Daybreak Review: A Somewhat Enjoyable Tale of the Apocalypse
This review contains spoilers for Daybreak. If you haven’t watched the entire season, turn back now!
Netflix’s latest series, Daybreak, goes through some growing pains, but by the end, it manages to turn things around and becomes a decently enjoyable show. It’s not perfect, not by any means, but it does manage to get some stuff right.
The trick is getting past the beginning, which, let’s face it, is rough. Without this review hanging over my head, I would have stopped watching after Daybreak Season 1 Episode 1, “Josh vs. the Apocalypse: Part 1.”
One of the main problems with Daybreak is that it spends far too much of its energy trying to convince you that it’s funny and clever. It wants you to be in awe of its humor, its satire, and it’s so very obvious about it.
Don’t get me wrong, it does work at times, but those instances aren’t as enjoyable due to the abundances of instances where it doesn’t work.
The whole first episode is a great example of trying too hard. The Ferris Bueller homage drags on for far too long, never landing a solid laugh, and it’s so obvious the show is going to go there as soon as roll call starts. The golf team randomly rhyming is just that, random.
As the series progresses, it slowly starts to figure itself out, and the moments that work start to outweigh the eye-roll worthy moments.
What works is when Josh argues with the person behind the scenes right at the beginning of Daybreak Season 1 Episode 2, “Schmuck Bait!” The show is actually clever there. Angelica taking over and announcing she is switching to voiceover also works.
It’s fun and unexpected, and both moments tell you a good bit about Josh and Angelica without trying too hard.
Having each episode take on a different style brings some fun to Daybreak. Some work better than others — Mrs. Crumble’s sitcom loses its appeal after a bit — but overall, the various styles Daybreak takes on are some of the more enjoyable aspects of the show.
It’s an unusual and entertaining way to shake things up and reveal a bit more about the character who has taken over the episode. Finding out what style or which character is going to take over next becomes something to look forward to.
One of the main reasons that Daybreak gets more entertaining as it goes on is the relationships between the characters. Josh being alone for the majority of the premiere forces the show to lean on his voiceover, which is a bad move.
Once Daybreak is able to explore and dig into all these relationships, pre and post-apocalypse, it has something to focus on other than proving that it’s actually funny.
The reason the flashbacks actually work is that they give us a look into who everyone was before the bomb goes off. We see relationships that have fractured since the bomb, and we’re able to understand a bit better as to how everyone got to the place they are once we meet them.
The flashbacks deliver some great emotional moments, as well as some funny ones, like Eli running through all of Josh’s flashbacks.
The characters are truly where Daybreak shines. There’s just one exception — Sam.
Sam rejecting Josh makes sense (and thank GOD she dumps him), but the leader twist at the end doesn’t quite work. She takes on a darker tone as she sits on the throne, and it comes out of nowhere.
Part of that is because we still don’t really know her. We’ve mainly only seen Sam through Josh’s rose-colored glasses, and he views her as perfect. It’s not until Daybreak Season 1 Episode 8, “Post Mates,” that we are able to see more of who she actually is.
Sam declaring that the apocalypse is the best thing that’s ever happened to her doesn’t fit with what (little) we see of Sam in the apocalypse.
We see her cower in fear in a classroom in the background of Killigan’s video feed. Then we learn she’s tending a garden and feeding Turbo. Now, I’ve never been in an apocalypse before (and hope to never be), but those don’t sound like the best thing to ever happen to someone.
None of those scenes scream Queen Bee, but that’s what the finale expects us to believe.
What would have helped immensely is if we got to see an episode from Sam’s point of view. It would have allowed us to get to know the real Sam, not anyone else’s version of her, and it would have helped to fill in the gaps between the flashback Sam and the Sam that sits on that throne.
Overall, Daybreak isn’t the worst show you could binge on Netflix, if you can make it past the beginning. It shows us, at times, that the show that Daybreak is trying so desperately to be is in there. All it needs is to dial it back a ton and pick and choose its moments.
Stray Thoughts:
- Mrs. Crumble is definitely my favorite character.
- If there’s a season two, we better start to make some headway and figure out how this apocalypse got started and what exactly ghoulies (and Mrs. Crumble) are.
- Team KJ.
- So, Mavis is….a mannequin?
- I honestly don’t know how I feel about Turbo, but Mona is a BAMF.
What did you think of this episode of Daybreak? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Daybreak is currently streaming on Netflix.
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Allison Nichols
Allison is in a love affair with television that doesn't seem to be letting up anytime soon. Slightly damaged fictional characters are her weakness. She loves to spend her free time curled up with a cat and a show to binge-watch. Allison is a Tomatometer-approved critic (Rotten Tomatoes).
5 comments
I think not giving Sam her own episode was the point. It was trying to send a message about how women get romanticized or become manic pixie dream girls in shows like this.
It’s kind of clever, manipulating the audience subtlety to think Sam is one person but she’s actually someone else entirely—kind of drills it home when there’s the twist at the end and she’s like “I’m not your job to save.” Most of the audience falls for Joshs narration, forgetting he can be unreliable.
I think if they are given a season 2 they’ll give us way more of Sams POV. I didn’t like her from the start, but I appreciated what they were trying to do.
I agree and like what they were doing with Sam. I think if they ended it just with her saying no and doing something less drastic than her “takeover” I would’ve been okay with it. I don’t know. I just needed something more to buy the Queen Bee moment. Other than that, I really loved how they showed Sam to us, and how in episode 8 we really got to see how she was dying under the weight of the “perfect” label people, Josh included, had placed on her.
During Ep 8, I feel like we got enough of a sense of her that her saying “no” to Josh at the end made sense. It just feels like everything with her in the present (once we finally started seeing her in the present) didn’t line up with her ending, and some scenes of her are shown outside of the context of Josh’s POV, so something more could’ve been done. It felt like we caught a glimpse of her in Ep 8, and then we just went back to Josh’s version of her in the last two eps as if ep 8 almost never happened. And Episode 8 proved to me that Sam is a lot more interesting than Josh painted her out to be, and so I would’ve loved to see more of the real Sam.
Maybe it’s something that I wouldn’t have been as bothered by if I binged the first two seasons at once — like if I was able to watch that finale and immediately go into Season 2 where, as you said, they will hopefully give us a lot of Sam’s POV. As an ending, I was just left a little stunned.
I would like to know if Mavis is a mannequin or not
I for the most part enjoyed the show, but you’re spot on about Sam. I have a feeling that Season 2 will be/would be told from Sam’s POV, and maybe have some apocalypse flashbacks. But the ending’s sudden shift to portraying Sam as a villain is jarring.
I can also relate to Josh a LOT, which certainly didn’t help how I felt at the end of the season.
I have to agree. We did not have a Sam Dean point of view and Burr said she was the worst of them all. Does he know things we don’t? She says repeatedly you don’t know me. People did say her video was a thirst trap – so she may have been an attention seeking person.
There may be a darker side to Sam that has yet to be explored. After all, she was attracted to Hoyles.
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