Well, here we are, finally at the end of Brett’s long journey (it’s taken a little longer than expected thanks to ABC.com’s erratic schedule, but I digress). There is a little bit of disappointment when you realize that the show’s producers were hoping for a second season of the show and left a couple of plot threads hanging just in case there were more episodes on the horizon. It’s nothing major, and I still think this was an awesome episode, but I guess this serves as a reminder that whenever you work in the television industry you never know how things will end up. That last image in particular is sure to have fans of the shows debating its meaning (I’ll get to that later).The first few scenes of this episode seem like more of the same: Brett using his knowledge to move through the day as efficiently as possible and save a number of people in the process. In the span of just a few minutes he manages to get immediate medical assistance to the bus ...
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First thing’s first: did anyone have problems with this episode being edited out of order? The show seemed out of sequence when I first tried to watch it: Immediately after Brett was running out of the courthouse, it cut straight to him finding Margo tied up in some remote location. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t so out of it as to miss an entire plotline and figured that it was a problem with the episode itself. Sure enough, towards the end I got another mixed-up sequence that explains what happened to Brett from the time he was threatening Uncle Nick to his freeing of Margo. At least I know now that I wasn’t going crazy. Did this happen to anyone else? It’s possible that it was a one-time glitch that caused the wrong act to play after the commercials. Hopefully it’s been fixed by now.Just about everything we thought we knew about our characters changed yet again tonight, and I was happy to realize that their motivations are always surprisingly con...
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The first few minutes of this episode were a great change of pace, although it didn’t take long before I was feeling the same way as Brett did: even when you’re lounging about on a tropical beach, sipping alcoholic beverages and spending time with your bikini-clad, smokin’ hot girlfriend, eventually you’d get bored of doing the exact same thing day after day. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t get bored of it, but you might eventually be depressed to realize that you’re trapped. Your life is on permanent hold, nothing you do matters in the long run, and you only have twenty-four hours of freedom to enjoy.Still, I’m glad that Brett finally decides to use this time-repeating to his advantage by taking outlandish vacations (and for those of you wondering why he’s able to flee the city without being hunted down like in the second episode of the series, it’s because he’s found the tracking device on his car that Fencik and Buchalter were using to...
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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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I hate to sound like a broken record in my praise of Day Break, but almost every episode has been better than the one before it, and tonight’s was no exception. So much happened that I was amazed the writers managed to cover all this territory in the span of an hour.Let’s start off with easily the biggest plot twist of the night: Brett’s mild-mannered sister Jennifer is somehow involved with the conspiracy, too. When I saw Chad get gunned down the second time around, and it revealed that Jennifer was the assassin, I was sure that she couldn’t possibly be acting of her own will. In other words, I had a really hard time believing something as out-of-the-blue as the revelation that she’s really moustache-twirling evil. I thought that I could see her crying as she iced him, and my suspicions were proven correct when the real criminal mastermind — the boss of shadowy guy (who we now know is named Detweiler) — threatened her in his car. Clearly she...
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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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My thoughts on Day Break coming soon...
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