Echo 3‘s gung-ho warriors spring back into action after weeks of repose and dissolution. Prince decides he’s had enough of a glimpse into a life without his kidnapped wife, Amber, and he’s ready to become part of the rescue operation again. But he’s going to need to get back into her brother Bambi’s good graces if he wants to make any semblance of a clean getaway.
Their next best hope is a DJ with bad security and bad habits — but getting him is going to be a chore and a half. It’s another baffling episode of the really odd Apple TV+ action thriller.
Echo 3 recap: ‘Habeus Thumpus’
Season 2, episodes 6: When we last left Alex “Prince” Haas (played by Michiel Huisman), he was sleeping with another woman (Katherine Hughes) and trying to get over his wife Amber’s (Jessica Ann Collins) kidnapping in the jungles of Venezuela. In this week’s episode, entitled “Habeus Thumpus,” he finally decides that 54 days is long enough to be not looking for his kidnapped wife so he gets back into action.
He goes down to Colombia, on the border of Venezuela, and finds Amber’s brother Bambi (Luke Evans) in the middle of a midday drunk. He takes this as evidence that Bambi has fallen off the wagon (he has), and that he’s just a drunken wreck now with no active intentions of getting Amber back.
These very unpleasant men cannot get over the idea that they know what’s best for everyone. So rather than accept that 54 days of deep cover (while you were sleeping around and glad-handing senators) is commitment enough, Prince — with some help from CIA contact Mitch (James Udom) — literally dopes Bambi up, handcuffs him, and drags him back to a hotel room to dry out. Luke Evans makes an absolute meal of the scene where he has to dry out, but this is still baffling. A few hours (days? Who knows?) later, they’re starting over.
Time for a new plan
Prince’s plan is pretty rudimentary. The Venezuelans running the drug operation out of the jail where they’re holding Amber answer to an ambassador named Tariq Marwan (Vicente Peña). So they’re going to kidnap his ne’er-do-well DJ brother Momo (Juan Pablo Urrego), torture him, then offer up a trade.
The sting gets off to a suitably bad start. They tail Momo for an hour or two. But the minute they’re going to grab him, a car accident separates them, and they can’t nab him. They think maybe the wrong people probably saw them get close, which means their window of opportunity is shrinking.
Prince suggests hitting Momo at a soccer stadium where he’s going to soundcheck, but Bambi hilariously suggests that committing a crime in broad daylight might ruin Prince’s political career. I mean, show me the lie, of course, but they’re gonna chain a guy to a car battery and electrocute him. How’s that supposed to be better? Not that there probably aren’t sitting senators who have tortured innocent people and worse, but whatever, just kind of funny.
So anyway, they stake out of the stadium, steal a guard’s uniform, pose as doctors, give the DJ a laxative, sleeper-hold his bodyguard (Juliana Morales), but keep messing up the extraction. And that means they end up running around a soccer stadium watching a DJ get diarrhea and have sex, while trying to think of ways to kidnap him. Just another day doing covert ops, I guess.
They finally get Momo. Then Mitch heads to Tariq’s office to bait him into admitting he won’t help free Amber, so that he can drop the kidnapping bomb when he has him right where he wants him.
Batman vs. Superman
Photo: Apple TV+
When Bambi and Prince are discussing protocol for how best to handle Momo’s kidnapping, they say “Batman,” which Mitch hasn’t heard before. “Batman” is code for “no good people get hurt,” whereas “Superman” means they’ll destroy the whole city if they have to.
This kind of jarhead lingo is the kind of thing Echo 3 creator Mark Boal gets off on, and it’s just this little psychopathic window into the adolescent worldview of his gear-strapped heroes. They see themselves as superheroes, even as they’re behaving like bumbling idiots at the Fingernail Factory.
There’s a very telling bit at the end when CIA guy Mitch is shaking down Tariq, who goes on this long monologue about how the United States invented enemies for itself to fight (true, objectively true) and how Amber is a criminal spying on them for her government to make a better case to reduce the country to dust.
Who’s the bad guy again?
I’m listening to this, knowing Tariq’s supposed to be the bad guy, and waiting for him to stop making sense. But he just never does. Anyway, Mitch then says: “One phone call and you could have her released. We’ll pick her up at the border. I’ll even pay for the call.” Then he puts some change on Tariq’s desk, along with Momo’s ring, showing that they’ve got him and will hurt him if need be.
This is supposed to be an ice-cold moment — this gangster display of power that shows how cool the U.S. intelligence service can be — but it’s also perfect because Tariq spends five minutes coherently explaining his country’s exhaustion at being a scarecrow for the United States to set fire to any time it wants to prove its might and the righteousness of its mission. Mitch has a quip and a threat, like he’s in an action movie (he is, but you get my meaning).
This is Boal’s diplomacy. Go ahead and tell us why you don’t want to be leveled and remade in the image of the United States. You’re just making me madder. Frank Miller couldn’t have put it better.
★★☆☆☆
Watch Echo 3 on Apple TV+
New episodes of Echo 3 arrive on Apple TV+ every Friday.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
