Critics Are Being Too Kind to 'Orphan Black: Echoes'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | July 11, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | July 11, 2024 |

There’s a very real phenomenon where audiences and viewers have so much fondness and goodwill toward a character, a TV show, or even a franchise that we keep mum about our criticisms even as we’re aware the subject has lost a step. God help us all when a beloved show like Abbott Elementary really starts to slip in its later seasons, or if the third Paddington movie fails to live up to expectations. Who’s going to be brave enough to publicly admit that it’s crap?

Orphan Black fits into that category of show. Even as it began to spin its wheels and devolve into nonsense in its later seasons, most of us continued to root for it anyway. It’s a nice show! Original! A low-budget underdog on a lesser cable channel. And it’s Canadian — we’re always willing to cut Canadian sci-fi a break even when it completely falls apart (hello, season four of Wynonna Earp). And Tatiana Maslany could do no wrong. Honestly! Even when Orphan Black stopped making sense, Maslany was still infinitely watchable. Nobody even remembers if they finished Orphan Black, but everyone remembers how much they loved Maslany!

Orphan Black: Echoes has that same Canadian underdog vibe, the kind of show you want to root for on a struggling streaming service (AMC+) just trying to bridge the gap between seasons of The Walking Dead spin-offs! Unfortunately, Echoes is lousy, and most of the equivocal reviews I’ve seen have been overly generous out of loyalty to our fondness for the early seasons of Orphan Black.

People like low-budget sci-fi and Canada and Krysten Ritter and Keeley Hawes — who doesn’t love Keeley Hawes! — so no one wants to come right out with the truth: Orphan Black: Echoes is bad. It stinks. They’ve recycled similar themes and put them in an inferior package and asked us to pay $4.99 a month (or $7.99 without ads) for the privilege of watching it.

I mean, there was a reason they cancelled Orphan Black just seven years ago: Most people had quietly stopped watching it without telling anyone else because we didn’t want to disappoint them. But what if Orphan Black but no Maslany? And instead of cloning, humans are being created with a printer? And instead of several versions of the same person with different personalities, it’s just different versions of the same person at different ages?
But why, again, did someone decide to print humans? And why did they decide to print the same human at different ages? That’s the mystery of Echoes, which is set in Boston, 2053, and stars Ritter as Lucy, a woman who wakes up with no memory of her past (because she has no past), discovers that she was printed in a lab (from the same technology that allows for the printing of human organs), and goes on the run.

Two years later, after she’s shacked up with Jack (Avan Jogia) and his deaf daughter, Charlie (Zariella Langford), someone tracks her down and tries to kill her, setting in motion a game of cat-and-mouse between the bad guys (controlled by billionaire Paul Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao)), Lucy, and her scientist creator (Hawes), whose identity I won’t reveal so as not to spoil one of the few surprises. That chase is complicated when Lucy bumps into Jules (Amanda Fix), a younger version of herself who Lucy has to convince is a printed creation because — for obvious reasons — Jules doesn’t want to believe this, although the evidence soon becomes impossible to ignore.

It’s a lame iteration of the original series, and for reasons that make no sense, someone involved in the cloning of the earlier series is also involved here, having learned nothing from those earlier experiences. It wouldn’t be too hard to put that aside if Echoes was interesting in other ways, or if the cast gave us something approximating Maslany’s transcendent performance. No such luck. Ritter is fine, although she’s not given that much to work with, while Fix is better (who at least is given the opportunity to play the sullen, teenage version of a Krysten Ritter character).

But it’s really hard not to wonder: What even is the point of this? It hasn’t really trafficked in questions of morality or faith vs. science (at least not yet) and most of the supporting characters are so dull (unlike in Orphan Black when Maslany herself brought those supporting characters to life).

Before anyone decides to greenlight a reboot — especially one that comes so soon after the original’s run ended — they need a creative justification beyond, “It’s one of the few IPs we have the rights to.” Echoes adds nothing new to the conversation and, worse, the biggest draw of the original series (Maslany) is not involved. It’s like when they tried to convince us that we cared more about the Bourne franchise than Jason Bourne himself and replaced Matt Damon with Jeremy Renner. We came for Matt Damon, goddamnit! Sometimes, it is about the property, but a lot of the time, it really is about the actor.

Don’t listen to those reviews that say Echoes is perfectly fine! Serviceable, even! A worthy successor! It is not. They’re just being nice. Being nice is great! But it’s also how you ended up spending $25 and two hours of your life watching your neighbor put on an awkward acoustic guitar concert in his backyard where there were too few people to be able to sneak out unnoticed. Sometimes, blunt honesty is the better way to go.