Echo 3

Essentially it’s an amalgam of The Deer Hunter, Band of Brothers, Phil and Grant’s sibling rivalry in EastEnders plus a sexy stay-at-home bride doomed to moon tearfully out of windows while her men straighten out Johnny Foreigner. Then something incredible happens. Amber, we abruptly learn, is not what she seems, but a protagonist in her own right.

Some members of the Colombian military and the rebel crew have personalities or hints of backstory, but not real characters. And at the same time, the various missions to rescue Amber are individually suspenseful without any overall momentum or cumulative tension-building. I’ll be curious to see if it all comes together as something truly good or just settles for well-meaning aspiration.

There simply isn’t enough characterization in the preceding episodes to justify a particularly deep investment in these people, one might feel largely ambivalent about Amber’s fate until halfway through the season—at which point the show, much like Amber, might be beyond saving

For all the ways that Boal’s writing on The Hurt Locker managed to be both engaging and more honest about the nature of war, this latest story just never has the sharpness to pull off either. There is a good narrative and thematic core hidden in the middle of Echo 3, but all of that promise gets drowned by too many detours that compromise its overall mission.