Echoes

Echoes starts with promise upon which it doesn't deliver.

By design, the series makes it impossible to know which twin to believe at any given moment. By the (rather disappointing) end, neither “Echoes” nor Gina and Leni themselves seem to understand who’s even who anymore, anyway.

For a few hours, Echoes achieves that much. You can get caught up in it until you aren’t anymore. The lack of confidence in the audience’s intelligence was finally too much for me and despite Monaghan’s worthy double-act and Robinson’s Columbo-esque ingeniousness, Echoes never recovered from revealing how its trick was achieved — long before it had actually been fully achieved

Stretched over seven episodes, with a number of distracting subplots, Echoes over-complicates its initially intriguing premise.

“Echoes” has a fundamental pacing problem. Its front half crams in questions, potential developments, identity games and shock reveals. These elements make promises. Then the next episode does more of the same. There’s not enough depth here to make up for the deliberate and repetitive march forward.

My physical reactions while watching this series – shrug, eye roll, blank stare, “huh” – are typical for a certain category of Netflix original: disposable content that’s barely passable but just watchable enough to likely garner millions of views.

The main problem with “Echoes” is the most common TV problem of the current era—it doesn’t have the story to support a series.