Day Break—What If They're Stuck

This show just gets better and better, making me even sadder about what seems to be imminent cancellation. But maybe if it does get cancelled, it'll get a break, like Smith, which just showed up on iTunes. I haven't watched Smith at all, but at $12.99 for the entire series plus a booklet outlining the last five unaired episodes, it's damned tempting.

Anyway, back to Day Break.

Day One this week is a quickly executed series of missteps. Hopper takes the hourglass to the police lab to have the print pulled. Unfortunately, his timing goes awry, and not only is he unable to get any information about the print, he's arrested and again ends up at the quarry. This time Rita is there, and is executed within his hearing.

On Day Two, Hopper prepares better, getting Dodgers tickets to bribe the lab guy with so he can get his information. Trying to get his hands on the murder book for the case, Hopper ends up pulling a gun on Chad.

The rest of Day Two revolves around this hostage situation. He demands that Rita and Jennifer and her kids be brought to the station so he'll know they're safe. In the process of trying to get Chad to tell him where the book is, Hopper ends up spilling his whole story--that he's repeating this day, that he's seen Rita die three times and can't bear to see it happen again. That he's afraid that if he just decides to give up and let a day reset so he can try again, it'll turn out to be the last day, and Rita will end up dead forever. Chad doesn't buy this crazy story...but maybe he does. Completely calm through his ordeal, but visibly sheened with sweat, Chad seems to gradually begin to believe, particularly after Hopper's impassioned speech about not wanting to lose Rita. And, at the very last, Chad tells Hopper that, if he's right about the day repeating, the murder book is in the front seat of his car.

Several tidbits are dropped, pieces to add to the expanding puzzle. Something bad happened with Hopper's father back in the day--the clues tonight seem to indicate some kind of mental illness. Was Hopper Sr. caught in a repeating day, as well? This would be a bit like Tru Davies (Tru Calling) finding out her mother also repeated days, so maybe that's not where they're going. But obviously the 1991 case and Hopper Sr.'s involvement in it is an important part to Hopper Jr.'s story. The fingerprint from the hourglass, however, proves to be that of a criminal who's been in prison since 1989, so the connection there isn't immediately clear.

Another interesting note--the crazy guy from lock-up in the police station, whom Hopper's encountered before, seems to recognize Hopper the third time they run into each other. Is he tuned in to the repeating day somehow? Just because he's off his nut, or because he's part of the unfolding conspiracy?

And at this point, some kind of conspiracy seems likely. The first time the SWAT team moves in on Hopper, Chad spies a .45 leveled at Hopper's head and pushes him out of the way, saving him from death at the shot. When Hopper asks him why he did it, Chad says because the hostage team wasn't following protocol. The second time the SWAT team converges, a gun has been trained on Rita, and the targeting light doesn't disappear until Hopper confesses to Garza's murder. All this implies to me that the police are deeply involved in whatever's going on.

On Day Three, Hopper gets the book out of Chad's car, setting off the alarm. In a nice touch, he also leaves the money Chad said Hopper owed him, because when they were partners, Chad bought coffee twice as often as Hopper did.

So Chad has come around, just a bit. And may I take a moment to wax fangirlish about Adam Baldwin? Because he's just doing a bang-up job with this role. I was a bit disappointed at first, because it seemed like they'd just tossed him into another brutish bad guy part, but damn, Chad actually has layers. He's rough and arrogant and more than a bit of a prick, but tonight we finally got to see exactly why Hopper trusts him to take care of Rita, and why Rita would have fallen in love with him in the first place. I applaud some well-written character development, executed nicely by a very underrated actor.

Day Break—What if They Run (Pilot)

Last season, viewers of Lost registered a good number of complaints that they didn’t like having to sit through reruns, and that they wanted uninterrupted first-run episodes instead. ABC’s response to this? Run 6 episodes of Lost in a row, then pull the show completely off the air until February, after which they would run the rest of the season uninterrupted. Now, of course, Lost fans are complaining that their show is off the air for twelve weeks.

In any case, for the hiatus we’ll be treated to a new show, Day Break. The premise: Taye Diggs and a collection of ex-X-Files-ers team up to turn “Monday” (a season six X-Files episode in which Mulder relives the same day over and over until he is able to stop a bank robbery and save Scully from blood splattery death) into a thirteen-part mystery. (Or it could be the season eight X-Files episode “Redrum”, but I liked “Monday” better.) The production staff is stellar, including Rob Bowman and Jeffrey Bell from The X-Files (and, in the case of Bell, Angel). In front of the cameras we have Taye Diggs, also serving as a co-producer, Adam Baldwin (The X-Files, Angel, Firefly), Mitch Pileggi (The X-Files), and, in a minor role, John Rubinstein (Linwood Morrow from Angel).

Wednesday night’s two-hour introduction presented a nicely convoluted tale, but for me the highlight was Diggs and Baldwin wrestling repeatedly in the elevator. I’ll tell you what, I could have watched that for the entire two hours. Well, with a break or two to look at Taye Diggs shirtless, another definite highlight of the episode.

Anyway, our story starts with our hero, Detective Brett Hopper, waking up with his girlfriend Rita. Several odd things happen so he’ll have a way to realize his day is repeating once we get to that point—there’s a car accident outside the apartment, he breaks the soap dish (remember Mulder’s waterbed leak and how he kept tripping over his shoes?). And of course we get all the background we need to set up our basic story. Assistant DA Alberto Garza has been murdered, and our hero has been framed for that murder. He’s taken in and interrogated. We find out his sister’s husband abuses her, and that his girlfriend Rita was once his ex-partner’s wife, and his ex-partner is now leading an Internal Affairs investigation against Hopper's new partner, Andrea. Then he’s kidnapped by goons who tell him he has to confess to the murder or they’ll kill his girlfriend. Well, actually they’ve already killed his girlfriend, and they show it to him on tape, then demonstrate that they are prepared and positioned to kill his sister and her kids, as well. They also tell him in a dramatically echoey manner that every decision has a consequence. And then he wakes up back in bed with Rita, faced with reliving the entire horrible day. Just to add insult to injury, rather literally, he wakes up with all the wounds he received on the previous day. This could be a problem.

Thus is our hero’s dilemma. Everything he does or doesn’t do creates a chain reaction throughout the day (and his major choice determines the title of the episode, talk about pressure), with different end results. Hopper acts based on knowledge gained in the previous repetition of the day, but he doesn’t know what the right mix is. In this respect he’s a lot like Tru Davies in Tru Calling, but he doesn’t have to run everywhere and he lacks Eliza Dushku’s cleavage.

Overall, this all worked better than I expected, given the difficult premise. Each repetition of the day reveals a few more details behind the conspiracy surrounding Garza's murder, adding layers to the mystery and the plot. I’m still curious to see how they manage to play it out over the full 12 episodes (13 if this one counts as 2), but so far, so good. And as long as Diggs keeps taking off his shirt and wrestling with Adam Baldwin in the elevator, I’m all good.

Day Break Official Site.