‘Orphan Black: Echoes’ Review: A Soulless Clone of the Original

The Big Picture

• Orphan Black: Echoes
  lacks the charm and creativity of the original series, instead delivering a bland imitation.
• The heavy reliance on flashbacks and lack of trust in the audience make watching
  Echoes
  feel tedious.
• Despite a strong performance by Keeley Hawes, the series struggles with uninspired writing and a lack of engaging storytelling.

It’s always an exciting day for fans of an IP when a sequel series gets announced. Any opportunity to delve further into the lore of a beloved world — especially when it’s science fiction or fantasy — is a boon for longtime fans who usually sate that need via pages and pages of fanfiction or hours scrolling on Tumblr. So naturally, when Orphan Black: Echoes was first announced in 2022, the two-year wait about what to expect from the new project starring Krysten Ritter and Keeley Hawes was near-excruciating.

The premise is simple for anyone familiar with Orphan Black: Ritter’s Lucy wakes up with no memories at all, unable to ascertain where she’s come from. In reality, she didn’t exist before that moment — she’s a print-out, created by Hawes’ Kira Manning, the daughter of Tatiana Maslany’s original clone Sarah Manning. But Lucy doesn’t know that and embarks on a quest to figure out exactly who she is and why she’s been created, a feat that becomes all the more difficult when she discovers other print-out versions of herself.

Initially, Echoes has all the hallmarks of what fans would want from an Orphan Black sequel series: a further exploration of the ethics behind human cloning, and a direct connection to Sarah’s story from the original series. It sets itself up for a slam-dunk into the hearts of avid fans and seems like it’ll go down in sci-fi history… until the end of the first episode, when things take a sharp turn.

‘Orphan Black: Echoes’ Does a Disservice to Its Leads

Perhaps the most egregious problem of Echoes is that Ritter’s Lucy has none of the charm of Maslany’s various clones from the original. This is less the fault of the actress herself and more of the writing, which is nearly a carbon copy of the original series with all its zing and interest surgically removed. It’s Scientific Ethics for Dummies, talking down to the viewer about why everything going on in the show is wrong despite trying to make you root for some of the people who committed those atrocities in the first place. It doesn’t help that Rya Kihlstedt and Amanda Fix, who play the younger and older versions of the same print-out character, seem like they’re letting Ritter do all the work for them, reading their lines with what feels like complete and utter disinterest in the show they’re starring in.

Hawes is really the only thing that makes Echoes worth watching, but I could’ve told you that without watching a single episode. From kicking ass and taking names in Ashes to Ashes and Spooks to her more recent, nuanced work in projects like It’s a Sin and Stonehouse, Hawes has always been one to watch, and it’s a shame that Echoes reduces her to a waif-like plot driver, forcing an American accent on her that, while believable, only makes her exposition-dumping dialogue seem all the more stilted and unnatural. I’d be hard-pressed to say that she’s bad as Kira Manning, considering she and Ritter are carrying the entire series on their own, but anyone would struggle with the material Echoes provides, which coasts by entirely on the reputation of the original series and nothing more. (This is also proven by a brief appearance from original star Jordan Gavaris, playing Hawes’ uncle despite being thirteen years her junior and wearing what can only be described as a comically bad fake beard.)

‘Echoes’ Is a Cheap Imitation of What ‘Orphan Black’ Achieved

It’s been seven years since Orphan Black went off the air, and yet Echoes doesn’t offer up a single idea that expands upon the ethics of human cloning in a meaningful way. Echoes itself feels like a clone in the same way that Lucy is without any of her host mother’s original memories — a hollow print-out, a copy that forged all the structural basics with none of the flair or creativity. It feels less like a sequel to the original, continuing its ideas in a new format, and more like a cheap remake; change a few names, and it could be a completely different project, with almost no throughline to the original beyond Kira’s name.

Echoes also features a heavy reliance on flashbacks, as though it can’t trust the viewer to infer things for themselves and must walk them, baby step by baby step, through each plot point. When the A plot is about as interesting as watching paint dry, it might help to spice things up a bit by mixing up the timelines, but the flashbacks (one of which lasts an entire episode) do nothing but dump more exposition on the viewer. Echoes doesn’t trust its audience for a second, which might explain why it’s about as fun to watch as one of those instructional training videos every job puts you through — it wants to make sure you don’t miss a damn thing, to its own detriment, rather than letting the viewer interpret its art through a personal lens.

As a result, getting through Echoes’ ten episodes —it’s the rare show that gets more than an eight-episode season order — is a feeling akin to wading through mud, with the end ultimately lacking what should feel like a satisfying conclusion. It’s a tragedy, considering how much Ritter and Hawes can knock you on your ass when they’re given the right material to work with, but it’s also unsurprising, given the landscape we live in, of IPs flogged until every last bit of money’s been stripped from them. Echoes is nothing more than a dead horse being beaten repeatedly in the hope that someone, somewhere, will mistake it for the (much better) original.

Orphan Black: Echoes premieres June 23 on AMC, AMC+, and BBC America.

Watch on AMC+