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What do I know about this series going into it?
I have heard of it, but I know nothing at all about it. I think it involves murder?
Previously On
A surprise party held in the Lost Woods Resort. Somebody’s mother is in prison. A woman punches another woman. Somebody has a headache while looking in a mirror, but it’s not a mirror – it’s her evil twin looking at her from the other side of a pane of glass.
Recap
An Officer Maple warns two women that “Mary Drake” has escaped from prison. The women are worried: their friend is getting married today, and Mary Drake is presumably targeting them.
The evil twin from the Previously says hi to “Ezra”. I know she’s the evil twin and not the good twin because of the sinister music and the immediate cut to the opening credits.
After the credits, the good twin wakes up in a high-tech prison with sliding doors and keycodes, and the evil twin is there. So was the one who said hi to Ezra a third twin, er, a triplet? The evil twin begins to tell the good twin her life story.
A flashback: A man approaches a bartender he recognizes, and calls her “Spencer”. The bartender is confused: My name’s not Spencer. He’s certain she’s joking or lying, but eventually realizes she’s telling the truth. She is Alex Straight, and he is Very Confused.
Back to the cell: the evil twin says this was the first time she discovered the existence of the good twin. “I didn’t know about you, or Charlotte, or Mary Drake.” Are they quadruplets, then? Let’s list them: 1) Spencer, being held captive; 2) Alex, the former bartender holding Spencer captive; 3) Charlotte, who Alex says is dead; 4) Mary Drake, who approached Ezra in the opening scene.
And then Alex mentions a Melissa. So there are five? Is this a sci-fi show with a cloning plot?
A series of additional flashbacks show various times that Alex has impersonated Spencer over the course of the series. Alex is from London, Spencer is from the US, and the actress changes accents depending which character she is (or which character the character she is is pretending to be). Alex-as-Spencer interacts with numerous characters I don’t recognize, including sleeping with “Toby”.
In another flashback, Alex forces the guy from the bar, named Wren, to shoot her so she can mimic a gunshot wound Spencer presumably has. She needs to impersonate Spencer so she can be accepted into Spencer’s friend group - not for any particular purpose, but as her end goal in itself. Back in the cell, she reveals that she has since killed Wren and turned his ashes into a diamond, which she wears around her neck.
A bit more gloating, and Alex leaves to attend the wedding. The bride is “Aria”, her friends are Em, Spencer (actually Alex in disguise), and two others. No, three others, as someone else comes in holding a baby. No, two others; that last is an older woman named Pam Fields, not strictly a member of the friend group.
Meanwhile, Spencer is visited in her cell by Other Woman. Alex is holding Other Woman captive too, but trusts her enough to allow her to roam free in the prison. But Spencer doesn’t trust Other Woman at all, even though the latter took the fall for when Spencer and her friend group murdered “Archie”.
Other Woman tells her story in flashbacks, and it turns out this isn’t a cloning plot: she is the nurse who delivered Spencer and Alex, who were twins. But the mother didn’t know she was carrying twins, so the nurse kidnapped the second child, Alex, and sent her to a wealthy family in the UK, who promptly abandoned the child at an orphanage.
This doesn’t explain where the other 3-4 copies of this woman came from, though.
Back in the present, the nurse hugs Spencer, saying “I’m your mother,” which confuses me further.
At the wedding, Ezra is missing, and Aria is panicking. No, not just missing: he sent a text to say he’s not coming. Aria believes this is because of a fight they had the night before. We, of course, can guess that Mary kidnapped him and sent the text, working with Alex to ruin Aria’s wedding. And in fact we then see Ezra in the cell across from Spencer, which she somehow entirely failed to notice over the last n hours.
I’m starting to suspect that it was Alex who approached Ezra, and that Mary is just one of Alex’s aliases. If that’s the case, maybe there really are only the twins, Alex and Spencer, and I’ve severely misunderstood the references to Charlotte and Melissa and Jessica.
