The Short Take:
Echo didn’t get a fair shake. The first episode is in many ways more confusing than helpful in setting up the story. Kingpin was great, but I thought Maya’s Choctaw family was the series’ most valuable asset. I’m interested in seeing more from all of them.
Image Credit: LA Times
[Until about the last third of the review, this will be spoiler free. I will issue an additional spoiler warning when the time comes.]
The Long Take:
This series has a lot of unfair baggage attached to it. And I don’t just mean the general hand-wringing around the MCU, with harbingers of apocalyptic doom declaring the end of superhero movies as we know it. The timing and canon connections surrounding Echo were working against it from the start.
For Marvel, it has been a year defined by box office flop after box office flop. Meanwhile, Disney executives admitted that they put too many eggs in their streaming basket, causing them to stretch their talent too thin and bring down production quality.
The biggest and most telling news, perhaps, was that after reviewing finished episodes of the upcoming series Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel decided to scrap them and go back to the drawing board. And, lest we forget, the primary connection Echo (the character) has to the rest of the MCU is not, in fact, Hawkeye, the first series in which the titular character appeared. But to Daredevil. They have a history in the comics, but, more importantly, MCU Echo is the adopted niece of Kingpin, Daredevil’s archenemy. So Echo is inevitably tied to the rocky return of Charlie Cox’s Daredevil to the MCU. The series only just this week (January 22, to be precise) resumed production on a new, course-correcting story. There are already paparazzi photos of the old Netflix gang — Charlie Cox, Deborah Ann Woll, and Elden Henson — back together again.
Disney+ subscribers are watching Echo in the middle of all of that. No matter how good Alaqua Cox is (and she’s good), this could, for many, lead to an Arrested Development “Her?” situation.
Marvel itself seemed to have this dismissive attitude as well. Instead of the normal slow rollout, releasing one episode a week to generate excitement in anticipation of the next episode, they dumped the entire 5-episode season on Disney+ on January 9th. Even the non-canonical animated series What if…? got a one episode a day drop over the holidays. This, to me, could be a sign of Marvel shrinking away in fear, seemingly insecure about its release in the midst of the centrifuge of bad press and growing pains I described above.
Even worse (yes, there’s more!), Echo has a distinction in its opening credits that no other series has had before: Marvel Spotlight. I have to admit that even I, MCU dork supreme who has written weekly reviews of all the Disney+ series to date, did not know what this meant. I still don’t, really. I’m looking it up right now as I type. Apparently, Brad Winderbaum, the Head of Streaming at Marvel, explained in an interview with Marvel.com that the Spotlight designation means that viewers of the series do not have to be plugged into the wider MCU continuity (a.k.a. how characters and storylines relate to one another) in order to enjoy the series. He said that this will make way for shows “focusing on street-level stakes over larger MCU continuity.”
I’m all for setting appropriate expectations for fans, conveying that not every single series or film is going to overtly contribute to the broader Saga-based story unfolding. The hunt for clues got largely out of hand during the first flood of Disney+ series. I’ve been complicit in this problem, I’ll freely admit. Similarly, street level stories unconcerned with the cosmic affairs of the MCU sound great. That’s the kind of the approach the Netflix Marvel series took. Yet, I can’t help but think that this Marvel Spotlight label is really saying, “This one doesn’t count,” or “we don’t want you to pay attention to this one,” creating two classes of MCU stories. Again, I don’t think that’s the intention; but I think that may be the end result.
Before I get into how I think all this has messed with Echo in a way that’s unfortunate, if not unfair, I want to say that the series as a whole was not bad. It tells a compelling story when it focuses on Echo as a character caught between two worlds: her Choctaw family and her underworld life working for Kingpin. The action sequences stood out as intricate yet slick, very much in the style of John Wick or, dare I say, the Netflix Daredevil series (obligatory shoutout to the all-timer long takes in that!). Vincent Dinofrio returns to form as Kingpin, with more of a menacing, tortured edge than his character had in Hawkeye. And Alaqua Cox holds the screen as powerfully as she did in Hawkeye. Any criticism I have about the series does not involve her at all.
