Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Echo 3’ On Apple TV+, Where A Woman’s Husband And Brother Try To Rescue Her From South America

Military-centric shows aren’t usually “thinkers,” are they? As much as shows like the recent The Terminal List try to reach for something deeper, the tone is still along the lines of “Good guys good, bad guys bad.” A new Apple TV+ series, though, really does try to go deeper than the usual milirary-focused series. But does it succeed?

ECHO 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woodsy area by a lake. A group of men, some on horseback but all carrying guns, are pushing a group of hostages through the woods. The captives are then put on their knees, one starts praying, and a shot rings out.

The Gist: Six months earlier, the woman who was praying, Amber Chesborough (Jessica Ann Collins), is getting ready for her wedding to Prince (Michiel Huisman). While getting ready, she calls in one of her closest allies, her brother Bambi (Luke Evans), to make sure she’s doing the right thing. After all, Prince has a crummy relationship with his dad Eric (Bradley Whitford), and they haven’t had the strongest family unit, given the addictions that their mother (Valerie Mahaffey) has had to endure. Bambi reassures his sister that she’s marrying a good man.

The reason why the two men know each other so well is that they both are in the same black ops special forces unit. During the raucous reception, their commander, Drifter (Dominic Fumusa) gets word that they have to do a fly away to rescue hostages in Afghanistan the next morning. During a snowy mountainside battle, Prince’s parachute fails and he’s caught in a no-man’s land; in the process of retrieving him after rescuing the hostages, Prince is shot in the leg and Drifter is killed. When Bambi reaches Prince, he tells his new brother-in-law that they have to leave.

Months later, Prince has recovered, but is still angry with Bambi about how that battle went down. Amber tries to get them to make peace at dinner but things just blow up. Amber, a scientist who is studying how hallucinogens can help treat addiction, is getting ready for a risky trip of her own, to the Colombia-Venezuela border, to collect and study plants with hallucinogenic effects. Prince, concerned for her safety, sneaks a beacon into her pack over Amber’s objections.

When the local village’s cartel invade the camp, they find the beacon and take the scientists hostage. This is when Prince finds out from Bambi that Amber had been doing freelance work for the CIA as she was doing her research. The two men decide not to trust the Agency with updates, and set out for South America themselves.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Echo 3, based on the novel and Israeli series When Heroes Fly, has strong Homeland vibes, though the story seems to be as much about the psychology of the men rescuing Amber than about the rescue itself.

Our Take: Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), who created and wrote Echo 3, seems to be determined to make the series more thoughtful than your average series about a rescue mission. It’s deliberate in its storytelling, almost to a fault. But in all its slowness, its still sets up an us vs. them situation that feels all too familiar.

The first episode uses its entire one hour runtime to introduce us to the main players, set up why former friends Bambi and Prince are now at odds, the life and death circumstances that they face in their work, and why they have to band together. But there are far too many scenes of exposition that feel unnecessary, like a TED-esque talk Amber has that explains why she studies hallucinogens, or a very languid discussion between Bambi and his mother about Amber.

We generally are happy when early episodes spend time on character development, but given how straightforward the show’s plot really is, this seemed to be too much. Yes, Bambi and Prince are going to get caught up in whatever secret war is going on in Colombia and Venezuela that likely set in motion Amber’s capture. And there is going to be time to explore just how deep their military backgrounds are, how their fractured family lives inform what they do, and how their relationship has ebbed and flowed.

But all of that could have been set up in half an episode, with the other half showing Amber in more peril and her brother and husband starting their search. There just seems to be too many scenes of helicopters landing and taking off, lots of telling and not showing and other pace-slowing tactics to trust that things will pick up as the episodes go along.

Sex and Skin: Prince and Amber have plenty of sex, but their bodies are so intertwined during those scenes that you don’t see much skin.

Parting Shot: A chopper lands outside of Prince’s house — believe us, he has the space. Prince and Bambi get in and it takes off.

Sleeper Star: Not sure how much we’re going to see Whitford and Mahaffey as the very different parents of Prince, Amber and Bambi, but the few scenes they do have in the first episode are compelling.

Most Pilot-y Line: “All you can do is revert to your redneck loyalty! I’m sorry, I know that’s a shitty thing to say, but you always take your brother’s side no matter how horrible,” Prince says to Amber. She then throws her shoes in his general direction out of anger, yells, “Admit it! You like it!”, then he sticks his hand up her dress. Um, is this fight about her brother turning them on?

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’ll give Echo 3 the benefit of the doubt because it’s taking a more thoughtful and deliberate tack than most military shows. But boy, do things go pretty slowly to start.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.