Echoes (2022) follows the story of a pair of twin sisters who constantly switch places but when one of them goes missing, both their lives are flung into chaos. The series is streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Gina is a career woman in Los Angeles who is living a comfortable life along with her husband, Charlie. She spends a few days trying to get in touch with her twin sister, Leni, who is living in Mount Echo, Virginia.
Leni’s husband Jack finally calls Gina and tells her that Leni has gone missing. Gina rushes to Mount Echo and isn’t given the warmest of receptions because of a complicated past. She meets with the local authorities, Sheriff Floss and Deputy Paula.
Search parties head out into the woods to look for Leni but there is no sign of her. Gina seems to know more than she is letting on and leaves messages for her sister on an electronic calendar that they both share.
It is gradually revealed that Leni and Gina took advantage of the fact that no one could tell them apart to switch places consistently and live each other’s lives. So it is actually Gina who has gone missing and Leni is the one looking for her.
After following all the suspicious leads, Leni finds herself behind the waterfall that she and Gina were once trapped inside of. There is a change of clothes and Gina’s published book with the message that Leni now has the luxury of both lives because Gina has apparently run away.
Leni switches back to her own guise and spends the next few days playing the role of Gina and Leni so that she can find out why Gina disappeared. Through her investigation, she comes across Dylan James, Gina’s high school boyfriend who has now returned.
Leni goes up to him as Gina and plays along but he is aware of their switching arrangement and calls her out for trying to pull one over him and asks her where Gina is.
Leni learns that Gina planned on dropping everything and leaving with Dylan to start a new life but somehow lost her way and is now missing. She grabs the passports and cash that they had stashed when Dylan isn’t watching.
Leni continues to reach out to her sister through the calendar and she finally gets a response in the form of pictures of an old crime scene and a burnt dead body along with the messages “You killed him” and “Leave me alone”.
Gina tries to access some money from her bank account but Leni intercepts it because she has Gina’s ID. Upon reaching the bank, she sees Gina for the first time since arriving, running away with Dylan.
Meanwhile, looks into their past show that Leni and Gina often had arguments and that they had faced a lot of trauma in their lives.
Gina shows up at their birthday party that night to face everyone and things get heated between her and Leni. She leaves at the end of the night with the message that she doesn’t plan on coming back.
The next morning, Dylan’s body is found in his truck and it is burnt to a crisp. Sheriff Floss says that he was stabbed before that and died because of it rather than the fire.
She considers Jack and Leni as the prime suspects which worries them as they have had some trouble of their own recently. Jack is later arrested for Dylan’s murder as there is evidence that puts him at the scene.
Leni meets him at the station and they try to come up with a plan. Jack comes clean to Leni that he had boarded a stolen horse at their farm because they needed the money but when Gina tried to run away she let the horse loose and it was killed.
Gina ends up at the hospital but she runs away before Leni and their family can get there. She calls Leni and tells her that the people who stole the horse are after her and that’s why she ran.
Leni offers to help and suggests handing them the money that Gina tried to get from her account. Leni pays off the men and is headed back home when she’s pulled over by Sheriff Floss and arrested for Dylan’s murder.
At the station, there is evidence to prove that fact and that’s when Leni realizes that Gina is pinning the murder on her.
Gina narrates the story of how they started switching after their mother died because she was the only one who could tell them apart. They shared everything until Dylan walked into Leni’s life and made her believe she was her own person.
After they were involved in a church fire, Leni convinced Gina that she would be in trouble if she continued seeing Dylan but it is later revealed that she ran off Dylan too with the threat of arrest after an unlucky bystander died in the fire.
Gina eventually moved away and built a life for herself, even getting married to her former therapist, Charlie. But after suffering a miscarriage, Leni suggests switching places because she’s suffering from postpartum depression herself.
Gina gradually feels trapped in her own life as Leni gets more controlling and when she meets Dylan during her time in Mount Echo as Leni, she is inspired to carry out her plan of running away with him.
Floss interrogates both the sisters after arresting Gina for the murder of the man who died in the fire. Gina finally comes clean about them switching places every year and Floss is left with a conundrum since she can’t charge either of them without enough proof.
With their lives falling apart after their secret is now out in the open, there is still more tragedy to come in Leni and Gina’s lives.
Echoes (2022) ending explained in detail:
What happens to Leni and Gina’s father?
Victor was Leni and Gina’s father and he raised them and their older sister on his own after their mother died when they were younger. When Gina goes missing and Leni returns, all Victor wants is for his family to be together.
One night at dinner with Leni, he reveals that he’s got congestive heart failure and doesn’t have long to live.
A little while after the secret of their switching is out, Victor calls Leni and Gina to his house. Gina gets there first and finds him lying on the floor. He admits to something that he thinks she’ll understand and then breathes his last.
Leni arrives soon after and when she suggests working together to come up with a story explaining his death, Gina says that she’s had enough. They get into a fight which knocks over a candle and burns the house down after they manage to escape.
What does Leni want to protect Gina from?
Leni chases Gina into the woods and they end up at the top of a waterfall where Leni explains that the only reason she wanted to switch was to protect Gina from difficult situations and protect her.
She tells Gina that when they were children, she saw their father kill their mother. That’s when Gina understands her father’s last words and she tells Leni that they planned it that way.
Their mother was suffering from a sickness and she wanted to end the suffering but Leni saw this happen and couldn’t comprehend it, leading to all the bad decisions they made together.
Gina says that she’s done living this life dictated by Leni and throws herself off the cliff into the waterfall.
What happens to the sisters?
Now that Gina is presumed dead, Floss has her eyes on Leni and is certain that she’s hiding something. She says that since Leni denied entering the church all those years ago, if there was some evidence proving she was, it would convict her.
Paula finds a piece that broke off from Leni’s bracelet and meets with Leni in a diner. She hands her the evidence because Gina was nice to her when she first moved but it turns out to be a trap set by the police.
Leni sees through it and she slips through their fingers. She visits her daughter to say goodbye before heading to the airport. At the airport, one of the guards asks her if she came through there the previous day because she saw someone who looked exactly like her.
Floss returns to her office to find a USB stick, the same one that Gina had downloaded their electronic calendar onto and threatened to expose Leni with, confirming the possibility that Gina survived.
Charlie writes a book about his experiences with both sisters. Even though he married Gina, he figured out on his own that they were switching but he kept quiet and observed them.
During a book reading, a woman with dark glasses and a hat asks Charlie if Gina’s body was ever found, and Charlie says that it wasn’t.
He returns home to find one of the sisters waiting for him and shares a drink with her. He tells her that the glasses and the hat were a bit much and she says that she was waiting at his house for the past hour, implying that he was visited by both sisters.
He tells her that he will eventually find out which sister she is because he can tell and she tells him that she has some scores to settle so she thought she’d start with him.
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