Day Break

It was inevitable that the show that would fill the shoes of LOST for thirteen weeks would have a serious hurdle to get over: comparison. I’m not going to compare Day Break to LOST, (or Groundhog’s Day, since that has been done to death), because that’s neither realistic, or fair. Not that LOST is incorruptible or anything, it is just Day Break deserves to judged on its own merits. Pretend, for a moment, that it isn’t in the same time slot as LOST, that it isn’t holding up the thirteen week hiatus LOST fans are suffering through, that it isn’t meant to appeal to that very crowd, and you might just see it how I saw it: A very, very interesting drama.
Did Day Break deliver? In a word, yes. In Day Break, Detective Brett Hopper (Taye Diggs) wakes up at his girlfriend Rita’s (Moon Bloodgood) apartment, showers, and heads out. On the way, he stops for coffee and manages to pull a hissy urbanite from the path of an out of control bus, saving her life. He heads to his apartment to get his mail and finds that it is trashed; at first his dog seems to be to blame. Before the detective can solve that mystery he is besieged by door bashing cops thrusting all sorts of gun barrels in his face; he is being arrested for the murder of an assistant district attorney from the night before. The fact that his girl-friend is the ex-wife of his ex-partner turned internal affairs investigator isn’t helping him get much traction in the “I’m innocent” routine. Other elements begin to surface: a mysterious package that he never received, an informant missing, a sister who is being abused by her husband, and the fact that his alibi, Rita, is missing. He ponders in despair from the confines of his cell as night falls when suddenly he is cold-cocked. He wakes up in a cave, some kind of excavation, surrounded by shadowy figures lead by ‘Shadow Guy’ villain extraordinaire Jonathon Banks (Who played Frank on Wise Guy) who orders in a cryptic, direct fashion, that Hopper confess to the murder while showing him footage of Rita being shot and killed. The footage is followed by candid video of Hopper’s sister and her children, who he is told are okay, for now. As Hopper is given an injection, Shadow Guy walks off repeating like a mantra “Decision, and Consequence.” Hopper fades and… Wakes up again, in his bed, at the same time. Trips over the same gun, hears the same traffic report. Slowly it becomes apparent that he is living the same day over, an opportunity to get a step ahead and try to figure out what is happening, and who framed him. It is the second of four such occurrences in the two-part debut of Day Break. The pacing is excellent, in the key of any of the best action adventure pieces I have seen on TV with some extremely notable exceptions (it’s no 24). The execution of the mystery, on the other hand, is where Day Break shines. The formula has to service both the conspiracy to frame Hopper, and the metaphysical rewinds simultaneously. Are they connected? The first two rewinds end with the men in the cave, giving the injection. So what if they ran? What if the men in the cave, the shadow men, are responsible somehow for the time-traveling. Plot advancement is very fast in this regards. We find out that he does not need to encounter the shadow men to be sent back to relive his day, Iputting which side of the conundrum they occupy, the temporal or the conspiratorial, in doubt almost immediately. One interesting feature in the time travel aspect, and a key difference to the Groundhogs Day comparison, is that Hopper brings his wounds back with him. The rewind does not undo any physical harm done to Hopper. So he could, theoretically die. In addition, fatalism is out the window. While he does fail in rescuing his girlfriend twice, he does succeed once as well. It’s an interesting premise enacted by talent that can bring it together in a believable way and, best of all, we know that by the end of twelve weeks the mystery of Day Break will be solved. This, however, may be one protracted mystery that will leave fans wishing it had held out just a little longer.