Marvel is always gonna Marvel, but Echo reflects some level of commitment to shaking up the MCU status quo in 2024.Marvel series usually take their time to roll out on Disney+, spreading their episodes over a few consecutive weeks. But the latest MCU series, Echo, departed from that tradition by dropping all five of its installments at once on Tuesday night. That was a very smart move, because the latest addition to the vast Marvel universe does not find its groove right away. Once it does, though, particularly in the conclusive fourth and fifth episodes, Echo earns justifiable praise for representing a new, more daring direction for the studio and its many interconnected sagas.
Despite the representational firsts associated with this origin story focused on Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), a deaf Choctaw woman with a prosthetic leg and an almost superhuman ability to take out multiple assailants at once, Echo’s initial episodes come across as Marvel as usual. The premiere runs through Maya’s backstory, hitting narrative beats that we’ve heard in Marvel — and, for that matter, DC — stories forever. We watch as the young girl (played as a child by Darnell Besaw) experiences a life-altering tragedy, and later, the young, orphaned woman becomes a vigilante working under the tutelage of Wilson Fisk (a simultaneously imposing and gentle Vincent D’Onofrio), the mob boss known as Kingpin whom Maya calls Uncle. We have been here before.
Echo marks another distinction for Marvel — its first story to land on Disney+ with a TV-MA rating due to graphic violence. But an early fight scene between Maya and a gaggle of dudes she’s been asked to take care of by Fisk has a business-as-usual vibe as well. It’s certainly grittier than the sequences that have previously appeared in the adventures of Loki and the like, but with its sepia-tinged aesthetic and constantly moving camera, it mostly looks like it was uploaded from an action video game directly onto Disney’s platform.
Even though Marvel has marketed Echo as the first series to carry its Spotlight banner, a designation that signifies a more character-driven approach and less reliance on previous knowledge of the many interconnected Marvel characters and story lines, the initial entries of this action-drama don’t slow down enough to meaningfully study the interactions between its central figures. In one early sequence, Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), shows up to warn Maya about her so-called “uncle,” prompting her to travel back to Oklahoma. The exchange between the two, in which Clint shares information that is mind-blowing to Maya at this point in her life, lasts for less than a minute, and then she’s off to seek vengeance. The sequence — which, for the record, may not fully resonate with viewers unless they’ve seen the previous Marvel series Hawkeye, where Maya was first introduced to the MCU — cries out to breathe a little longer and let us watch as this revelation sinks in for our protagonist. Based on truncated character beats like this, the whole concept of Marvel Spotlight, whose logo precedes each episode like a stamp of prestige, seems disingenuous at best and farcical at worst.
If you only watch the first two or three episodes of Echo — which many critics did, since those were the only ones Disney shared in advance — you might conclude that Marvel’s attempt to hype up this story as the beginning of something new is just clever branding masking the fact that the studio is just doing the same old thing it always does. Frankly, that was my assumption. But the exceptional fourth and fifth episodes in this limited series prove that assumption wrong. Yes, the outlines of this drawing strongly resemble all the other outlines in the Marvel coloring book. But the hues that creator and Better Call Saul veteran Marion Dayre, her fellow writers, and the directors add to those familiar illustrations ultimately add up to something more dazzling than we’ve been conditioned to expect from the Marvel machine as of late. I am aware that it’s very annoying when people tell you to stick with multiple episodes of something to get to the good stuff. But in this case, especially since Echo is such a concisely structured show, the payoff really is worth it.
In fourth episode “Taloa” — a Choctaw word that means song or singer — Echo instantly becomes the show that Dayre & Co. clearly set out to make. It opens with a flashback to a moment from Maya’s childhood, when Fisk beats so much blood out of an ice-cream man that you can viscerally hear the plasma gushing out of his body. When tiny little Maya discovers what her father figure has done, she doesn’t register shock; instead, she walks over to the seriously injured hawker of frozen treats and swiftly kicks him a few more times for good measure. It’s a grim but darkly funny sequence filled with the kind of attitude and verve that was missing from much of what Echo did prior to this. If you’re going to go TV-MA, this is how you do it.
In its final act, Echo also takes more time with some key conversations, most notably one between Maya and Chula (Tantoo Cardinal), her estranged grandmother, that connects the dots between the frequent, unexplained visions both experience of their female Choctaw ancestors. The physicality Cardinal brings to signing with Maya is so beautiful it turns ASL into something akin to a spiritual dance. Both this and a climactic finale face-off make it clear that Maya’s deafness, her prosthetic, and her Native heritage don’t exist just so Marvel can mark off marginalized community boxes on some demographic checklist. These attributes — shared by Cox — are integral to who she is and the story that Echo wants to tell. Marvel has been accused, rightly, of patting itself on the back in the representation department before. (Surely you have not forgotten the try-hard “girl power” sequence in Avengers: Endgame?) But Echo resists pandering in its celebration of female, Indigenous, and disabled identities, keeping it all rooted in character moments that are organic and well earned.
The performances from a cast of largely Indigenous actors add to that sense of organicness, even when the series’ other elements haven’t quite gelled yet. Fans of Reservation Dogs will be pleased to see so many favorites from that Hulu gem, including Devery Jacobs, Zahn McClarnon, Jana Schmieding, and the great Graham Greene as Chula’s wise and flirtatious ex-partner. While Cox doesn’t have the years of experience that some of her co-stars have amassed, she more than holds her own as the lead, playing Maya with a stoic reserve that conveys even more power once we start to see her long-buried emotions seeping through it.
While Echo may be an exceptional child within the Marvel family, it still has Marvel’s DNA, which is why it still must do the contractually obligated work of setting up the audience for future MCU endeavors. Daredevil, played by Charlie Cox — who assumed the same role in the Marvel-produced Netflix series of the same name — pops in briefly in what registers as a nod to the forthcoming series Daredevil: Born Again, which will put Matt Murdock back into Fisk’s orbit. A mid-credits stinger in the finale serves a similar function. Let’s be real: Marvel is always gonna Marvel. But after a 2023 run of films and shows that induced superhero fatigue in viewers who hadn’t developed it already, Echo reflects some level of commitment (fingers crossed really hard) to shaking up the MCU status quo in 2024. After watching all five episodes of Echo, I can honestly say it’s both gratifying and moving to watch a truly American woman be the one who starts the shaking. Sometimes, it’s very satisfying to be wrong.
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