Warning: This post contains spoilers for 56 days.
Based on the 2021 best-selling novel of the same name by Catherine Ryan Howard, the Prime Video series 56 days jumps back and forth throughout the titular time period to unravel the connection between Ciara Wyse (Dove Cameron) and Oliver Kennedy (Avan Jogia), from the moment they first meet, seemingly by chance, in a supermarket until two months later, when the police find a decomposing corpse in Oliver’s apartment.
The eight-episode adaptation, now streaming, shifts the setting of Howard’s erotic thriller from pandemic-era Dublin to modern-day Boston, removing COVID lockdowns as a plot point. However, the show largely follows the overall trajectory of the novel, until its drastically different ending.
Created by showrunner duo Karyn Usher and Lisa Zwerling (The tower), the television adaptation of 56 days It concludes with love prevailing over revenge, a twist on the source material that reframes the book’s central relationship. The series follows the progression of the intense, whirlwind romance between Ciara and Oliver, who are ultimately revealed to have hidden their true identities.
Who really are Oliver and Ciara?
Oliver, whose real last name is St. Ledger, is the super-rich 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 teenager by Kingston Rumi Southwick) and his best friend, Shane Martin (Sam Warnock), were involved in the murder of their classmate, Paul Sparling (Aidan Ledingham), in their hometown of Narragansett, Rhode Island. 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 blame the murder on Shane to prevent fraud.
In the days after the murder, a boys’ school counselor named Dan Troxler (Patch Darragh) realized that Oliver was spiraling and used his experience 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 paid 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. After Shane’s death, Troxler worked to ensure he continued to benefit from the St. Ledger family by fueling Oliver’s paranoia to maintain his control over him.
So how does Ciara connect to all of this? She is actually Shane’s younger sister, Megan Martin. He tracked down Oliver and infiltrated his life with the express goal of making him pay for Shane’s suicide and the debilitating damage it caused his family. Except she ended up falling in love with Oliver and finally realized she didn’t want revenge anymore. After the two confessed everything to each other and Ciara convinced Oliver that she no longer needed the disgusting therapist, Troxler showed up at Oliver’s apartment and threatened to expose Oliver’s crimes using the letter he wrote as a teenager and years of recordings of their sessions. This led to Ciara hitting Troxler in the head with a sculpture from Oliver’s apartment, killing him.
As 56 days end?
With the help of Ciara’s sister Shyla (Megan Peta Hill), Oliver and Ciara prepare what they believe is the perfect crime scene. Jumping to the current investigation, Detectives Lee Reardon (Karla Souza) and Karl Connolly (Dorian Missick) 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 affair for Troxler’s murder.
While Oliver appears to consider confessing to his crimes and even shows up at the police station, he ultimately chooses to fly off into the sunset with Ciara. This is a significant departure from what happens in the novel, in which Troxler’s character does not even exist. Instead, Oliver is eventually revealed to be not only a cold-blooded killer who intentionally murdered Paul, but also the corpse in the apartment. In the book, when Ciara discovers 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 to suggest that Oliver’s death was not of his own making, Lee and Karl are unable to solve the mystery and Ciara is cleared of the blame.
But in the show, both Ciara and Oliver get their happily ever after: In the final scene, which takes place sometime in the future, the couple lives in a tropical paradise with their baby, named Shane after Ciara’s late brother.
