The opening of this episode had something that I love to see on Day Break and don’t get nearly enough of: Watching a short piece of a day over and over again as Brett tries to figure out precisely the right set of actions in order to get what he wants. Here, he’s confronted with a hostile prison warden who’s not letting him see the legendary prisoner Miguel Dominguez. First he just tells Brett that Dominguez is in solitary confinement. Then Brett realizes the warden is a part of the conspiracy and tries to pretend he’s there on Detweiler’s orders. Finally, he’s able to make his answers to the warden’s questions believable and detailed enough to get access. Sometimes Day Break can seem like a really good noir that just happens to have the clever twist that Brett Hopper is repeating the same day over and over again; I always appreciate it when the episode is edited in such a way that we see him really taking advantage of this fact rather than just se...
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Sorry if I’m moving a little quickly for some of the readers out there – I figured it would be best if I made sure this blog kept up with the episodes available online, since I assume most people are watching them as soon as possible (Day Break withdrawal and all that). I’m hoping to knock out the tenth episode either this Saturday or Sunday, and then we’re back to one review per week until the series concludes.Now that the boring logistics are out of the way, I have to say: this might be the best episode of Day Break yet. It’s chock full of twists and turns, insanely dangerous moves by Brett Hopper (at this point, I’m willing to compare him to a time-traveling Jack Bauer), and a couple of lines of dialogue that had me laughing out loud. Did they save up all their best one-liners for this one episode? Writer John Hlavin deserves some credit for his witty dialogue: I especially liked Andrea’s comeback “Well this morning, I had breakfast wit...
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Now this is more like it. The previous episode of Day Break brought up a couple of new plot threads without resolving anything – here, we’re finally seeing how all of the pieces of this puzzle fit together, and how a number of the major players in this series are involved in the conspiracy to frame Brett. Specifically, it seems that both Chad and Hopper’s sister Jennifer are being extorted into helping against their will: Neither one of them has much power in the greater scheme of things. More than anything else, what I loved about this episode, and the series in general, is that everyone’s motivations make sense. As the show’s mantra “decision… consequence” proves, sometimes these characters’ stupid mistakes in the past have spiraled into personal tragedies by the end of the day.It all comes back to Hopper’s father (I forget, did we learn his name at some point? The best I can remember he was Brett Hopper Senior). It was hint...
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First off, thanks to everyone who pointed me in the direction of ABC’s official Day Break website (check it out here). I was surprised, actually, by how much the FAQ on there gives away: it specifically outlines the rules the time repeating operates by (if he dies, he stays dead – end of story), and it promises to finish up this day’s plotlines within the first season. I expected that last part, but I thought it was unusual for the show’s creators to let us know this right off the bat. Maybe they just don’t want potential audience members to worry that they’ll be dragging this story out forever. And it’s left deliberately unclear whether or not they’ll explain what’s causing the time repeating, although the other interviews that I’ve read suggest that it’s never going to be solved.Watching this second episode, I’m even more impressed with how neatly the pieces of the puzzle fit together. It’s clever how we see eve...
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I’ll admit it: When I first saw the commercials for Day Break, my initial thought was, it’s Groundhog Day meets 24! My second thought was, can a show really sustain such a cool but very specific premise over the long run? Groundhog Day did a masterful job of filling up a 100-minute movie with every single gag and philosophical insight that its writers could think of, but wouldn’t the well run dry after just a couple of episodes on a TV show?Now that I’ve seen the first two hours, I understand. The neat twist Day Break pulls on us is that there’s enough happening that the show would be interesting even without the time loop. Detective Brett Hopper has to find a key witness on the run, avoid being framed for the murder of a DA, tell his girlfriend and sister to get out of town or face serious consequences, get payback on the sister’s husband for abusing her, and generally figure out who’s behind the conspiracy to frame him and ruin his life. Got all ...
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Question: Am I the only one who got the black humor of the Nip/Tuck episode with the air-crash triage scene? Mitch Pileggi is the triage doctor. Julia has to take layers of dermis off a dead woman for a skin transplant. She asks Pileggi how much to take off. He replies, "Skin her" (as in Skinner, his character name on The X-Files).
Answer: I didn't catch that. Possibly too freaked by the intensity of that episode. You're the first to bring it to my attention, and I love it ...
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