Leap Day 1×04 Review: Episode 4

Curiouser and curiouser! They’re giving us hints and clues drop by drop and teaching us that we can’t necessarily trust what we’re being told. But every new piece of information just adds to the mystery!

Day (with Ozone) and Night (with Dream) once again are on the same wavelength and end up visiting their families’ graves at the same time. As we saw in the first episode, the memorials are on opposite sides of the same wall. So when Day calls Night, even though Night hangs up on him, Day hears the phone ring and finds him in the cemetery. He once again tries to convince Night that they need to work together, but Night refuses to hear it.

I can see both sides of this argument. If you’re a person who believes in curses and bad luck – and are apparently the victim of both – then it makes sense you would not want to do anything to compound that. Two unlucky people aren’t necessarily going to cancel each other out; they’re just as likely to magnify the bad luck. This is Night’s position, and considering he’s not only lost family members, but a girlfriend and a pet as well, I can understand why he’s wary of believing Day.

But Day also makes a lot of sense. I would also be focusing on the fact that for the first time since they were born, they didn’t lose anyone on their birthday, even if it looked that way for a while. And to have it happen on a day you just so happen to meet a person who shares the same fate, something like that would be extremely difficult for me to ignore. I would also believe that something happened for a reason, especially given everything that Day and Ozone experienced leading up to the accident in the first place.

When Day implies that everyone with a February 29 birthday must have the same curse, Night tells him that he has a professor who shares their birthday, and he has a family. Day suggests he may have found a way to fix whatever afflicts them. I suspect Day is on to something. As I mentioned last week, when Night talked to Professor Wiwat, it was clear that the professor was playing dumb. That was before that awful flashback.

Let’s talk about the flashback. Even though he’s resolved to ignore Day, Night does start to question if Wiwat was telling the truth. He and Dream decide that the best course of action is to talk to people close to Wiwat, rather than try and get Wiwat to talk. Since it’s clear that he has no intention of doing so.

What they discover is what we saw in the flashback last week. Wiwat was delivering a baby – on February 29 – and the mother died. It was quite the scandal, as it’s implied he was negligent due to fatigue, and the hospital hushed it up. He stopped work as an obstetrician after, and shifted towards his academic career. This happened about twenty years ago, which means that – as I posited last week – the woman who died was probably either Day’s or Night’s mother.

However, we know that it doesn’t seem to have been negligence. I was so confused by the flashback when we saw it last week because a) we didn’t know who the woman or the baby was at the time and b) Wiwat was so emotionless when she died, almost as if he were expecting it. He doesn’t react at all the way you hope a competent doctor would, and rush to try to save his patient. He essentially just lets her die.

Now I have to wonder, is that how you break the curse? Do you have to kill someone? (And if he had intervened, could he have saved her, or would the curse have killed her anyway?)

Side note: I have to admit, I legitimately cackled during the scene where Dream was interrogating Win. When she blurted out that she had a crush on Wiwat as an excuse for asking Win all of these questions, I burst out laughing. But it worked! It got Win to spill the tea, and confirm what they had already learned, that Wiwat killed a woman. Night coming in and laying it on thick with the “teerak” was also hilarious, as was Win’s reaction when they left.

Everyone made it through Leap Day, but that doesn’t mean they’re safe, as Day and Ozone discover quite abruptly. When they’re eating dinner, Ozone suddenly chokes, and then spits out a worrying amount of blood, along with a razor blade that somehow ended up in his food. Day rushes him to the hospital, but because he’s underage and Ozone is autistic, they have to call someone from social services to make sure that Ozone is safe. It is very suspicious, after all, that a razor ended up in Ozone’s dinner.

I mean, props to the hospital for having procedures in place for domestic violence victims, although I suspect someone actually perpetrating domestic violence would react very differently. But you can pry these two and their ridiculously adorable relationship from my cold, dead hands. And the scene where the social workers were interviewing Ozone, and he listed all the stuff Day does for him, was just too sweet. They’ve come a long way in four years.

It is this incident that convinces Night that Day may have a point. Night just happens to be at the hospital, interviewing an old classmate of his who was close to Wiwat, when Day brings Ozone in. The thought that even surviving Leap Day may not be enough to save Dream goes a long way in swaying Night they should try to investigate the curse. Interestingly, although he is keeping a closer eye on Dream, nothing happens to her like what happened to Ozone.

Another piece to the puzzle is the mysterious stranger who suddenly seems to be following the boys. He’s at the cemetery, spying on Ozone and Dream. He’s watching Ozone and Day when they’re in the library. He’s at the library again, later in the episode, only this time, Ozone spots him.

Given how closely he seems to be following Ozone, in particular, one has to wonder if he was somehow responsible for the razor blade. We don’t know who this mysterious stranger is, but he’s paired with the professor in the opening credits. Some are speculating that this guy and Wiwat are like Day and Night, in that they are both February 29 babies trying to break their curse. Is this guy trying to kill Ozone to save his own loved ones? 

But then, why Ozone? And why now? Does Ozone know something, even if he doesn’t know that he knows it? He draws the mysterious man in the final scene, and then crumples up the drawing. The man has obviously scared him, but his reaction when he saw him in the library gave me pause. Did the man just give him bad vibes, or has he seen him before?

I just have so many questions!

Author: Jamie Sugah

Jamie has a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from The Ohio State University. She self-published her first novel, The Perils of Long Hair on a Windy Day, which is available through Amazon. She is currently an archivist and lives in New York City with her demon ninja vampire cat. She covers television, books, movies, anime, and conventions in the NYC area.

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