Echo 3 1.1-1.3: Bondian Flavor and Pure Adrenalin

Hey, if you're in the mood for some high-octane adrenalin, surprises at every turn, colorful locales, and thoughtful characters -- and I'm always in the mood for that -- check out Echo 3 on Apple TV+.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The series has a Bondian flavor, with a little Narcos mixed in, served in a rich tapestry of places and characters.  Amber Chesborough, recently married to Delta Force operative "Prince," gets taken hostage doing research into tropical cures for drugs, in Colombia.  Except she's also on some kind of CIA mission which her husband didn't know about it when he slipped a high-tech tracker into her luggage so, well, he could track her if she got into trouble.  Which she does -- becaused being kidnapped is of course big trouble -- and when the kidnappers find the tracker, things get much worse, because they think (correctly) that she's a spy.

Also, she has a brother,"Bambi," in the same unit as Prince, and they start from being good buddies at Amber and Prince's marriage, to being at pretty serious odds over a mission that went pretty bad in Afghanistan.  But you know they have to bury that hatchet and join forces to rescue Amber, which of course they do (join forces, that is -- she's not yet rescued), and though that's obvious, it's good to see it happen, anyway,

Other characters (so far) include Colombian military guys at all levels who are excellent, and a pack of kidnappers who seem to produce a succession of new leaders as some are picked off by the good guys.  This might seem a little too much to believe, but the action is so good, I have no problem at all with it.

There's also a woman journalist who tries to negotiate for Amber's release, but gets taken prisoner by the kidnappers, raising terrible memories of what actually happened to Diana Turbay, a renowned journalist who was kidnapped by Pablo Escobar's cartel, and was killed in a government rescue attempt gone wrong in 1991.

My only disappointment with Echo 3 is that after seeing these first three episodes, I of course wanted to see more.  But the good news is I'll be able to remedy that when the fourth episode comes up this coming Friday.

Narcos 2: In League with The Godfather Saga

My wife and streamed Narcos 2 on Neflix the last two evenings, and, what can I say, it was outstanding, a stand-out masterpiece in both true-crime and crime fiction drama, in any medium.  I liked it even better than the first season, and I would now place it in league with The Godfather trilogy and The Sopranos.

Pablo Escobar's crew is portrayed in vivid and memorable detail.  Limon the driver ... La Quica the hitman ... Blackie the masterful bomber ... everywhere you turn in this story you find a subplot as riveting as the overall drama, and acted with style and precision (Limon by Leynar Gomez, La Quica by Diego Cataño, and Blackie by Julián Díaz).

As the pressure mounts on Escobar and the Medellín Cartel, he and we can never be sure who is still loyal.   The story has some shockers, especially if you're not familiar with the real history.   The pressure comes from so many interlocking sources that, as was the case in the first season, you find yourself admiring Escabar's intelligence and survival skills, despite the murders that he ruthlessly dishes out, especially when he's angered.   In addition to (most of) the government of Colombia including its President, and the US DEA, Escobar must fend off increasingly damaging attacks from the rival Cali Cartel and a brutally effective rightwing military group, Los Pepes.   Even worse for Escobar, these groups have an alliance, uneasy but effective enough for the DEA - or at least one agent, Peña - to funnel high-tech surveillance info to Cali and Los Pepes.

Even a fleeting knowledge of history will tell you how Escobar's story ends. What you may not know, though, is the lack of telecom sophistication that sealed his fate, or the joy he took in just buying and eating strawberries and creme like any other citizen of Medellín (assuming that's true, but touchingly shown in the series).  But the bigger questions attendant to his life of crime continue.  Miguel Uribe, husband of Diana Turbay - tragically killed by Colombian National Police in 1991 during a botched rescue attempt after Escobar had kidnapped her (portrayed in Season 1) - told me at dinner in New York City in the late 1980s that the drug cartels wouldn't have grown rich and powerful in his country had there not been such a keen taste for the white powder in ours. And that problem obviously still remains.

And this means there's more than ample Narcos story to tell for a third and subsequent seasons, which I hope are made.  As for the first two, they shouldn't be mistaken for literal history - some of which is left out, such as La Quica's arrest in Queens, NY and his conviction for the bombing of Avianca Flight 203, for which he's still serving time in the U. S. - but that's the difference between documentary and docudrama.  Indeed, even documentaries sometimes leave out material that others deem important to the true story, but what we're left with in Narcos is a fabulous piece of work - not really the "magical realism" with which the narrator Agent Murphy frames the story (clever, given that the late Gabriel García Márquez, one of the pillars of magical realism, also penned News of a Kidnapping, about the cartel's kidnappings, including Diana Turbay) -  but a real epic of our time, or the time that led to our time, brilliantly told and directed, and indelibly acted by Wagner Moura as Escobar and Paulina Gaitan as Tata his wife.  Narcos, like all the great crime drama, takes its place not only with The Sopranos and The Godfather, but Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies - in other words, with stories of greed and yearning for freedom, and right and wrong, and establishment vs. anti-establishment, as old as our very humanity.

See also Narcos on Netflix: Outstanding

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a different kind of crime

Narcos on Netflix: Outstanding

We streamed Narcos on Netflix the past few evenings.  Like House of Cards, Peaky Blinders, and Bloodline on Netflix, and The Man in the High Castle on Amazon, Narcos is a powerful, top-notch kind of streaming television, every bit as good as and sometimes even a little better than the best we've seen on cable television.   As I pointed out in McLuhan in an Age of Social Media, we're undergoing a new revolution in television indeed, not just in the process of streaming, but in the narratives that are being streamed.

Wagner Moura's portrayal of Colombian drug king Pablo Escobar - at his height, the seventh richest person in the world - is so strong and sensitive that you almost find yourself rooting for him - that is, until he brutally murders yet another rival or political figure who gets in his way, and anyone that he rightly or wrongly perceives as disloyal.   Escobar was also responsible for the kidnapping - and the death that ensued as a Colombian military unit attempted to free her - of journalist Diana Turbay, and he had no problem bringing down and to their death a whole plane of people in an unsuccessful attempt to do away with a Colombian Presidential candidate who opposed him.

But, as if often the case with these sociopaths, for whom the life of just about anyone other than his immediate family is a commodity to be bartered and expended with if necessary in pursuit of his business, Escobar at least in this narrative on Netflix commands at very least our keen interest, and for that reason alone a part of us in not unhappy when he escapes against all odds over and over again.

Even as those who pursue him in the narrative become less human as their frustrations mount.   By the end of the first season, DEA agent Steve Murphy and Colombian President Gaviria, each compassionate in their own ways for most of this story, have become ruthless to the point of almost nothing else mattering except the killing of Escobar.

Superbly acted, beautifully photographed in verdant Colombia, the best news about Narcos is that it will be back for a second season - maybe a little later than expected, as recently reported - but it will be much welcome viewing whenever it's back.

See also Narcos 2: In League with The Godfather Saga