Echo 3 takes crazy to bizarre and torturous new heights [Apple TV+ recap]

By

Echo 3 recap Apple TV+: Bambi means business.☆☆☆
Bambi means business.
Photo: Apple TV+

TV+ ReviewApple TV+ thriller Echo 3, about the kidnapping of a CIA plant and the truly bizarre array of personalities that accumulate in its aftermath, takes a trip to torture town this week.

Brothers-in-law Bambi and Prince get a visit from a familiar face, a journalist realizes she’s in over her head, and DJ Momo gets the business end of a car battery. As usual, this is the weirdest show on Apple TV+ — filled with casual sadism and murder — and things just keep getting more bizarre.

Echo 3 recap: ‘Red Is Positive, Black Is Negative’

Season 2, episodes 7: In the episode, entitled “Red Is Positive, Black Is Negative,” Alex “Prince” Haas (played by Michiel Huisman) and Bambi (Luke Evans) await an important phone call. They’ve kidnapped ambassador Tariq Marwan’s (Vicente Peña) brother Momo (Juan Pablo Urrego), and they plan to use him as collateral in a swap for Amber (Jessica Ann Collins), Bambi’s sister and Prince’s wife who was kidnapped by Colombian drug runners after they found out she was working for the CIA.

Amber’s CIA handler, Mitch (James Udom), delivered the threat to Tariq a few days ago. Now, Prince and Bambi are just waiting, but it seems like Tariq’s not going to trade. (Momo sure doesn’t seem to think so. I mean, would you trade a DJ for one of your only bargaining chips in a war?)

Not helping things at all is the fact that they grabbed Momo in a very public place, and their images from CCTV are now being spread across social media. It’s only a matter of time before they get spotted on the street, and even with the added muscle of their friend Roy (Temuera Morrison), they might not be able to survive that.

Lots of questions, no answers

Meanwhile, journalist Violeta Matiz (Martina Gusman) is having bad dreams. Her failure to rescue Amber is weighing on her. She meets with the president for dirt on the kidnapping, and he evades her questions about how much the government knows or is involved. Violeta knows the CIA is involved, but no one’s coming clean about that.

Her husband (Juan Pablo Raba) is worried about Violeta. She’s not sleeping, and she’s very dogged about this matter. She’s wondering why Bambi and Prince haven’t been arrested. She gets a visit from Natalie Foster (Elizabeth Anweis), a U.S. intelligence official working in Colombia, which she reads as a gentle warning. When her piece on the kidnappings gets killed at The New York Times, she realizes there’s no beating the system.

Let’s throw mom into the crazy mix

Bambi and Prince have another wrench thrown in their plans when Amber and Bambi’s mom Maggie (Valerie Mahaffey) shows up. She’s worried about her kids and can’t think of anything better to do. So now she’s an accidental third party to a kidnapping conspiracy and rescue operation. Apparently having no idea her son is involved in special ops, she starts going through all of his guns, and touching them and posing with them in the mirror. It’s insane like everything else on this show.

Some gunmen hit the safehouse while Maggie’s in the shower and Roy’s watching a football match. Roy gets two of them, but they kill him and Maggie handles the last one. It’s meant to be this kind of folksy, down-home, “Gramma with a gun” thing, but it reads as absolutely childish nonsense. Who wrote this show, Paul Henning?

After the encounter, Bambi puts Maggie back on a plane. Then he and Prince take Momo to the country to torture him a little. They call Tariq and show Momo being shocked and stuff, but Tariq doesn’t fold. They need a new strategy.

Prince hires some local muscle to take down the black site where Amber is being held, and Bambi asks Natalie if she’ll take down surveillance long enough that they can hit it without an immediate response. They want to cripple the Venezuelan drug trade and get new leverage in one fell swoop.

Crackpot conspiracies and documented facts

Some of the most bizarre stuff yet happens this week on Echo 3. Natalie is trying to explain to Bambi why the U.S. government won’t help out any more than it has in trying to recover Amber. She basically says that all of this is a big setup, which is … a huge reach. If Mitch could find enough reason to send two rogue cracker lunatics into Venezuela to start a private war, they could eventually unseat the current government.

I mean … that’s ludicrous. There’s just no way in the world this was Mitch’s intended outcome. There are 4 billion risky X factors, and this only looks like a game plan because things happened to shake out the way they did. But also, the U.S. government already washed its hands of the situation, so it’s not like any actual plan to have Bambi and Prince destabilize Venezuela would have worked. (Also, we tried this in reality a few years ago, and it was a huge disaster. Is Echo 3 creator Mark Boal saying he could have planned it better, or are we watching his dramatization of that botched embarrassment?).

Taking crazy to a strange new level

That’s not even the nuttiest part of this week’s episode. Natalie tells Bambi to look at the big picture. And then, with a montage of government officials and marching soldiers from across South and Central American history playing, she goes on a rant.

“The United States’ objectives and programs for national security,” she says. “NSC 68. The document that President Truman signed made rolling back communism the single highest priority. I mean can you imagine how fucking hard that is? Replacing left-wing leaders with right-wingers? Military takeovers? Coups? Protect American business interests. I mean do you understand how invested we are down here? It’s a lifetime commitment. We’re the ones who did Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Panama and Venezuela. The CIA’s number one client is the CIA. Never forget that. [They] want a war. You’re going to give it to them.”

What’s this show’s point?

So here’s the thing — that’s all basically true (except Cuba — a picture of Fidel Castro flashes during that section, but U.S. spies didn’t lift a finger to help him get to power. The CIA liked Fulgencio Batista, the guy Castro overthrew, because he was a corrupt gambler who let the United States raid Cuba’s economy. The U.S. tried to kill Castro like a hundred times and failed at all of them).

But Bambi hears it all and just says, “Yes and?” He’s told by an upper-echelon CIA plant that overthrowing Latin American governments is U.S. policy, and like Thomas Jane in Arrested Development, he simply says, “I’m just here to get my family back!”

Essentially, Boal’s show says, “Hey, yeah, so we did all those coups, but it’s worth it when someone’s sister is in trouble.”

Like the Venezuelans are tying ladies to railroad tracks or something. Furthermore, zero evidence is presented that the fake Venezuelan government we’re looking at is communist. What’s that even supposed to mean within the context of Echo 3? Every week, I don’t think this show can get any stranger. And every week it surprises me.

☆☆☆

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.

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.