With the wedding now called off, Alex returns to the prison to gloat more. Spencer tries to convince Alex to just repent, promising she’ll be accepted into the friend group “like Mona was”, but Alex doesn’t just want to have friends. She wants to entirely replace Spencer and have Specncer’s boyfriend Toby to herself.
Alex explains a bit more of the plot, but this is way too many names in a row! Jenna and Sydney and Noel and Sara Harvey and oh my God I have no idea what is going on.
Aha. A flashback to an airport clarifies something important: Charlotte is not another Spencer clone or triplet but rather her and Alex’s sister. Charlotte had found out about the existence of her sister Alex in something called the “Radley file”, met Alex in the airport, and they became close friends along with Alex’s love interest Wren and Charlotte’s love interest Archie (Archer?). For some reason, though, Charlotte determinedly kept Alex and Spencer apart – until Charlotte died.
Her gloating done, Alex tells Spencer that she’s not planning on killing her because she’s family, but she is going to kill Ezra. As a classic villain, though, she doesn’t do this right away, though; first she returns to Spencer’s friend group and goes to sleep in a bed next to them, creepily stroking one’s hair and saying, “I think we’ll be the closest”.
Alex wakes up early to secretly try to ride Spencer’s horse, but the horse knows she isn’t Spencer and goes nuts. A man – Toby? – catches her but she makes the excuse that the horse is in a bad mood.
Meanwhile, the rest of the friend group are still trying to contact Ezra with no luck. But then there’s a knock on the door: a guy in a ridiculous costume is here to collect Mrs. Fitz (Aria’s intended married name) for a balloon ride. The friends ask when the ride was booked: the morning of the wedding, after Ezra and Aria fought! Ezra was still planning on getting married!
The guy who saw Spencer with the horse does some hacking and finds that Ezra hasn’t used his credit cards at all since they last saw him. Then Toby shows up and delivers a finding of his own: Spencer gave him a book as a present, but she was always writing notes in the book and those notes are missing, so it’s not the same copy of the book. So now they’ve figured it out: someone’s been impersonating Spencer.
Based on this conversation I’m now thinking Mary isn’t Alex’s alias but rather Charlotte’s twin.
As the friend group are working this out, and realizing Spencer must have an evil twin (while lampshading how ridiculous the idea is), we see somebody spying on them through a hidden camera. This somebody makes a phone call and tells Alex that it’s time for plan B: Alex will kill Spencer to make sure the others don’t find her. Mother/Nurse tries to dissuade Alex, but the latter knocks her out with a punch to the face.
Then the woman who made the call meets with the friend group and tells them the truth, giving them the coordinates of where Spencer and Ezra are being held. I don’t get it; whose side is she on?
Meanwhile, Spencer picks the lock of her cell using a hairpin we saw her steal earlier from Mother/Nurse, then frees Ezra as well. They flee to what they think is outdoors – but it’s a fake painted ceiling with projections and recorded sounds. There’s no way out. Alex changes the projection from day to night, knocks Ezra out, and attacks Spencer with an axe.
Just then the rest of the friend group arrives, separating the two at gunpoint.7 And of course both women claim to be Spencer. It should be ridiculously easy for the real one to just say any random fact about their friendship that Alex won’t know (“We saw The Avengers at the cinema on Maple Street on a Tuesday”), but instead Toby dramatically approaches one of Spencers, hugs her, and asks what her favorite poem is from the book she gave him. The other Spencer answers, and Toby tightens his grip on the first one so that she can’t get away. Conveniently and immediately, the police show up, take Alex into custody, and say they caught Mary Drake a few blocks away. (She was the big threat and she didn’t even show up on screen?)
Aria and Ezra get married. During the cliched “speak now and forever hold your peace” some idiot’s phone rings, which is actually pretty funny, but the wedding continues without a hitch.
In the denouement, Aria’s getting ready to leave on her honeymoon. And Hanna, whoever Hanna is, reveals that she’s pregnant.
