FOREVER Midseason Finale Post-Mortem: Matt Miller on the Anonymous Caller Reveal and What’s to Come in 2015

[Warning: This post contains massive spoilers for the FOREVER midseason finale, “Skinny Dipper.”]

Henry finally met his anonymous caller — but not before “Adam” put him through the wringer.

In “Skinny Dipper,” Henry’s naked-in-the-water resurrection activities caught up with him and he was sent for therapy at Bellevue. Simultaneously, Henry was dealing with being framed for murder by the mysterious man, and he had to out his stalker to Jo and the rest of the NYPD…but stopped short of telling them the full truth.

And while the team did their job and was able to pinpoint a psychiatric patient, Clark, who was convinced he was immortal as the person who was stalking Henry, it ended up being another con: unfortunately for Henry, his assigned therapist (played by Burn Gorman) was actually “Adam.” Even worse? He only revealed himself after Henry accidentally killed Clark in the middle of a fight…and then he took off in a cab.

So what the heck comes next? I spoke with FOREVER creator Matt Miller about unmasking Adam, and where the show goes from here…

What kind of discussions went into the decision to unmask “Adam” this early in the show’s run?
Matt Miller: I think we thought that there’s only so much of that kind of cat and mouse, calling him on the phone, bothering him, harassing him, without Henry actually knowing who he was.

In episode 1×06, our Jack the Ripper episode story, he shows up in that episode and slits Henry’s throat as a favor to Henry, because Jo was about to see him die — an unusual favor! But Henry only saw his feet. We personified him in that episode so he wasn’t just a voice on the phone. But you kind of get to a place where you really want to be able to have some scenes between these two. And it’s [the question of] how much longer could Henry be on the phone with a voice, and us filming maybe an elbow or a hat or feet? And we wanted to turn up the heat on this strange, Moriarty/Sherlock Holmes relationship they have.

In order to do that, we wanted to have him reveal himself to Henry. And he revealed himself to Henry, but he certainly didn’t have to by the end of the episode…we could have ended the episode with Henry still not sure of who it was, but it felt like to get the right pop of the episode [we had to do the reveal]…it was just a really great way for us to [end on a] cliffhanger with us going off a few weeks for Christmas.

When will we see the anonymous caller next?
MM: He’ll come back in episode 1×14.

Will we see him more or less now that he’s been revealed?
MM: We’ll see him a little bit more going forward. It’s not every episode.

We’re adopting THE X-FILES model: they would have regular cases of the week, and then every third episode or fourth episode, it would be something that dealt with the mythology of the show. And that’s about our schedule.

Totally makes sense. Henry was really pushed by Abe to tell Jo the truth in this episode, and yet he managed to avoid having to be completely honest with her. How much will the show be playing with that secret — and whether or not Henry should tell her the truth — going forward?
MM: I think that’s something we’re going to toy with and play with through the rest of the course of the season.

Abe, in this episode in particular, but I think throughout the course of the series, is really encouraging Henry to open up to Jo, because I think Abe is worried about Henry…Abe is in the twilight of his years, and he is a mortal man. He knows his time is finite, and he’s very worried about what happens to Henry when he’s gone. It’s something we started in the pilot, even, with Henry and Jo walking off to go solve a case, and Abe looking and smiling through the window, and turning the sign from closed to open, that kind of stuff. The idea has always been that he’s trying to get Henry to open himself up to somebody else, someone else he can trust. And for Abe, that person is Jo, so he can pass the torch, so to speak.

For Henry, it’s a lot more difficult — because as we’ve seen in flashbacks — to trust anyone [because] of some of the things that have happened to him over the years when he did trust people.

Absolutely. Looking ahead, Alana De La Garza (Jo) teased on Twitter that episode 13 was a big one for her. What can you tease about that hour?
MM: In episode 13, which will be two episodes after we get back from Christmas, [it] is an episode where someone is a victim and is killed, and is involved in a jewelry store robbery. But what we come to find out is they’ve been in jail before, and the…DA that put him in jail was Jo’s husband. Her now-dead husband, but this [original crime] was many years ago.

So as we unpack this case…Henry starts to believe this person was framed [and] Jo is forced to confront the ghost of her dead husband by going back through his old files and folders, and even watching an old deposition she didn’t know existed, in which he actually appears in the frame. And watching a videotape of her dead husband she didn’t know existed, and at some point the phone rings, and it’s Jo on the phone talking to him. So she in real-time gets to watch this conversation she had with her husband before he died a few years ago. Which is kind of heartbreaking for her. So we watch her deal with that in that episode, and we watch Henry be there for her, to help her get over that emotional hurdle.

[It’s] a little bit sad, but a little bit bittersweet. It would be sad if she was dealing with it alone, but having Henry there makes it a little more uplifting and certainly a little bit easier for Jo.

Speaking of bittersweet, we’ve seen a number of Abe’s exes on the show already. Will we be meeting more of them, seeing any of them return, or diving into another aspect of Abe’s life in the near future?
MM: We were just talking about that in the writers’ room right now. He’s a 70-year-old guy, he’s had a few flings in his life. We met Jane Seymour’s character who was Abe’s twice-married and divorced ex-wife. And then we also met another character, Fawn Mahoney, in a recent episode, who was Abe’s first kiss, which is obviously a lot more sweet, romantic notion. We may meet some more, we may revisit some of these other characters again.

Does that mean Blair Brown’s Fawn might be “back in the neighborhood” soon?
MM: Maybe Blair Brown, maybe Jane Seymour, yeah.

Awesome. You guys really have gotten an impressive amount of guest stars so far. Who else can you tease is coming up?
MM: In episode 1×12, the first episode after we come back from Christmas, Billy Baldwin’s in the episode — he’s fantastic. He plays a master of the universe, Wall Street tycoon. It’s our WALL STREET, Michael Douglas episode, so he plays our Gordon Gekko character. He’s very, very good in it.

Fantastic. Any cases you can tease?
MM: We’re about to start shooting a Nazi art heist episode, which is really fun for us. That one will feature the anonymous caller, but because Abe was a survivor of the Holocaust, it brings up some old wounds for him. And maybe he starts to learn some things throughout the course of the episode about his family.

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What did you think of the “Adam” reveal?!

Related:

FOREVER: Matt Miller Teases Henry Meeting ‘Adam’
Blair Brown Books PERSON OF INTEREST and FOREVER Guest Spots
FOREVER: Hilarie Burton on Getting ‘Dared’ to Play a Dominatrix

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