It is perhaps unfair to compare a single 10-episode season of Orphan Black Echoes against its predecessor’s 50 episodes over five seasons run. After all, that much more real estate allows a show so much more time to explore and resolve its mythos satisfactorily. But if one stacks up Echoes’ season against the original’s debut, the newest member of the franchise still suffers by comparison.

Created by Anna Fishko and taking place about 40 years after the events of Orphan Black, Orphan Black Echoes opens with an immediate hook. A woman (Krysten Ritter)—who we’ll eventually know as Lucy—awakens in a well-appointed living room. She has no memory of who she is, where she is, or how she got there. Dr. Kira Manning (Keeley Hawes)—the adult daughter of Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), who is sadly only glimpsed in a photo—attempts to calm and remind Lucy of her past. It fails and the amnesiac has to be chemically restrained. Later, she manages to escape the room, only to discover that it is little more than a set built inside a massive warehouse. In 2052, the cloning process at the center of the original series may be illegal, but science has found a workaround, creating a different kind of copy called, colloquially, “printouts.”

From there, the series follows Lucy’s attempts to discover her past and protect those she cares about. The quest sweeps up several others in its quake, including a teen, Jules Lee (Amanda Fix), who’s deeply connected to Lucy and Kira. Others pulled into the situation include Kira’s wife (Rya Kihlstedt), a seemingly altruistic billionaire, Paul Darrios (James Hiroyuki Liao), a shoot-first-ask-questions-later enforcer Tom (Reed Diamond), and a single father (Avan Jogia) and his tween daughter (Zariella Langford).

It’s an intriguing premise with a twist on Orphan Black’s science has gone too far thesis that keeps it in the same area code. However, that’s not the advantage it may initially appear. The printout process is similar enough that the questions it raises are nearly the same as those raised by cloning. It becomes a difference without distinction. That forces Orphan Black Echoes even further into its cousin’s shadow that it already would inevitably have to dwell. It would’ve been better served to revolve cloning again or the abuse of some very different future science. The former would remove the new science explainers, and the latter would help the show to blaze new ground. Alas, the choice to go very similar but not the same strands the show in a place betwixt and between.

The plot echoes (haHA) that sort of neither here nor there sensation. While the tenth episode manages to close on a shock, the time spent getting there is often wheel spinning. Not even the new direction that twist sets up makes the pacing feel worth it. Through the series’ high point fifth installment, “Do I Know You?”, Echoes has a strong sense of forward motion. The back half, however, meanders, going over several of the same notes. It ends up retroactively making much of the season’s start feel similarly repetitious.

It’s a shame as it strands Ritter and Fix, with their excellent mentor-mentee chemistry, in a repetitive loop. Every event begins to feel like “someone gets snagged, everyone else rescues them, a sacrifice proves necessary, another revelation manifests, someone gets snagged…” and so on. Ritter may have escaped that warehouse in the show’s first 15 minutes, but Orphan Black Echoes feels increasingly hermetically sealed.

This is why it proves so exasperating when two characters break with their plan in the final episode’s last act. This ensures the mission’s failure and a cliffhanger teaser for a possible second season. Faced with giving at least one plotline a satisfying resolution, the characters run in circles until their clock runs out.

Orphan Black Echoes is welcome to a second season, especially if it goes in the hinted-at new direction. However, the show’s unwillingness to offer the season a satisfying conclusion feels both illustrative. And not just of Echoes in specific, but a lot of streaming culture in general. TV often feels like it needs to remember that it can end a thing before launching another. It doesn’t need to just run one right into the other without any outcome or catharsis.

Orphan Black: Echoes will have you seeing double on AMC and streaming on AMC+ starting June 23.

Orphan Black: Echoes Trailer: