Taye Diggs in Day Break
© ABC

Mania Grade: A+
Stars: Taye Diggs, Mitch Pillegi, Adam Baldwin

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"Day Break: What if They’re Stuck?"

This series continues to grab me each week with its paced and energetic execution and the streamlined no frills, no filler approach to the writing.  Hopper (Taye Diggs) has really settled into his situation.  He knows he’ll wake up the next day and have to go through virtually all the same events again.  So, he has it all down to a science keeping track of all the clues he accumulates and all the things he must do the next day when he wakes up in a little notepad.  The things he does continue to affect not only his story but the stories of nearly all the characters that come in contact with him, including the lives of his sister and his girlfriend.  

One key piece of evidence he discovered is a picture of a murdered girl from an investigation his father was involved in years ago.  He decides to take the picture and the hourglass with the fingerprint into police headquarters for analysis.  He knows that he will be accused of murder and officers will attempt to arrest him so he must get the information from the station early and try to get out before all of that goes down.  As has come to be expected with this series he runs into a new twist.  When he gets someone from the lab to pull up the case file that the picture is from, he discovers that the “murder book” was already checked out by Chad (Adam Baldwin), the Internal Affairs Officer that once was his partner and is the ex-husband of his current girlfriend.  Hopper has believed that Chad knows more than he’s been saying this new twist proves it.  So he approaches Chad for the murder book and is arrested, which takes him to jail, then to the rock quarry where he will again witness his girlfriend’s murder. 

Obviously he plays it different the next day, taking Chad hostage and making his demand that his girlfriend be brought into the station.  Through a number of plot twists he discovers that the SWAT officer handling the negotiations in the hostage situation is in fact connected to the shadowy group that wants him to take the fall for the murder of Garza.  Finally the next day, he actually does get the murder book. 

There are a few other key scenes in this episode that deepen the story.  The first is that we learn that Hopper’s father apparently had some sort of mental breakdown.  So this begs the question; is this all just an illusion created by a man who has lost his mind just as his father did before him?  I don’t buy that for a minute, but the idea was cleverly worked into the storyline.  Another incident occurs when Hopper is back in the rock quarry.  The mysterious man running the show asks Hopper if he had ever felt Déjà vu.  This throws Hopper off but the man is apparently talking about Hopper’s father and some dealing they had together.  Finally, there’s the old guy that Hopper has been noticing in the police station throughout the series so far.  At one point they are sitting beside each other and the man seems to know what Hopper is going through.  He asks Hopper for his arm and when Hopper obliges the man chomps down on it.  Police haul him away while he screams “We all taste the same!”  My feeling is that this man is going through the same thing Hopper is going through but he’s been stuck in his loop so long that he’s gone mad. 

My favorite scene in this week’s episode doesn’t really have a lot to do with the plot twists.  It’s a simple monologue that Hopper delivers during the hostage situation.  After telling Chad, and everyone who is secretly listening that he is going through the same day over and over again Chad asks him why he doesn’t just go out guns blazing and start over the next day.  Hopper’s reply is masterfully written and delivered.  In a nutshell, he says that he doesn’t know when all of this will end.  What if he does just that and his girlfriend is killed, and then all of a sudden tomorrow does come and he doesn’t get another chance at the day?  Then she stays dead, and anything he does wrong also sticks, including going out guns blazing.  Diggs plays the drama subtly and not too over the top.  The scene does a great job of defining where Hopper’s head is with each redo of the day.  He has to do his best each day to try and solve the crime and protect his loved ones because he never knows when it all might end. 

DAY BREAK continues to impress me each week with its intriguing twisting and turning storyline, slick execution, and gripping drama.  Each week we get just a little more of the mystery and each week we get more questions.  Knowing in advance that the whole story has to be told in 13 weeks has allowed the writers to move the story at a breakneck pace and it’s utterly refreshing compared to other series that are crafted to move along at a much slower pace.  DAY BREAK owes a great deal to 24, the series it most mimics but never copies.