Orphan Black: Echoes Season 1 Review
Orphan Black: Echoes premieres June 23 on AMC, AMC+, and BBC America.
From its opening scene, Orphan Black: Echoes is destabilizing yet familiar. Everything feels purposefully a little off, like we’ve been here before, just not with these characters. The self-aware tagline for this spin-off calls it a “completely unique copy of the original” Orphan Black, the Canadian clone drama in which Tatiana Maslany offered a masterclass in playing multiple roles on a single TV series. While the first season of Echoes never hits the same, dizzying heights, its exploration of identity isn’t a rehash, either. It’s at its best when it allows its own story to take shape while making a few coy winks (rather than distracting, overt nods) at the past.
A near-future setting further separates the two shows. The technology on display is more advanced, and the scientific community has moved beyond the covert cloning operation that produced Sarah Manning and the cast of characters who shared her exact genetic makeup. But there’s nothing out of the Back to the Future II playbook of flying cars and hoverboards here; no one is wearing anything wacky, and people listen to music from the previous century.
Echoes’ futuristic developments and timeless ethical conundrums collide in the work of a scientist played by Keeley Hawes. This is the type of twisty sci-fi thriller that landed in critics’ inboxes with a hefty “do not reveal” list, one item of which is the name of Hawes’ character. (Though you’re certainly free to speculate in the comments.) The British actress offers a layered portrayal of a conflicted woman who can’t help but play god and whose groundbreaking research is both a lifeline and a curse. Brilliant and intelligent is often shorthand for clinical and cold – or at least detached. Here, Hawes imbues a soft, empathetic, and almost timid quality that underscores the humanity at the heart of Orphan Black: Echoes.
Similarly, Krysten Ritter is no stranger to playing someone with gaps in her past or a history of being experimented on. Lucy is not a carbon copy of a character like Jessica Jones – or any of the Maslany clones – but she does put up defensive walls and drinks to dull the pain. Lucy lacks answers about her origin, but her quest for discoveries about the past doesn’t negate her attempts to make connections in the present. It’s a refreshing change of pace that gives Ritter some lovely moments with adolescent characters like Charlie (Zariella Langford) and Jules (Amanda Fix).
Echoes continues Orphan Black’s insightful examination of themes like nature versus nurture, motherhood, and societal roles. You don’t have to be a clone to wonder what it means to be a person, and this recurring thread is a strength of the spinoff. It’s an existentialist quest of sorts, and its only downside is how long it takes to kick into gear due to withheld information. Thankfully, the feeling that we’re being held at arm’s length via convoluted plotting has mostly disappeared by the fourth episode.
Lucy isn’t the only person in this world plagued by missing memories: Teenager Jules is equally in the dark after surviving a car accident that killed her parents and being placed with a wealthy family in Boston. Unable to recall her childhood (aside from flashes of one bloody incident), Jules is as lost as Lucy. While both women have people they are close to, there is still an inescapable void that is only filled when they meet each other. Fix deftly walks the line of hiding her vulnerability through teenage bravado, daring anyone to challenge her. Despite her younger years, Jules is more hardened to the world, and her fearlessness adds another layer to how each woman fights back at the shadowy figures pulling the strings. Humor – sometimes wry and dark – is threaded throughout, increasing our connections to the leads.
Paul Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao) and his quest to make giant leaps and world-changing discoveries ensure that the character’s parallels to real-life billionaire tech moguls can’t be missed. Echoes follows in the footsteps of shows like A Murder at the End of the World, The Morning Show, and For All Mankind (among others) by using this recognizable archetype as a primary antagonist. Darros’ motivations shift into focus over the course of the season, and this storyline isn’t reinventing the Machiavellian wheel. It would also be beneficial if most of his security team weren’t so cartoonishly evil.
The visual language established by director John Fawcett in the pilot provides another link to the original series (which Fawcett co-created). The fragmented bloody-knife flashback and the use of pink lighting in the lab bear all the hallmarks of the Orphan Black universe – ditto the way art and science overlap. As a fan of that show, I got a kick out of these callbacks, but the scripts don’t cater exclusively to the Clone Club faithful – connections to Sarah, Alison, Cosima, and company are explained within Echoes. (But making time to hop back in the timeline and watch Maslany do her thing is still undoubtedly worth it.)
Echoes doesn’t cater exclusively to the Clone Club faithful.
Orphan Black took time to introduce the various clones, but from the jump, family connections (no matter how fraught those dynamics were) provided a solid foundation. Echoes tries to repeat this winning formula, which is hit-and-miss at times. Lucy’s makeshift family becomes a distraction and another obstacle to surmount as the season progresses, and her romance with former military medic Jack (Avan Jogia) lacks the chemistry of the other pairings. However, Langford’s performance as Charlie (who uses ASL to communicate) makes up for areas where these supporting characters feel superfluous or like a convenient shortcut to medical treatment.
The push-pull between Lucy, Jules, and Hawes’ character provides a much-needed jolt in the arm. In the standout fifth episode, motivations and connections take shape, and much like its predecessor, queer romance is at the heart of this story. Given the way these revelations are timed out, the second half of the season has a much stronger sense of self and connection to the characters than the first. It’s slow to get there, these puzzle pieces add to the twists and turns stemming from the series’ scientific game changer and ensures Echoes is no mere facsimile of Orphan Black.
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