What If He's Not Alone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“What If He's Not Alone”
Day Break episode
Episode no.	Season 1 Episode 7
Written by	Jeffrey Bell Steven Maeda
Directed by	Andy Wolk
Production no.	107
Original airdate	January 29, 2007
Episode chronology
← Previous	Next →
"What If They Find Him"	"What If She's Lying"
List of Day Break Episodes

What If He's Not Alone is the seventh episode of Day Break which was first available through ABC.com

[edit] Summary

Hopper believes he may have found someone who is inadvertently involved in his never-ending day - and may also be caught in the same, repetitive loop.

[edit] Synopsis

In Rita's bathroom, Hopper examines himself in the mirror before Rita notices the scar on his shoulder from his bullet-wound. He tries to dismiss her questions until he finally confesses that he feels "stuck" in his current case, and that he has to figure it out alone. Rita leaves him to himself by heading to the bathroom; Hopper switches out his cellphone battery, then calls in to work as Detective Choi to have the license plate of Detweiler's employer — 1E49908 — run for a registration address.

Hopper visits the address to find the Santayana Club with Detweiler's employer's car parked in front of the building. Inside, he tries to get information from a Club employee, but learns nothing. In the bar, he gets directions from the bartender, Lloyd, to the director's office; crossing the lobby, he runs into criminal defense attorney Barry Colburn, who doesn't recognize him. Hopper continues on to the director's office; finding it empty, he sneaks inside and locates an open laptop, which he quickly searches for the Club's membership information.

He manages to download 10% of the file onto a thumb drive before the director returns. Assuming that the detective has gotten lost on his way to a function being held upstairs, the director leads Hopper to the Delano Room where they find Alberto Garza's widow with Detective Choi and a dozen police officers. When she identifies him as her husband's killer, Hopper beats a hasty escape with Lloyd's help and makes it to his truck, pulling out into traffic and hitting a pedestrian. When he climbs out to help the man, he finds the old man who bit him; stranger still, the man remarks only that "that was different."

Hopper helps the man up as a police unit arrives, but the man flees, claiming that he can't get caught again. The new officers ignore Hopper to tackle the man in front of Choi, who points out Hopper as the man they need to catch; Hopper flees, leaving his truck. Choi phones Spivak to inform him that Hopper showed up at the Santayana Club; Spivak instructs Choi to bring Mrs. Garza, the only eye-witness to her husband's murder, to headquarters under protective custody, on the assumption that Hopper had been trying to kill her as well.

Hopper trades his own coat for another, then tries to phone Detective Battle. She doesn't answer, however, as she waits for her meeting with Detective Shelton and learns from Detective Pressier that Hopper is wanted for ADA Garza's murder. At Internal Affairs, Chad talks with Rita about Hopper's whereabouts the previous night, and informs her that another witness's testimony conflicts with her story. As Mrs. Garza is escorted into the building, Spivak serves Chad with a search warrant for Rita's apartment.

On the street, Hopper requisitions a laptop and examines the thumb drive, finding Conrad Detweiler's file moments before he is intercepted by Buchalter and Fencik. Hopper mentions the tracking device, the quarry, and Detweiler to the agents' confusion; before they get far, however, a sniper takes out the two agents from the roof of a nearby building, leaving only Hopper standing. Hopper ditches his coat again before getting a call from Battle, who wants to know where he is. She informs him that the police believe he was trying to kill Mrs. Garza at the Santayana Club, and that Buchalter and Fencik were ex-sheriff's deputies. Battle hangs up as Spivak approaches.

Hopper calls Rita's cellphone, but gets her voicemail since her phone is using his dead battery. At IA, Rita watches as the old man is escorted into the building (still demanding to see his brother) before Chad returns with coffee. She then sees Mrs. Garza being escorted to a nearby bathroom, and Chad explains that Mrs. Garza is the key witness to the Homicide department's case against Hopper. Rita heads for the bathroom to confront Mrs. Garza.

At Rita's apartment, Spivak finds a bloody shirt and passes it off to forensics, but Choi voices his skepticism that an officer as decorated as Hopper would kill a man he didn't know and be sloppy enough to leave the gun in his own apartment and a bloody shirt at his girlfriend's. Spivak chastises Choi for questioning the evidence in front of forensics, but Choi accuses Spivak of gunning for Hopper instead of trying to find Garza's killer.

