I’ve been watching the new series Ringer, and I’ve found it rather compelling. But I figure a lot of viewers who started watching it aren’t familiar with the origins of the major characters, so I thought I’d post a handy reference guide:
Bridget Kelly: Her real name is Buffy Summers. Some sort of demonic creature stole her vampire-slaying powers, cloned her, and gave her false memories of growing up with an identical twin sister.
Siobhan Martin: She’s the evil twin clone of Buffy.
Agent Machado: Having escaped from a mysterious island that had kept him from aging since the 1800s, Richard Alpert became an FBI agent.
Andrew Martin: At some point during or after the Napoleonic Wars, Horatio Hornblower found that same mysterious island and, like Richard, stopped aging. He now poses as a British financier.
Mr. Carpenter: Tiring of the celebrity bad boy image of being the son of murdered Hollywood star Aaron Echolls, Logan Echolls changed his name and became a teacher at a public high school in New York City.
The writers of Ringer have done an excellent job of merely hinting at the marvelously complex backstories of these characters (other than the “evil twin” thing with Siobhan). In fact, “merely hinting” is probably too strong a phrase to describe their extreme subtlety. (In this, they are quite unlike the writers at Castle, who have given rather broad hints that Richard Castle is merely a pseudonym for a time-traveler from the future, a cowboyish space-trader by the name of Malcolm Reynolds.)