What resonated with most, however, was Maya’s family. Much like Kamala Khan’s family in Ms. Marvel and The Marvels, I found Maya Lopez’s family to be fully formed, grounded characters with a lot of heart. I 100% believed that Chaske Spencer’s Uncle Henry, despite being a part of the organized crime system, cared about Maya. The tense conversations between the two of them throughout the series were essential to establish the emotional and moral stakes of the story. Chula, Maya’s grandmother, set up the most satisfying emotional payoff because the writing did a really nice job of conveying why she and Maya would be estranged. (Though I would have deployed those flashbacks differently. More on that later.) The actress who plays her, Tantoo Cardinal, by the way, also appears as the mom, Lizzie Q, in Killers of the Flower Moon, which recently received 10 Oscar nominations. But unlike her devastating yet stoic performance in that film, she gets to be lively and flawed here. I’d watch her in anything.
Image Credit: Marvel.com
Considering how much the show tried to emphasize her importance, I wish Bonnie had more to do. She seemed fine, but I didn’t learn enough about present day her (although I suppose her being an EMT says a lot) to pass judgment one way or the other. The heart and soul of this show actually comes from two characters who provide comic relief: Academy Award nominee Graham Greene (Dances with Wolves) as Skully and Cody Lighting as Cousin Biscuits. The levity they brought was much-needed in many scenes, especially as a way to bridge the other characters. I was utterly charmed by them both.
[SPOILER for The Marvels in the next paragraph.]
Unlike Kamala’s family, I’m not sure these characters would hop on an aircraft with Nick Fury just to keep an eye on Maya — a sign that they are all well-developed characters and not stock archetypes — but I do hope we see them again in the MCU. I can see Cousin Biscuits ending up with the Avengers by accident. I’d love to see a scene in which he teams up with Spiderman’s BFF Ned. (Marvel Spotlight…Marvel Spotlight…Marvel Spotlight…)
[SPOILER WARNING: I’m about to get into more details about specific episodes and plot points of Echo.]
I did not feel this warm on the series from the start, however. I was pretty dismayed after watching the pilot episode, which was, to me, a disorienting mess. It took one of the strongest episodes of Hawkeye — the one that introduced Maya Lopez to the MCU — and chopped it up into bits, diffusing the impact of her backstory. Some scenes, like the way she takes out a boxing opponent, with the camera lingering on her prosthetic leg, were instantly recognizable. And then with others I spent more time trying to remember if this was something I’d already seen before or if it was a new scene that was supposed to demonstrate the same thing.
At first, I thought, don’t be so harsh. They’re trying this Marvel Spotlight series thing to get more viewers to feel welcome without having to do a bunch of pre-viewing homework. That’s a good thing. But then I realized that there’s no reason for someone brand new to the Echo series to have to deal with Jeremy Renner AT ALL. The specific scenes I’m thinking of include: 1.) The flashbacks of Ronin, the vigilante alias Clint Barton takes on during The Blip, murdering Maya’s father and Kingpin’s other men. And 2.) non-Ronin Clint later, during the present timeline in Hawkeye, telling Maya that she doesn’t need to listen to Kingpin. The inclusion of these scenes appropriates a major climax from an entirely different series and renders it random and therefore inert. It also overcomplicates the story in ways that distract from the core story of the series: Maya and Kingpin vs. Maya and her Choctaw community.
It’s a modern day tale of colonization, in which Kingpin has weaponized Maya, indirectly against her own people, assimilating her into organized crime so that, rather than defend her own community, she plays a hand in exploiting it. I kind of wish they hadn’t said it out loud to make it more heavy-handed, but showing that Kingpin refused to learn sign language to communicate with Maya (he outsources to both human and non-human translators), while her estranged family so clearly sees doing so as essential to being in her life, told me everything I needed to know. Even though Kingpin claims to love Maya and probably actually does in some twisted way, he is first and foremost using her so that she is an ally rather than a threat. It becomes apparent by the end of the season that she is only useful to him if he can control her.