That night, Hopper gets a call from Rita, who tells him that the shirt found in her apartment had Garza's blood on it. She pleads with him to turn himself in, promising that they can get him help; Hopper realizes that Chad is on the line, and hangs up.

At 6:25 a.m., Hopper picks through Rita's hamper to find a shirt with any blood on it. She questions him, but he puts her off by insisting that no one remembers anything he says or does. He correctly predicts that Andrea will call in twenty seconds to tell him that she is taking Eddie to rehab, and Rita is rightly unnerved. Hopper refuses to explain further, however, and rushes to the Santayana Club where he sneaks into the director's office and is stunned to find the old man who bit him sitting at the director's laptop. Hopper demands to know why the man is there, and the man demands that he's always there because "it's always today, over and over, and [he's] stuck in it."

Hopper demands to know if the man recognizes him, but the man claims he doesn't remember. Hopper explains that he too is repeating the day, and proves it by pointing out that the Dodgers rally in the bottom of the ninth. Elated that someone understands him, the man hugs Hopper as the director returns; Hopper sends the director away, claiming that the man was a close friend of Garza's. After the director leaves, the man returns to the laptop, explaining that his brother was taken by someone who belongs to the Club. The man has been coming to the Club to memorize the list of members, but Hopper produces the thumb-drive and uploads the entire list instead.

In the Delano Room, the director complains to Choi that a detective has commandeered his office. He describes Hopper before leading Choi to his office, which they find empty; Choi radioes to his officers to lock down the building. In a hallway, Hopper finds out that the man can't remember how long he's been repeating the day, but that he didn't have his full beard before it started. Hopper explains that he's been repeating the day for three weeks, at which point the man says that "three...is the magic number" before promptly passes out.

Hopper drags the man to a storage closet and revives him to learn that he blacks out frequently and wakes up elsewhere. The man also mentions needles, but explains that they are administered in a laboratory instead of a quarry, by a man called "Four-Eyes." Hopper explains that Detweiler has been administering his own injections, but that he's really after Detweiler's employer, whose name is on the thumb-drive. He learns that the man's name is Jared before slipping out to ask Lloyd about Detweiler. Lloyd feigns ignorance, but covertly sets up a meeting with Hopper at 316 Grayson Street for nine o'clock that night.

Jared flees the closet moments later, only to be tackled by police in the hallway; Lloyd stops Hopper from helping, pointing him to the emergency exit instead. Outside, Hopper finds officers looking over his truck, then spots Barry Colburn climbing into a car. The detective joins him in his car, explaining that they have a mutual acquaintance in Nathan Baxter. Colburn identifies Hopper as the man being sought for Garza's murder, then instructs his chauffer to drive; Hopper claims that members of the Santayana Club are framing him. Colburn explains that his retainer starts at $30,000.00, but accepts a one-dollar fee to put Hopper under attorney/client privilege, citing that he can make ten times his normal fee from the book deal alone.

At LAPD headquarters, Spivak interrogates Rita about Hopper's whereabouts. She insists that Hopper was with her the previous night; when Spivak tries to question her about her driving record, and a certain incident in 2002, Chad demands that the incident is irrelevant. Choi pulls Spivak from the interrogations to interview Jared Pryor, informing Spivak that Pryor was with Hopper that morning. Pryor refuses to divulge any details of the encounter, except to say that both he and Hopper are searching for the man for whom Detweiler works. Spivak shows certain recognition at the mention of Detweiler's name, but ignores Pryor's claim that he's trying to find "the man who's making it today over and over again."

At Colburn's office, the attorney advises Hopper not to talk to anyone about the case, including wives, girlfriends, or the press. He also offers to recommend a publicist for Hopper, but the detective spots a small hourglass on the attorney's desk that matches the one he had received in the mail. Hopper pins Colburn to the desktop, flips the hourglass, and gives the attorney three minutes to explain himself. Colburn explains that the hourglass is a token given to every member, past and present, of the Santayana Club's Board of Directors. Hopper tells the attorney that he has seen another of the hourglasses, sent to him by Garza for unknown reasons, which was evidence in the 15-year-old murder of Isabella Contreras, who worked at the Club.

