YMMV / Daybreak (2019)

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Sam Dean. Genuine Nice Girl who's only doing what she believes she must to help as many people as possible survive? Manipulative Bitch using everyone around her to advance her own agenda? Or exactly what she claims: just a teenage girl trying to figure out who she really is? Perhaps best exemplified when she insists in taking on Burr herself while Josh rescues Ms. Crumble. Did she really believe it was her responsibility to fix her own mistake, or did she just think it would look good on her resume for Glendale's Overlord?
  • Sam and Josh as a couple. How do they really feel about each other? How much is Josh genuinely in love with Sam, versus how much is he in love with the idea of Sam? She's right that he doesn't really know her, but she's hardly an open book (and tends to deflect his genuine attempts to get to know her). Given more time and less stress to process, would he have been okay with Sam's sexual history, or still considered her pedestal broken? What did Sam want out of her relationship with Josh? Did she even know? Why did she fail to communicate her expectations of what they were to each other? Were her attempts to push him out of his comfort zone with exotic food and kinky sex her trying to deepen him as a person, or just messing with him for amusement?
• Complete Monster: Baron Triumph, actually Principal Burr, is introduced as a cannibalistic warlord roaming the post-apocalyptic lands, capturing teenagers to serve as slave labor under the threat of death, and keeping the rest as cattle for him. Before the apocalypse, Burr manipulated Ms. Crumble in her moments of emotional weakness to have sex with him. In the season finale, after he takes over the jocks through a coup, Burr claims to be helping them to go back to "normalcy" only to show his true colors when he turns all the Jocks into his new food supply. His true vileness is shown in the last episode when he reveals his ultimate plan: to detonate an inactive nuke to destroy all that's left of Glendale and start anew in a world fit to his image. When he's finally defeated for good, it's revealed that he never cared for any of the kids at the school even before the apocalypse, doing everything for entirely selfish reasons. With any of his supposed good qualities being all an act with ulterior intentions, Triumph proved himself to be an irredeemable monster from beginning to end, willing to do anything to get his way.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Angelica and Wesley faking Sam's death to ensure Josh stays with them. While it's genuinely heartbreaking to see Josh believe that the girl he loves is dead, the scene also manages to be hilarious with Angelica's Internal Monologue revealing how utterly unrepentant she is at manipulating Josh.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • Episode 6 gives some increased depth to Turbo Bro Jock, a brutish warlord post-apocalypse and a Jerk Jock before it. It reveals he genuinely loved Wesley and was a "Well Done, Son" Guy to his ultra-humanitarian father who neglected his personal life.
  • Episode 9 gives this to Eli, who previously had been a Hate Sink.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The fashion-obsessed Disciples of Kardashia and Down on the Farm 4-H Club both get interesting introductions in the second episode but are Hufflepuff House factions afterward, when some fans would have liked seeing more of their culture and interactions with their peers.
• The Woobie: Ms Crumble. Before the bombs fell, she was a well-meaning and genuinely great teacher who cared for her students, and struggled with the fact she was limited in how much she could help them. However, students tormented her until she burst into tears in front of them, prompting them to nickname her 'Ms Crumble', which other teachers and parents began calling her. Some particularly cruel students even hacked the school network to change her name there (and rigged it to revert back every time she tried to fix it), and as a result she was unable to cash her paychecks until she was forced to legally change her name to Crumble. After all this, Burr took advantage of her low self-esteem to have sex with her, as well as manipulated her to help him with his bribes-for-grades scheme. When she found out, he pushed her down some stairs during the resulting scuffle and she suffered a traumatic brain injury, resulting in her fractured psyche. Now, she's trapped between being a Ghoulie, with a strong desire to eat children, and what's left of her broken human mind, who understandably doesn't want to do that, but can't control her painful cravings.