Maxance Vincent
Warning: The following article contains spoilers for all episodes of Echo.
After a year they would likely forget, Marvel Studios is back with their first TV-MA television series under the Disney+ umbrella with Echo. Not only that, but it is also the first series to be a part of the Marvel Spotlight banner, meaning that audiences don’t need to have seen previous Marvel Cinematic Universe films and television series before seeing Echo, as the story told is a largely self-contained one. I find it weird that the first series under that banner is a spinoff show to 2021’s Hawkeye and a continuation of Netflix’s Daredevil, but credit where credit is due, the first episode does a good job at contextualizing Maya Lopez’s (Alaqua Cox) story within the prism of the MCU.
A couple of flashbacks from Hawkeye are shown, including William Lopez’s (Zahn McClarnon) death at the hands of Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), who was sent by Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) to get rid of him during the Blip. Daredevil (Charlie Cox) also shows up during an extended tracking shot fight between Maya and Fisk’s goons but disappears after being unable to defeat her. Beyond that, larger connections to the MCU are sparse, with name-drops of Madripoor and Roxxon Oil that enhance the story for die-hard fans but won’t confuse any viewers who aren’t interested in the franchise’s larger repercussions.
One of the bigger elements that this series would answer going in was acknowledging the canonicity of the Netflix Daredevil series, which Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige did not directly address when both Cox and D’Onofrio returned to the MCU. With Vanessa Fisk being recast from Ayelet Zurer to Sandrine Holt in Daredevil: Born Again, fans were skeptical that the MCU’s Fisk and Daredevil were not the same as the Netflix version. Echo immediately shuts down this nonsense by having Fisk’s arc from Daredevil, in which he killed his father with a hammer as a twelve-year-old boy, carry over to this show. It’s, in fact, one of the most pivotal elements of the series when Lopez is reunited with her Choctaw roots once she travels to Tamaha, Oklahoma, after taking down Fisk in Hawkeye.
Lopez attempts to take down Fisk’s empire by asking help from her Uncle Henry (Chaske Spencer), who has tried to get out of the Kingpin’s pocket but has failed to do so. He wants no part of this until he is dragged into the conflict once Maya blows up one of Fisk’s weapons carts to send a message. It doesn’t take long for a hospital-bedridden Fisk to send his goons (one of them being Tenet’s Andrew Howard, the “Wake up the Americans.” dude) to Oklahoma and kill Maya.
This is where the show flexes its well-earned TV-MA rating, with a brawl between Maya and a swarm of goons at Henry’s roller derby that’s as bloody and as gritty as the trailers advertised. The action pulls no punches directly, showing its unflinching violence, and the choreography is surprisingly precise and tactile. With a smaller budget allotted for this series, it allowed directors Sydney Freeland and Caitriona McKenzie to directly craft practical action that’s effectively gnarly at showing just how powerful Maya is without relying too much on elaborate visual effects. The aforementioned [brief] fight with Daredevil directly harkens back to the Netflix days, with choreography that brings The Man Without Fear back to his glory days of vigilanteism, unlike when She-Hulk: Attorney at Law made him a far more elaborate hero. He is in very good hands.
D’Onofrio is also (and unsurprisingly) magnifying in his true grand return as Fisk. Hawkeye made him a bit sillier than he was initially perceived in the Daredevil show, but Echo quickly course-corrects this and brings him back to the man we knew when we left him in Daredevil‘s third season. His chilling voice and unpredictable presence, with literally everyone in his pocket, is enough to terrify as soon as he appears on screen. However, the show goes the extra mile by attempting to peer through his dark childhood, with one of the franchise’s greatest-ever scenes involving Fisk as Lopez uses her powers to explore his mind, where it directly recalls Daredevil‘s flashback episode as a young Fisk picks up a hammer to kill his dad. For the first time, we have seen how broken Fisk is, no matter how strong he attempts to perceive himself to Maya and the ones he wants to dispose of.
Freeland and McKenzie also give the series a distinct visual look through striking flashbacks of Choctaw heroes who transmit their powers to Maya, from a game of stickball shot with an IMAX-like aspect ratio to a black-and-white, silent film cold open where Killers of the Flower Moon‘s William Belleau portrays the leader of a group of Lighthorsemen who hunts down criminals and saved by an ancestor of Maya, able to wield powers.
Storytelling elements representing Choctaw culture are the main highlight of Echo, with Indigenous storytellers and performers telling this story from their point of view. Each cultural element that is highlighted through the series is handled with extreme care, with careful aesthetic choices that beautifully complement their story. Many of its best scenes are also unspoken but instead performed through American Sign Language, with Cox being a deaf actor in real life. One such scene involves Lopez reuniting with Chula (Tantoo Cardinal), who blames Maya’s father for the tragic death of her mother, while her ex-husband, Skully (Graham Greene), is more forgiving towards her father because it wasn’t his fault.
The Chula reunion scene is another incredible showcase for Cardinal, who was also recently seen in Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon. In that film, she says very little but speaks through her eyes, evoking a life that is slowly drifting away from her. The same approach feeds Cardinal’s performance in Echo, who exudes incredible emotional vulnerability with Cox as she tells the story of her pregnancy through a Choctaw midwife exclusively through her eyes and sign language. Cox also makes quite the impression as Lopez, whose arc was slightly underwhelming in Hawkeye but now has the full time to shine through her show. Anyone who watches it for Daredevil will be severely (and I truly mean this: he appears in one episode for 90 seconds) disappointed, but it shouldn’t be a deterrent since this is called Echo, not Daredevil Season 3.5.
Scenes where she connects with Chula, Skully, Henry, or her cousin Bonnie (Devery Jacobs, with their second MCU project in a month, after appearing as Kahhori in What If…? – Season 2) are the beating heart and soul of the series, rife with emotional complexity and beautifully performed. But I also wish there would be more of this exploration, as the five-episode structure doesn’t allow for greater character development. The arcs are properly introduced but barely stitched together near its end, as if the second part of the first season is coming later this year that will wrap things up nicely instead of leaving it on such a whimper of an anticlimactic finale.
You can tell the latter half of the series has been hacked to bits, with its multiple editors attempting to figure out how to make sense of all its moving parts instead of satisfyingly telling a story that not only takes its time to establish its multiple characters but the main conflict. Instead, it prefers to rush through everything, at the detriment of many of its supporting characters, to have an incomplete arc by the time the series has said “enough of this,” and abruptly ends with an albeit tantalizing post-credits scene, but with many plot threads still waiting to be resolved.
Maya’s powers are cool enough but don’t have the impact they do because of how little time we spend with her honing them in and learning the value of her ancestry. Had the show explored her past in a much more complete way, it likely would’ve had a bigger impact once Maya, Bonnie, and Chula felt their energy and freed themselves from Fisk’s shackles.
As a result, Echo feels as formless as many of Marvel’s television ventures, with a strong opening few episodes setting the stage for what’s to come, only for its latter half to rush through the storytelling to get to the origin story and the set up for Daredevil: Born Again. However, it also gives a blueprint for the future of the MCU that should inspire promise: lower budget, character-driven storytelling with practical action and striking images instead of CGI-laden slop that’s as shoddy and indistinguishable from the other CGI-driven blockbusters made today. If Marvel wants to succeed and move past the endless “superhero fatigue” discourse, they need to do more of Echo and less of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, though at longer episodes in a truly televisual structure instead of its “five-hour-long movie” mandate that is genuinely starting to show its cracks. Here’s hoping their recent course correction will do Daredevil: Born Again justice.
SCORE: ★★1/2
All episodes of Echo are now available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.
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