Echoes is about twins. One is good, one is bad. They swap identities regularly so you never know if you’re looking at the good one or the bad one. The series was created by Vanessa Gazy and used all women directors.
In Echoes, the adult versions of both Gina and Leni were played by Michelle Monaghan. The twins were shown at various ages in life changing circumstances that revealed early on who the actual bad character was. That’s when they started switching places. Only their mother could tell them apart and she died early in their childhoods. Even the girls’ father, Victor (Michael O’Neill), couldn’t keep them straight.
This series was overly impressed with how clever and confusing it was. It meant to make it hard to know which twin you were seeing, and it succeeded. In episode 5 (of 7) things were finally explained in a logical sort of order to help make sense of everything. Prior to that it was an exercise in frustration.
The role swapping that began as children continued into adulthood. Every year on their birthday, the twins changed lives. That included husbands. Jack (Matt Bomer) was Leni’s husband. Gina was married to Charlie (Daniel Sunjata). That also included a mother swap to Jack and Leni’s daughter.
There were murders, fires, horse thefts, drug sales, and all kinds of mysterious events surrounding the twins. One twin pushed their elder sister Claudia (Ali Stoker) off a building and she was in a wheelchair afterwards. The series was very sly about letting you know who was responsible for what.
Gina (or was it Leni) wanted to run away from it all with her high school boyfriend Dylan (Jonathan Tucker).
Sheriff Floss (Karen Robinson) and her deputy Paula (Rosanny Zayas) investigated the various crimes the twins may or may not have been responsible for – some of them going back decades. The Sheriff was a sort of female Columbo with an aw-shucks demeanor and a mind like a steel trap. The deputy was good friends with Leni (or was it Gina).
The twists and surprises continued right up to the last second. Always the unexpected. The way it ended leaves open the possibility of a second season, although I don’t think one has been approved at this point.
The women directing this Netflix series were Kat Candler, Li Lu, Anna Mastro, and Valerie Weiss.
i’m a big fan of Michelle Monaghan. i think she is underrated. but i didnt enjoy this series. the characters consistently made decisions that defied reason, even when it was clear that liberty interests, if not lives, were at stake.
I thought it was deliberately confusing , which irritated me.