As much as I love seeing Jeremy Renner, we didn’t need to make him part of the prologue to this series. He’s an Avenger and this series doesn’t need us to worry about The Avengers, right? (Marvel Spotlight…Marvel Spotlight…Marvel Spotlight…) I didn’t need to say the word “Hawkeye” in anything I just wrote in the last paragraph. I completely understand the impulse to get new viewers up to speed. That is supposedly the spirit behind the Marvel Spotlight moniker. I feel as though this backstory could have been much better handled had we not seen Maya’s father’s death but rather heard a revealing retelling of it when Kingpin confronts Maya at her abandoned family home. I kept waiting for her to bring up the death of her father and for Kingpin, in response, to lamely try to defend his decision to put a hit on him. But it never came. Reconfiguring the first episode to focus on flashbacks of Maya and Kingpin when Maya was a young girl, as we get in a later episode, would have made more sense in the context of telling this story as opposed to the one already told about Maya in Hawkeye.
I blame all the factors I laid out at the start of this review. To me, this first episode of Echo is very much a product of the chaos and confusion implicit in where Marvel Studios’ head appears to be at right now. Marvel Spotlight should mean we’re so focused on the here and now that whatever came before is inconsequential. It shouldn’t mean please hold while we rush through a bunch of backstory in an awkward way and then the second episode is really where the story begins. I wonder, would the premiere of Echo be more or less disorienting for those who, unlike me, haven’t seen Hawkeye? If you have some added insight to this, please share in the comments!
There are, of course, a small handful of other issues I have with the series, and they are mostly ones that I’ve complained about with other MCU Disney+ entries. Could the story they were trying to tell here benefited from more episodes? Absolutely. The confrontation with Kingpin came a little too soon, but, more importantly, the realization that not just Maya but all the women in her family for generations have supernatural abilities and a telepathic connection to one another, while compelling, felt very sudden and convenient. A better-told version of this storyline can be found in the Kahhori-centric episode of Marvel’s What if…? That was only in one episode, though, so perhaps what we needed was an entire episode of Echo dedicated to exploring her new powers and learning where they came from.
I could argue that the editing of Echo has been the primary stumbling block for me, because when I think about the gradual introduction of the generations of Choctaw women who came before Maya, it still seems very clunky to me. The idea of seeding one story at the start of each episode to then reveal their connection in a montage is extremely cool on paper, and yet the visual execution of it just didn’t work for me. So between that and the first episode’s misuse of footage from Hawkeye, I’d say this season needs a new cut.
Image Credit: The Hollywood Reporter
I can’t help but wonder, could there be some kind of connection between Kahhori and Chafa, the first Choctaw who saved her her people? Kahhori is a Mohawk woman and therefore should not be conflated with Chafa. Yet the powers they have seem awfully similar visually (though I’d say they looked better in the animated series), with intricate patterns on characters’ bodies and glowing earth or wells from which powers spring. Part of me hopes they do not because I like the fact that Marvel seems to be taking on different indigenous cultures rather than painting them all with the same broad brush. There I go again… (Marvel Spotlight…Marvel Spotlight…Marvel Spotlight…)
This turned out to be one of my favorite Marvel series. My spouse, who isn't into the MCU in general, enjoyed it as well which I guess is what they were going for with “spotlight.” My son is taking ASL in high school so he got a kick out of that part. His teacher urged all of the students to watch.
I have to say, I've watched pretty much everything that the MCU has put out, and I have, as yet, only watched the first episode and a half of Echo. As you point out, it feels like they're saying, sort of, that this isn't a priority series. With so much to watch and keep track of, and a busy life, that says to me "I'll get to this" not "I'll binge this." Agreed on the first episode too!