Hopper produces the thumb-drive and has Colburn identify the Board members, one of whom is named Alexander Forasz. The detective realizes that Forasz was the man who Jared mistakenly heard referred to as "Four-Eyes." He leaves Colburn's office and calls Battle, asking her to run Forasz's name for any history; Battle does, but comes back with only a restraining order that Forasz took out against Jared Pryor. Before she can give Hopper an address, she sees Mrs. Garza being escorted to the bathroom; down hall, Mrs. Garza passes Chad and Rita before going into the bathroom, and is followed soon after by Rita.

Rita attempts to explain to Mrs. Garza that she has to be wrong about Hopper, because he was with her, but Mrs. Garza recounts the events of the previous night. She claim that she heard her husband say Hopper's name before coming downstairs to find Alberto dead with Hopper standing over him. She insists that she saw Hopper's face, then storms out of the bathroom.

That night, Hopper gets a call from Colburn, who informs him that the police have the murder weapong with Hopper's prints, Hopper's t-shirt with Garza's blood, and Garza's grieving widow with eye-witness testimony, making for an "extremely compelling" case against the detective. Hopper insists that he's being framed by a conspiracy, but Colburn informs him that "juries don't take kindly to the C-word." Colburn advises Hopper to take a plea of murder-two with 15-to-life, but Hopper hangs up and heads down the alley to 316 Grayson Street where he finds Lloyd. The bartender apologizes, explaining that he has to be careful; and Hopper is knocked out from behind.

The detective wakes up on the ground in a halo of car headlights, and promptly confesses to murdering Garza. His captors tell him that he certainly didn't kill the ADA, but that he won't find answers at the Santayana Club. Instead, he is advised to follow the trail that his father had been pursuing into the Contreras murder. The three men leave Hopper a knife to cut himself loose, but identify themselves only as "friends of [his] father."

The next morning, Hopper examines himself in Rita's bathroom, curtly telling her that nothing is wrong. She asks if he had a dream, and Hopper admits that he had a nightmare: "the worst ever." Later, outside the Santayana Club, Hopper calls his sister and leaves a message concerning their father and his old materials. Moments later, Jared spills out onto the sidewalk, and Hopper calls him to the truck, and the two flee the scene to visit the home of Alexander Forasz. Jared remains outside while Hopper questions Forasz about Detweiler, Jared's brother, and the Santayana Club, until Forasz confesses to having been Jared's surgeon.

Forasz explains that Jared had been a successful bond-trader until seizures from temporal lobe epilepsy made brain surgery necessary. The surgery, however, caused side effects including hallucinations, black-outs, and hyperactive episodes of déjà vu. Forasz explains that Jared's brother died from cancer more than a year ago, but that Jared doesn't remember because of the surgery; because of Jared's spotty memory and tendency to relive moments, Forasz claims that Jared believes he's at the center of a grand conspiracy with the surgeon as the ringleader. Hopper also learns that, short of seizures, an individual afflicted with such a condition probably wouldn't even know that they were sick.

Hopper returns to Jared and offers to take him to Forasz, who will explain everything to him. Jared hugs Hopper and thanks him for believing, since Jared had been alone for so long. He also apologizes for the way he treated the detective; but when he apologizes specifically for biting Hopper, an event which occurred on a previous loop of the same day, the detective realizes that Forasz may not have actually explained the truth.

[edit] Trivia

• This episode introduces the Santayana Club, named for Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who is famous for the quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." [1]
• Other members of the Santayana Club include Henry Davis, Kevin & Beverly Davis, Mark & Darlene Davis, Walter & Rachel Davis, Frank & Diane Dixon, Kenneth & Ann Dixon, and Patrick Dixon. The Board of Directors includes, among others, Robert Dominico, Winston Wells, Giselle Mack, Seth Bass, Alexander Forasz, and Alberto Garza. Membership file #467, however, appears to be missing.
• Had the series not been canceled this episode would have likely aired on December 20, 2006.