’s told of his family connections with the slave trade, setting up a confrontation with his father and a small moral tale around the ‘sins of the father’ epithet. At this point in the episode it had all rather fallen flat, and then a couple of things happened that made it much more interesting. The appearance of Adam in the antiques shop and the sequence of events that this set in motion made the murder investigation rather secondary. The later explanation, that Adam was experimented on by the Nazis, seemed designed to paint this sociopathic character in a warmer light. Or it would if we can take it at face value, and that wouldn’t be prudent. He doesn’t produce his own number tattoo to provide evidence, an omission that that might prove rather telling at some point. That Adam provides the clues Abe needed while brutally torturing and killing yet another person does hint at the extremes of light and shade in this persona. Personally, I wish they’d rested Adam’s appearance for longer, but in bringing him back at this point they’ve attempted to at least provide him with some extra dimensions. I think what was lacking here was any hint of the growing relationship between Jo and Henry, as this was put on hold for these events. Instead they replaced it with that between Abe and Henry, as they go to collect the small box of information relating to Abe’s parents from the Museum of Jewish Heritage. This left me very curious about who the real people were in the photo Abe has, and if they were really holocaust victims. In the end it was more about what we learned about some of the characters than what actually happened in the investigation, so there is value in that. Read Billy’s review of the previous episode, Diamonds Are Forever, here.
