☆☆☆☆☆
Enervating Apple TV+ series Echo 3 comes to a close this week. The show finally springs kidnapped CIA plant Amber from her prison, but there’s a lot more to freedom than no longer seeing the same four walls.
This bizarro, jingoistic wife-guy fantasy comes to a screeching halt with a conclusion preordained from its first incredibly strange seconds. Come for the last gunfight, stay for the most risible attitude toward human life I’ve yet encountered on scripted television.
☆☆☆☆☆
It’s finally go time on Echo 3, the Apple TV+ show about rescuing a CIA operative with a brother and a husband in the military. Prince and Bambi have cleared the runway for their secret invasion of the prison where sister/wife Amber is being held captive.
But big questions remain: Can they get in without getting killed? Is Amber actually there? Can they avoid a large-scale incursion with massive casualties? Can they flee the country to safety once they’re done? Is this at all a proportionate response?
Find out on this week’s installment of the most ideologically confused show on Apple TV+.
★☆☆☆☆
Echo 3, writer Mark Boal’s fundamentalist patriotism slash fic about two men who will stop at nothing to rescue the woman they share, gears up for a very illegal raid on the prison holding her this week.
The two mercenaries tie up loose ends before their mission to save their wife/sister/CIA agent Amber Chesborough Haas. Plus, Amber and Prince’s parents kibbutz about the next best step to take for their kids. And an old foe is finally taken out of commission.
★☆☆☆☆
Apple 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‘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.
★☆☆☆☆
This week on Echo 3, showrunner, writer and director Mark Boal — known for The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty — gets lost upriver trying to graft some semblance of a worldview onto his hollow, sadistic Apple TV+ jungle adventure.
The kidnapped Amber’s captivity is explored, as is her captors’ thin psychology and political motivation. She tries to escape and everyone else suffers for it. It’s a boring and grim edition of Boal’s G.I. Joe fantasy.
★★☆☆☆
New Apple TV+ military thriller Echo 3 finds its heroes in desperate times this week, anxious and ready to take desperate measures. The kidnapped Amber has been put in a hellish South American prison camp, her brother Bambi is abandoned by his cohorts, her husband Prince is back in America recovering from multiple gunshot wounds — and nobody has a clue how to make this situation any better. But the writers sure know how to make it weirder.
The show, about what happens when an American with clandestine government ties stumbles into a private war, gets good mileage out of mechanics over message in this week’s episode, entitled “Upriver.” The bizarro sexual subtext of intervention gets quite the workout in this show.
★★☆☆☆
New Apple TV+ series Echo 3 follows two very different military men who venture to South America to rescue a mutual loved one during a clandestine war.
Written and produced by Mark Boal, the mind behind Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, the series is deeply strange, if certainly memorable. And it shows Apple TV+ heading in a new, possibly suspect, direction.
When a young American scientist goes missing on the Columbia-Venezuela border, all hell breaks loose. You can get a taste of the madness and mayhem, and the intense political overtones, in the Echo 3 trailer Apple TV+ released Tuesday.
The 10-episode action series, starring Luke Evans and Michiel Huisman, debuts November 23 on Apple TV+.
