Leap Day 1×07 Review: Episode 7

We are finally starting to get some answers, but are they ultimately worth the consequences?

Picking up from where we left off last week, Day, Night, and Dream are all looking for Ozone. Dream stays in the library in case he comes back. Night immediately goes to the security office to examine the CCTV footage. And Day tries calling Ozone’s phone while checking the location of his tracker. (Also, Ozone attempts to save himself.)

First off, props to everyone for maintaining relatively level heads in a crisis. They are obviously all anxious, but they take logical, measured steps in order to find out what happened to Ozone. In a lot of horror movies, people panic, and that leads to more issues. So it was very refreshing that somewhat cooler heads prevailed.

But something was going on with Dream. When she’s in the library, she gets a call from Night to meet them in the CCTV room. Before she leaves, she sees movement in the distance – what looks to be someone heading into the emergency stairwell. When she follows, she gets locked on the stairs. After a heart-pounding sequence, Night is able to get into the stairwell just as Dream slips and falls down the stairs.

She is OK, of course, but Night understandably freaks out and takes her to the infirmary. He wants to take her home, but when Day calls asking for help finding Ozone, she demands to be allowed to help. She points out that Night would still worry about her being home alone, so she might as well go with him and be where he can see her.

Can I just say how phenomenal Leap Day is at building suspense? The editing was spectacular, switching back and forth between two very tense situations – Night trying to get to Dream, and Day trying to track down Ozone. We were in each scenario long enough to feel the tension, but just when you thought something would happen, we flipped to the other location. So you were always on the edge of your seat.

Also, the music is fantastic. The score was unnerving, but it also uses the silence well. You get such a sense of dread and anxiety while you’re watching.

The most important thing about this episode is that we have at last learned the identity of the creepy dude, and how he is involved with everything. Creepy dude is named Kittiphob, and he was also born on February 29. He tells Ozone that he “shares his Leap Day fate” with Professor Wiwat, and they were once friends.

Honestly, this opens up so many more questions. Do these February 29 birthdays only come in pairs? Is it really so uncommon to be born on February 29? (I looked it up, and there are approximately 5 million people born on February 29. Considering there are more than 7 billion people on this planet, I’d say it’s fairly likely that yeah, there are only these two guys with that birthday in all of Thailand.)

Anyway, it turns out Kittiphob really is trying to help, even if he’s going about it the complete wrong way. Abducting Ozone is not going to make anyone listen to you, and given the events of the episode, it may have actually caused the very thing he was trying to prevent. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Kittiphob is clearly trying to expose Wiwat. I’m fairly positive it’s him who left the threatening letter Wiwat was looking at in his office. He left Day’s mother’s medical report for them to find. He has a truly impressive collection of newspaper clippings (but disappointingly no murderboard). I think if he had tried to approach them normally, it would have worked out much better.

The problem is that he insists that his information is only for Day. That’s why he’s apparently been stalking Ozone. Someone had the theory that, just as Wiwat somehow passed his curse on to Day, Kittiphob passed his on to Night. Perhaps in the same manner (directly or indirectly killing someone), which he now feels guilty about. It would explain why he doesn’t want to tell Night anything.

I don’t know why he left the envelope at Night’s house if he didn’t want him involved, unless it was because of his connection to Wiwat. (That’s how Day was able to confront him.) But the reason he went after Ozone is likely because he wants to know whatever Ozone knows, because I think we all know at this point that Ozone probably knows something more than he’s telling.

In fact, while unconscious in Kittiphob’s place (actually… was it his apartment? I have a lot of questions), he has another dream about Night dying. This dream was so vivid and so plausible that I legitimately thought it was real for a moment. I was very relieved when we saw Ozone wake up, even if he was restrained, with duct tape on his mouth.

Unfortunately, that was short-lived relief. Ozone is able to secretly grab his phone and call Day, and when Kittiphob discovers the open line, he lets Ozone go. I knew, as soon as Ozone started running down the stairs in a way that mirrored his dream exactly, that we were about to see something bad. I suspected that Ozone would also recognize the events and try to prevent them, and he did. But they still happened, just different.

In Ozone’s dream, he escaped Kittiphob and ran outside, where he saw Day, Night, and Dream across the street. But Kittiphob had followed him, and Night went to go help, only to be hit by a car. (Do y’all remember the scene in Final Destination where the girl gets hit by the bus? It very much reminded me of that.) In reality, once Ozone realizes that his dream is coming true, he tries to stop Night from crossing the street. Sadly, it’s Dream who does, and she is then hit by a car.

I was expecting it and I was still shocked. It was so sudden and visceral. And the episode ends there, with Ozone screaming and Dream bleeding in the street.

Now, there are a couple of things I want to talk about. One is the continued issues with technology that seem to surround Kittiphob. The security camera at Night’s house glitched when he was on screen, seemingly covering up his dropping off the envelope. Ozone’s tracking app kept malfunctioning, showing his position moving all over the place once Day had finally tracked him down to a general area. And while it may be unrelated, the flickering lights when Dream was in the emergency stairwell are too much of a coincidence to ignore. (It couldn’t have been Kittiphob, but it’s all very curious.)

Is that supernatural? Or is it something else? Or am I just reading too much into things?

The other is, honestly, the Wiwat of it all. He ends up in the same area as the kids. I thought perhaps he lived in the area (I first thought maybe that was his apartment, because Kittiphob didn’t seem to live there), but I’ve seen some people theorize that he was following Kittiphob. (He did, after all, see Kittiphob with Ozone on campus. I’m still not sure whether or not that was intentional on Kittiphob’s part.) And I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I think he was the one who hit Dream with his car. It wasn’t clear, but everyone else seems to have arrived at the same conclusion, so I think that’s what we’re meant to assume.

If he did hit Dream, why? Is it because he knew that Kittiphob was trying to share what he knows, and he wanted to distract them? Is he trying to isolate or manipulate Night in some way?

The trailer for next week’s episode looks insane, though I try not to put much stock in episode promos, as they are often deliberately misleading. Still, I am very impressed with how good Leap Day is at building a suspenseful story. The editing, the music, and the pacing are all working perfectly. And of course, the acting is top-notch. Gun was exceptionally amazing in this episode.

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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