echoes netflix ending gina leni book

Here’s Exactly What Happened At The End Of ‘Echoes’ On Netflix

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Another binge-worthy thriller series dropped on Netflix over the weekend and this one might be the streaming platform’s kookiest yet.

Echoes follows the story of identical twins — small town mother Leni and big city novelist Gina (both played by Michelle Monaghan) — from Mount Echoe in West Virginia, whose lives are rocked when one of the sisters disappears.

But is it Leni or Gina who has gone missing and what is she running from? These are questions Sheriff Floss seeks to uncover, along with why every time these sisters get in trouble, someone ends up burned to death in a firey blaze.

The seven-episode limited series is sitting at number one of Australian Netflix and for good reason: it’s not just super addictive viewing, it’s also low-key bonkers. There are constant twists and turns, making it the perfect thriller to binge on a lazy Sunday.

FYI: It difficult to go on without dropping some major spoilers. If you want to watch the series with fresh eyes then I’d recommend exiting this browser window now. 

The series begins with Leni going missing, prompting her city slicker sister Gina to return to her hometown to find her. However, we soon learn that Gina is Leni which means Gina is the one who’s missing.

You see, these sisters are weird. They swap lives every year on their birthday: Gina has a turn being married to Leni’s husband Jack (Matt Bomer), raising Leni’s daughter Mattie while working on a small town horse ranch, while Leni gets a taste of Los Angeles life, working as a writer while living large in a mansion with her psychologist husband, Charlie (Daniel Sunjata).

Yep, this means they’re constantly having sex with each other’s husbands. Super normal! Nothing to see here!

If this wasn’t a big enough twist, just wait until episode five when the entire story is turned on its head. The series up until this point is told from Leni’s perspective who is constantly positioned as the ‘good sister’ to Gina’s ‘troubled sister’ character: after all, Gina had been the sister who paralysed their older sibling, Claudia, when they were kids and Gina had been suspected of starting a fire that killed a man.

But hold up, episode five tells a vastly different story. It turn out that Gina spent her childhood years covering for Leni and wearing all the blame. Even in adulthood, Gina lived in Leni’s shadow under constant surveillance and control. Gina fleeing town and trying to start a new life wasn’t just another careless decision the twin was making: she was trying to escape Leni. Plot! Twist!

The series comes to a climax when Leni and Gina face-off and it ends with Gina jumping into a massive waterfall. While some assume she died, when Leni went to an airport with plans to flee to Australia — after she was left disgraced when the twins’ life-swapping antics were exposed — she was told by an airport security guard that someone that looked like her had already passed through. Gina must be alive.

The series ends with Charlie doing a book reading for a new novel he penned based on the twins, and during a Q&A, either Leni or Gina appears to ask about what happened to Gina’s body. In the following scene when Charlie returns to his LA home, either Leni or Gina is waiting for him and they have no recollection of the book reading, suggesting the other sister attended it.

But which one is which? This is a question that’s plagued viewers with the ending left intentionally ambiguous. Luckily for us, executive producer and co-showrunner, Brian Yorkey, and lead actress, Monaghan, gave an interview to confirm which twin is which. “Gina’s at the book reading,” Monaghan told The Wrap. Yorkey agreed, adding that they decided who was who “for Michelle’s sake, and for the sake of, you know, the production team… So Gina is at the book reading.”

Does this mean Leni is at the end with Charlie, or were they both Gina? “I think it’s Leni,” Michelle pondered, but Yorkey offered a more definitive, “It’s Leni with Charlie at the end.”

Well, that’s that then! It’s rare with these kinds of one season thrillers that the viewer gets any kind of clarity over the cliffhanger endings, so this is a refreshing change.

As far as a potential Season 2 goes, Yorkey hasn’t ruled it out. “Netflix and the audience will decide whether the show wants another season,” he said in the same The Wrap interview. “We’ve been pitching each other Season 2 since even before we started choosing shooting Season 1 because these women are fascinating and this situation is super tangled… there are threads to follow. There is this very, very sweet girl [Mattie] who they both really really love, and Jack very angrily shut her two mothers out”.

The executive producer also floated the idea of Floss spin-off and I’m about it. “We want Sheriff Floss to have her own show. Like it’s called Floss Daily. And she just goes around the South solving crimes and bringing people to justice, and, you know, having snacks,” he joked.

Sign me TF up!

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Echoes can be streamed on Netflix.