Love the flashbacks with Hope... but also there were SO many. We didn’t need quite that much... we already knew a lot of that information. It just took up more screen time they clearly needed for Sanctum.
My biggest issue with the Sky Ring storyline is the lack of meaningful change and growth after 5 years together.
In 6 years in space, Echo went from an Azgeda warrior who was only about her people, who had betrayed most of the people she was on board the ship with. She went from a spy, a follower, and a warrior to... someone slightly softer, a member of spacekru, Bellamy’s girlfriend. Her people became spacekru. Her leader became Bellamy.
Maybe some of that is knowing she was exiled and had lost her king... so maybe knowing Bellamy is alive kept her from fully integrating into a new family?
But in the 5 years on Sky Ring she has even fewer people to talk to. Gabriel and Hope were also strangers comparable to spacekru at the start. The only one with a grudge is Hope... which is not much compared to how Bellamy felt about Echo at the beginning of their six years in space.
Orlando is an outsider despite none of them being close. He’s the odd one out... a position I imagine that Echo found herself in in space many times.
Yet.
I don’t feel like we’re getting any of the proper flashbacks or storytelling to show us these important connections and moments.
And when it comes down to it... they treat him like it’s been weeks when they leave him to die... oh he’s our friend but... these people are our family.
But that doesn’t make any sense. 5 years is a really long time. Those people would become your family. The same way Echo is bonded to Gabriel and Hope, she should be bonded to Orlando... and that goes for all of them.
Echo knows them just as well as she knows her spacekru family. It’s a similar amount of time and isolation.
So the pragmatism and ease with which she makes this decision to leave Orlando behind, to betray his wishes and him... that’s hard to understand.
Unless she is cold hearted. Unless this is Dark Echo... which I’m all here for by the way. I’d love to see her character just GO somewhere.
But the really terrible, cruel decision felt undercut by something... I think the willingness of Gabriel and Hope to watch and let it happen. Bc Orlando would be their family, too. Echo would be their family.
But why did Orlando not become Echo’s people the way spacekru and Bellamy did?
I know that her rationale was that she wasn’t a part of Orlando’s people. Which is fair. He still had ties to his people. He seemed generally anti-violence and peace-seeking...which isn’t Echo’s MO.
Bellamy and spacekru still had ties to their people. Something I think Echo was worried about when they landed.
Then she was the one to point out that Clarke had chosen her person... Madi... and her loyalty had shifted. Her people weren’t Bellamy’s people anymore and by extension Echo’s (although Clarke remedied this).
Maybe it does all go back to Echo didn’t have a people when she went into space, but she did still have a people when she went to Sky Ring.
Which I guess makes me wonder if Roan was still alive when Echo went into space, would she have ever let her loyalty be given to spacekru?
And if she didn’t break free from her need to serve a leader and be blindly devoted to a people in the five years on Penance, then how will they believably move her character forward and give her an independence she hasn’t ever had??
