Taye Diggs, Moon Bloodgood on Day Break
© Taye Diggs, Moon Bloodgood

Mania Grade: A

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"Day Break: What If They Find Him?"

I can’t believe this series is already on the chopping block.  We’re right at the midpoint of what has turned out to be a slick and intriguing series and the network is saying it will be canceled.  I hope the fan outcry is enough to get the series finished even if it’s on a different night. 

The clues are finally coming together for Hopper as he continues living the same day over and over again, trying to find out why he’s being framed for a murder and trying to protect his family and friends.  He was able to get the murder book from Chad (Adam Baldwin) and he utilizes his contact in the street gang to find out who the Jane Doe is.  It turns out that this obscure cold case leads him to the man whose been drugging him day after day in the rock quarry and telling him he must confess to the murder. 

The progress Hopper is making with each passing day changes everything, even small things.  His partner’s meeting with Internal Affairs is even canceled or postponed because Chad is tied up trying to find out what happened to the murder book.  That’s the one challenge to this series; not only do you have to live the day over and over again with Hopper assembling the clues but you also have to look at it from the perspective of the characters around him that are surprised that Hopper knows what he does because to them nothing Hopper has done all season ever happened. 

When Hopper finds this mystery man who he thinks has been pulling the strings all along he automatically goes into instinct mode, busting in the guys house and threatening to kill him if he doesn’t give up some answers.  In a mildly humorous moment the mystery man’s wife draws down on Hopper with a shotgun and begins counting to three, and then a new day suddenly begins.  Now the question is what happened there?  She couldn’t have killed Hopper because he carries his injuries into the next version of the day with him.  Whatever happened it didn’t end well.  It takes Hopper two more attempts at approaching the mystery man before he handles it proper.  He tries to approach the situation calmly and subtly and that doesn’t work.  In the end, he had to be sneaky about it.  He turns over all the evidence to the man and tells him to make it stop.  Then he follows the man, staying close enough that he can pick up audio from the listening device he included in the bag of evidence.  While Hopper learns that this mystery man is little more than a flunky his actions also cause another mystery man to order the evidence destroyed and everyone involved killed. 

Thus far, Hopper knows that Chad is connected in some way and so is the murder case his father worked on, and apparently so is the gang investigation Hopper is working on.  The one thing we learned in this episode that Hopper has yet to discover is that his sister is an important player in the mystery.  I always wondered why they killed his girlfriend and only threatened him with the death of his sister.  Early in this episode we see his sister gun down Chad in front of an ATM and later after the death of the mystery man we see her crying and getting lectured to about the differences between a warning and an example by a new shadowy man. 

This series continues to do everything right.  Each week we get new answers and are given new sets of questions.  It never gets boring because unlike LOST the writers aren’t under any mandate to try and drag the story out.  As has been consistently the case from the beginning this episode is slick, fast paced, well acted, and well written.  This series must get its conclusion, it deserves it and so do those of us who have stuck with it this long.