What a view | Latin America, the CIA, drug cartels, kidnapping: Apple TV+’s Echo 3 takes viewers down a dark, violent path
- Jessica Ann Collins plays a botanist who is kidnapped in South America by bandits linked to drug cartels in Echo 3, from Zero Dark Thirty scriptwriter Mark Boal
- Meanwhile, in The Glory on Netflix, Song Hye-kyo plays Moon Dong-eun, who as a teenager was terribly bullied at school and is out for revenge
Talk about going to war: Echo 3 (Apple TV+) puts us in the jungles of Colombia and Venezuela, where Amber Chesborough (Jessica Ann Collins), an American botanist researching the psychotropic properties of certain plants, is kidnapped by bandits connected to drug cartels (and therefore government agencies).
Worse, she is also suspected of being a CIA spy, which will complicate any official plans to bring about her release. Not that the White House actually has any plans, because the politics are tricky.
Cue one heroic, off-the-books rescue mission cooked up by Chesborough’s brother (played by Luke Evans) and husband (Michiel Huisman), both ex-special forces soldiers, who act like a beefy, two-man commando unit.
It’s a unit that’s repelled, however, leaving Chesborough languishing in a joint jungle prison-drug factory, a pawn of both pitiless bureaucrats back home and brutal drugs barons with a trump card to play.
The 10-part first series, which has just wrapped up, conveniently fills any lingering Strike Back-shaped hole that may be perceived in the schedules. And coming from the pen of Mark Boal, scriptwriter for movies The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, it can be trusted to give a realistic flavour of what amounts to unconventional – if increasingly familiar – warfare.