Spoilers ahead: There’s a moment in 56 Days when the show’s central con is revealed: Ciara (Dove Cameron) didn’t meet Oliver (Avan Jogia) by chance at the supermarket. She planned it. She’d been watching him, taking photos, keeping notes. She orchestrated the entire encounter to get close to a man she had reason to hate. By any definition, this is manipulation. This is the setup for a love bombing scenario, or worse. And yet, by the end of the show, we’re supposed to be rooting for them to stay together. To build a life and to have their happy ending.
Dove Cameron is aware of this contradiction. When asked directly if audiences will excuse the red flags both characters exhibit, she doesn’t hesitate: “I don’t think they’ll excuse any of it. They shouldn’t.” But then she pauses, because she knows what actually happens.
The attractiveness loophole
There’s this recurring theme in 56 Days: one where Oliver does something genuinely alarming, or Ciara reveals another layer of her deception, and the camera lingers on their faces. Both of them are beautiful, the tension is unbearable, and somewhere in that moment, the audience’s moral objections start to soften.
“I don’t think the audience will completely brush it off,” Cameron says when asked about whether attractiveness gives characters a pass. She’s repeating herself because she knows it’s not true. Or rather, she knows the nuance: audiences shouldn’t excuse it, but they will. “But I do think they’ll start to excuse it more and more as it is clear that they’re both exhibiting red flags,” she continues.
I think when the playing field gets more levelled, it’ll be like, oh, so these two are just fucked up. They’re perfect for each other.
DOVE CAMERON
This is the moment the show wins; the psychological shift happens for the audience when both people are compromised equally. When neither one is the victim, and neither one is the villain, audiences stop trying to pick a side. And in that refusal to judge, they actually end up rooting for the relationship, not despite the red flags, but because of them.
The con works because we want it to
Ciara’s plan to get revenge on Oliver, the man she believes destroyed her family, doesn’t survive first contact with reality. She falls for him, or she decides to love him anyway. The show intentionally leaves this deliberately ambiguous. But what’s not ambiguous is what happens next: she kills his abusive therapist to protect him and then she chooses him and they run. Oliver, meanwhile, carries his own devastating secret: he killed someone in high school and let his best friend take the fall. Oliver’s been living a lie his entire life, with his abusive therapist weaponising that secret to control him.
Neither of them is redeemable in any conventional sense; both have done deeply unforgivable things. And yet the show ends with them together, with a child, living in hiding. Not because they’ve been punished or because they’ve atoned, but because they’ve chosen each other.
That confusion in that inability to pin down who’s hurting whom, who’s the predator and who’s the prey, is precisely where the audience’s judgment collapses. We’re not meant to figure it out; we’re meant to accept the ambiguity, and we do. Because they’re beautiful and they’re damaged in interesting ways, where we as the audience almost want to save them. But to be blunt, that’s because they’re hot and the chemistry between them is undeniable.
The moral we’re actually learning
The uncomfortable truth 56 Days presents is this: we say we want to identify red flags and that we want to protect ourselves from manipulation. But when presented with two attractive, deeply flawed people who are essentially destroying each other and everyone around them, we don’t actually want to look away, and we don’t necessarily want them to be held accountable.
Cameron’s honesty about this is refreshing. She doesn’t pretend the show is teaching us something virtuous. She doesn’t argue that we should root for these characters. She just acknowledges what’s actually happening: “I think that’s when we’ll get into a zone of more, like, I have no idea who’s got the upper hand here.” Jogia agrees and goes further. “You can have all the red flags in the world, but sometimes it doesn’t matter who they are,” he says. “In some cases, they usually go hand in hand with a real connection.”
Jogia points out that he’s not saying to ignore the flags, he’s highlighting that the presence of red flags doesn’t automatically disqualify a relationship from being real. That genuine feeling can coexist with genuine danger, and that when both people are compromised, when both are beautiful and broken in the same ways, the red flags become almost irrelevant to whether we believe in the connection. We reach a point where the question of who’s manipulating whom stops mattering. And at that point of moral surrender, the show achieves something genuinely dark: it makes us complicit in the fiction that love, real, genuine love, can exist in a space of pure mutual corruption.
Maybe it can. Maybe that’s even true in real life, sometimes. But 56 Days doesn’t let us off easy by pretending it’s beautiful. It just shows us that we’ll accept it anyway. As long as everyone involved is attractive enough.
You can stream 56 Days on Prime Video.
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