Echo — Series Review
Echo is the tenth television series set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it made its debut on Disney+ last week with all five episodes dropping at once. Set after the events of Hawkeye, Maya Lopez is on the run from Wilson Fisk/Kingpin’s organization and she returns to her hometown of Tamaha, Oklahoma. There she reconnects with old friends and family, learns more about her Native American roots, and finds herself face to face with familiar foes from the past.
Since it hasn’t really been stated on this new blog of mine, I should start with a prelude and say that there was a point in time not very long ago where I considered myself a big fan of almost everything MCU. That was ultimately during their run with the Infinity Saga from 2008–2019, but everything since then has been… mixed, to say the least. I’ve enjoyed some of their recent works, but I’ve also found myself really underwhelmed and even tired out by other projects of theirs, especially a majority of their TV shows. To this day, the two seasons of Loki and the one season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are the only MCU shows that I’ve genuinely enjoyed. But everything else on their TV department has been a big misfire, in my opinion. I went into this show really hoping that it was the game-changer that some people were hyping it up to be, as I’ve been really wanting Marvel to finds its stride once more.
Alaqua Cox reprises her role as Maya/Echo. I give her a ton of credit as an actress who’s both deaf and using an actual prosthetic leg. It gives her a lot to work with and in some of the series’ more engaging scenes, such as the occasional fight scene or one brief bit of emotion between her and a loved one, she really shines. She has her work cut out for her physically and the overall performance is serviceable, but the big issue is that her character came off as very flat. For a majority of the show, she only has one mood: Brooding. So many times in these five episodes does it feel like she just spends a lot of time just wandering around town, staring at some key thing from her past with a depressed look, and not evolving beyond that. It was disappointing to see since I see the potential for Cox as an actress, but I don’t think that the show gives her much to work with.
For the show itself, I have to profess to feeling like the first three episodes were all just… fine. And I don’t mean fine like “A fine piece of work”, but more fine as in “Yeah, it’s fine… I guess.” The first three episodes can basically be boiled down to this: Some moderately entertaining action scenes, but the build up to them feels lackluster in terms of the pacing, due to it being an almost constant show of Maya brooding around her town and stopping for the occasional chat with an old friend or family member. It all just feels very repetitive and the first three episodes just don’t have the momentum to keep the story going at an interesting pace.
For the fourth episode, the first half of that got me hooked purely because of the one thing that most everyone was looking forward to: Wilson Fisk. That’s right, he’s back after being badly nerfed in Hawkeye and his back and forth psychological battle with Maya is easily the most engaging part of the whole series. Half of episode 4’s runtime is dedicated solely to Maya and Fisk and we get to see a lot of character and terrific acting from Vincent D’Onofrio. The second half of the episode just makes a return to a bunch of dull family melodrama, but it had a good run while it was just Fisk-centric.
On the subject of supporting character, I honestly found a lot of them to be very one-note and unmemorable. Some characters are slightly elevated by the performances, such as Graham Greene or Tantoo Cardinal, the both of them shining and showing some signs of likability and charm that the show is lacking. But then there are some characters, such as Maya’s uncle Charlie or her cousin who goes by the name of “Biscuits” who are just kind of… there. Biscuits in particular is just your run of the mill comedic sidekick who doesn’t contribute anything major to the plot and I honestly found myself annoyed by him in several scenes. Maya has another cousin named Bonnie who only shows up when the plot needs a hostage, which is just a huge indicator of the show’s writers simply not knowing what to do with characters who aren’t Maya or Fisk.
The show also really emphasizes Native American culture and that was interesting to see in the sense that it’s a part of the MCU that we haven’t seen to this point. Some episodes start off with some type of flashback or vignette showcasing a look at Native life in the past and how it connects to Maya’s powers in the modern day, but it doesn’t have the development that it needs, nor does it stick to the show’s attempts at tryng to be the grounded character study that it really wants to be. If anything, it just makes the finale come off as goofy and a complete betrayal of what came before it in the first four episodes.
This show’s finale is easily the weakest episode. Not only does it follow the usual MCU TV formula of making the finale the shortest episode, but it follows in the footsteps of other shows in that it just appears to be throwing everything at the wall and hoping it sticks, only for it to miserably fall to the ground with a sad, wet plop. I already mentioned it being goofy, but it’s also very rushed. The big action set piece at the end happens so quickly and it’s over before you can even fully process just what the hell happened. Without credits and opening credits, the finale just barely reaches the 30 minute mark and that’s simply not enough to wrap up any big show that’s trying to be some deep character drama in a world as big as the MCU’s.
And with briefly going back to Fisk, I still can’t say that I’m terribly excited with what Marvel’s going to do with him in the future. This show has small glimpses of the terrifying, but still emotionally complicated force of nature that he was in the Daredevil series. But the show doesn’t fully realize what made him such a threat in that show. For someone who’s basically a street-level Thanos, I didn’t feel the sense of power that he’s supposed to have and the show doesn’t capitalize on the TV-MA rating that was so hyped up. With the amount of blood in this show, it can easily belong to a lesser rating. Don’t go into this show thinking that it’s going to be ultra violent or gritty, because it’s just not.
By and large, Echo is just yet another mediocre MCU show that really showcases that the latest phases of Marvel has no real sense of direction outside of just oversaturating the market with quantity, not quality. I’m basically right on the cusp of just calling it quits with MCU series, as I’ve been impressed by very little of them. This series isn’t the worst of the MCU shows that I’ve seen, but it’s not gonna get by merely on being better than crap like Secret Invasion or She-Hulk.
