Warning: This post contains spoilers for 56 Days.
Based on Catherine Ryan Howard’s best-selling 2021 novel of the same name, the Prime Video series 56 Days jumps back and forth across the titular timespan to unravel the connection between Ciara Wyse (Dove Cameron) and Oliver Kennedy (Avan Jogia), from when they first meet, seemingly by chance, at a supermarket to two months later, when police find a dead body police decomposing in Oliver’s apartment.
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The eight episode adaptation, now streaming, changes the setting of Howard’s erotic thriller from pandemic-era Dublin to present-day Boston, eliminating COVID lockdowns as a plot point. However, the show still largely follows the overall trajectory of the novel—up until its drastically different ending.
Created by showrunner duo Karyn Usher and Lisa Zwerling (The Rook), the TV adaptation of 56 Days concludes with love winning out over revenge, a twist on the source material that reframes the book’s central relationship. The series traces the progression of the intense and fast-moving romance between Ciara and Oliver, both of whom are ultimately revealed to have been concealing their true identities.
Who are Oliver and Ciara, really?
Oliver, whose real last name is St. Ledger, is the uber-wealthy son of a billionaire venture capitalist who has been using a pseudonym to hide from his dark past. We learn that, in high school, Oliver (played as a teen by Kingston Rumi Southwick) and his best friend, Shane Martin (Sam Warnock), were both involved in the murder of their classmate, Paul Sparling (Aidan Ledingham), in their hometown of Narragansett, R.I. When Oliver and Shane were hanging out by the river one afternoon, Paul showed up and instigated a fight with Shane. Fearing for his friend’s life, Oliver pulled Paul off of Shane and subsequently held him underwater until he drowned. The two boys felt they had acted in self-defense and initially planned to lie to avoid blame. But after a guilt-stricken Oliver confessed to his father, he was persuaded to pin the murder on Shane in order to get out of dodge.
In the days after the murder, a counselor at the boys’ school named Dan Troxler (Patch Darragh) took notice of Oliver spiraling and used his background as a social worker to insert himself into Oliver’s life, learn the details of what really happened, and begin blackmailing Oliver’s father into compensating him as Oliver’s extravagantly overpaid therapist. When Oliver attempted to write a letter that would absolve Shane, Troxler kept it to himself and instead visited Shane in prison to goad him into committing suicide. Following Shane’s death, Troxler worked to ensure he would continue profiting off the St. Ledger family by feeding into Oliver’s paranoia in order to maintain his hold over him.
So how does Ciara connect to all this? She’s actually Shane’s younger sister, Megan Martin. She tracked down Oliver and infiltrated his life with the express goal of making him pay for Shane’s suicide and the debilitating damage it did to her family. Except, she ended up falling in love with Oliver and eventually realized she no longer wanted to exact her vengeance. After the two confessed everything to each other and Ciara convinced Oliver he no longer needed his creep of a therapist, Troxler showed up at Oliver’s apartment and threatened to expose Oliver’s crimes using the letter he wrote as a teen and years of recordings from their sessions. This prompted Ciara to bash Troxler over the head with a sculpture from Oliver’s apartment, killing him.
How does 56 Days end?
With the help of Ciara’s sister Shyla (Megan Peta Hill), Oliver and Ciara stage what they believe to be the perfect crime scene. Jumping ahead to the present-day investigation, detectives Lee Reardon (Karla Souza) and Karl Connolly (Dorian Missick) then decide to use the ambiguity of the evidence to frame a local drug dealer with whom Lee has fallen down a dark rabbit hole of a bribery-laced affair for Troxler’s murder.
While Oliver seems to consider confessing to his crimes and even shows up at the police station, in the end, he chooses to jet off into the sunset with Ciara. This is a significant deviation from what happens in the novel, in which the character of Troxler doesn’t even exist. Instead, Oliver is ultimately revealed to not only be a cold-blooded killer who intentionally murdered Paul, but also as the dead body in the apartment. In the book, when Ciara learns the truth about Oliver’s sadistic nature and Shane’s innocence, she kills her already incapacitated lover by drowning him in the shower and then tries to make it look like a self-inflicted accident caused by drug abuse. Although there is some evidence suggesting Oliver’s death wasn’t of his own making, Lee and Karl aren’t able to solve the mystery and Ciara gets off scot free.
But in the show, both Ciara and Oliver get their happily ever after: In the closing scene, which takes place sometime in the future, the couple is living in a tropical paradise with their baby, named Shane in honor of Ciara’s late brother.
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