Finally, we’re in a shop in Paris. The shopkeeper, who I think is the woman who changed sides, closes up at the end of the day and goes downstairs to a dollhouse. Behind the dollhouse is a window, which brightens to reveal Mother/Nurse and Alex imprisoned behind it; they identify the shopkeeper as Mona.
Unresolved questions
Why did Alex want to ruin Aria’s wedding? Why did she want to kill Ezra? How did either of these actions further her plan to take Spencer’s place in the friend group?
How did Mona get custody of Mother/Nurse and Alex from the police? How did she smuggle them overseas? What is she planning on doing with them?
How many more evil twins are out there?
What were the motivations of that woman who called Alex but also told the friend group where to find Spencer? (Was that in fact Mona or have I confused two characters?)
Ratings
Story: 4/10. A by-the-numbers “evil twin replaces the good one” plot. Bog-standard plots usually deserve a 5 by definition; I’m docking a point because the writers’ reliance on convenient coincidences actively created some plot holes.
Writing: 3/10. Lazy writing throughout. A villain needs to take evil actions to create drama, but Alex’s actions didn’t match her claimed (if hazy) motivations. The writers used lazy 80s-era writing tricks to make Alex easy to defeat, like deciding to kill Ezra but not just yet, and attacking Spencer with an axe rather than the gun we know she has. They also relied way too heavily on the villain monologue to give us her backstory – something that could have and should’ve been revealed slowly over the course of five episodes or five seasons. They tried, bless them, to mitigate the effect by showing most of the story in flashbacks, but it didn’t help as much as they hoped.
Production: 5/10. Very little stood out, for good or for ill, with regards to the acting or the score. The split-screen work on the twins was fine, but I strongly suspect that they made it nighttime for the confrontation just so they wouldn’t need to invest in special effects for the hand-to-hand fighting. Come on, people, it’s the series finale! If there were one episode where you invested the money and effort in a two-Spencer fight where you can clearly see both of their faces, it should’ve been this one!
Characterization: 2/10. Only three characters had screentime: Spencer, Alex, and Mother/Nurse. Of those, Alex is the only one whose character is explored – and she turns out to be a fairly cookie-cutter villain, complete with villainous monologuing, not killing the good guy when she has him in her clutches, and deviating from her goals in order to do extra evil things for evil’s sake. It’s clear that the friend group were supposed to be the main characters, but they did so little in this episode that I know absolutely nothing about them. I don’t even know two of their names!
Clarity: 3/10. I don’t always issue this disclaimer, but I feel the need to this time: Clarity is a measure of how easily a newcomer could understand the finale – not a measure of episode quality.
With that in mind, this finale was nearly opaque. Despite the simplicity of the plot, I found myself drowning in the flood of references to people and organizations that weren’t strictly relevant to the episode. And the glass-and-metal-and-keycode nature of Spencer’s prison led me down a scifi rabbit hole from which it took me two-thirds of the episode to emerge.
Closure: 6/10. Three characters got closure of some sort: Spencer defeated the evil twin that she’s been fighting for years, Aria got married, and Hanna is pregnant. I’m being generous in including the last one, because in fiction a pregnancy begins a stressful plotline just as often as it concludes a happy one. Usually that depends on who the father is (and whether the mother knows who the father is) – and in this case I don’t have a clue, considering how little Hanna appeared in the episode.
With 40% of the friendgroup entirely untouched and unmentioned throughout this episode, that means they either got their closure two episodes earlier (one episode earlier isn’t likely, since this episode is Part 2) or the series just left whatever plot threads they had dangling. Either that or they’re Advertised Extras, the Mayweather of the group: theoretically a main character, but in practice just hanging around the background for seven seasons.
Do I want to watch the series now?
Based on this episode, no. But I get the feeling it isn’t very representative of the series in general, laser-focused as it was on only one main character and spending all of its time on an extended infodump.
This is perfect 😂
Next do Curb!!!