Review by C.J. Bunce
Despite what seems like Disney’s efforts to hamstring the show from its inception, even at only five episodes the new superhero series Marvel’s Echo is one of its strongest, arriving in the top echelon of Marvel’s efforts since its Netflix days, up there with the edgy and stylish Luke Cage and the inventive Moon Knight. Echo takes a recent Marvel Comics character we saw only briefly in the series Hawkeye and reconfigures her story into something more worthy of her Choctaw warrior roots. It is also Marvel’s first project headlining a Native American hero, and one with disabilities. Star Alaqua Cox is both deaf and an amputee, elements that become attributes, not obstacles for her character: Maya Lopez, an anti-hero whose life is compressed under the thumbs of New York gangsters, groomed as a niece of sorts to “Kingpin” Wilson Fisk, played by returning Marvel actor Vincent D’Onofrio.
Ultimately Marvel’s Echo is the studio’s best treatment yet of a new or lesser-known character from the comics pages, and it boasts Marvel’s most distinguished slate of actors.
That slate includes so many great Native American actors from the series Longmire (which made our list of the Best TV of the Decade), it’s practically a spiritual successor to the show. Longmire fans will recognize Maya’s father Zahn McClarnon as reservation cop Matthias. Fellow Longmire alumni Tantoo Cardinal and Graham Greene play her grandparents. There are still more crossovers in supporting roles, including Julia Jones and David Midthunder among Maya’s ancestors (Midthunder played key Longmire antagonist David Ridges, and Jones was Gabriella). Fans will also recognize McClarnon from the recent Dark Winds, Cardinal from Stumptown and countless other series, along with acting legend Graham Greene. Devery Jacobs a standout talent on The Order, plays Maya’s cousin Bonnie. And the Twilight movies actor Chaske Spencer is her uncle Henry, a strong, positive force for Maya.
Who is Maya Lopez? In 2021 she made the borg annual list of Kick-Ass Genre Heroines, and Alaqua Cox proves she has what it takes to headline a series of her own. Cox’s sympathetic villain can do it all without the use of her hearing and aided by a prosthetic leg. A fairly new character in Marvel Comics, she was created for a Daredevil story in 1999. Viewers got their first look at Maya when she opposed Hawkeye’s dark alter ego Ronin in the Hawkeye series. Marvel’s Echo carries that encounter into the first episode, revisiting the scene with new elements to flesh out Echo’s role and relationship with her father, a gangster working for Fisk who is later killed by Fisk–touching off the events of this story.
At five short episodes, less than four hours of content, the series feels like it was too tightly edited, and two episodes are only 39 minutes long, which may remind Disney subscribers of so many “blink and you missed it” episodes of The Mandalorian. The Disney+ series experienced several missteps in getting released. Initially figured at a full 10-episode series as discussed here at borg, it was soon whittled down to a small mini-series (shorter than the six episodes of series like Loki), with Marvel chief Kevin Feige reportedly calling it “unreleasable” before a series of reshoots resulted in the five-episode final product. The first trailer had all the makings of a bridge between the post-Avengers Marvel and grittier series that first aired on Netflix like Daredevil. In truth Marvel’s Echo is less violent than The Punisher and other Marvel Comics adaptations. The end result is this quick batch, all five episodes released on a single day, under a new Marvel banner called “Marvel Spotlight.” As fans of Marvel, viewers are left to try to figure out what this means. Is Maya Lopez another one-and-done character like Jessica Jones and Luke Cage? In the comics she is part of the Spider-Man universe–the characters under Sony’s umbrella, like Venom. But now she’s tied into Fisk (and there’s a small role for Charlie Cox, back fighting as Daredevil, although the scene is too brief and not given any context)–which ties Maya to both the Netflix shows of Marvel and the “new” Disney+ Marvel, which includes the Hawkeye series. When Maya’s dad tells her she must learn to jump between worlds, he could easily have been talking about Marvel media brands.
As with Tulsa King we’re seeing a setting in America not often featured (although it’s clear that it’s Georgia, where the show is filmed, when it could have been filmed in Oklahoma). Maya’s small Oklahoma home town still has a roller skating rink that plays The J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold.” How awesome is that? Every good new series about Native Americans highlights elements of culture many other Americans have never seen from the inside, from values to traditions like the powwow. This show plays with the sound editing to give viewers a window into Maya’s world without sound. Fisk develops a virtual reality mechanism to communicate with her without knowing American Sign Language, which becomes an important clue to Fisk’s character for Maya. Although ostensibly the villain fueling the action, Fisk feels almost shoe-horned into this story–he’s clearly a tie-in requirement, and yet the story may have been better without him. But this was also the best audiences have ever seen of this villain, thanks to D’Onofrio’s performance and better scripting than previous appearances of the character, who is usually relegated to the status of a knock-off of DC Comics’ Lex Luthor. And there are some obvious tropes, like when Maya gets her prosthetic stuck and must get it repaired. In another scene Maya “MacGyvers” a roller skate into a weapon to get her relatives out of trouble.
Like Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and even Scarlet Witch in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, this story is another take on empowerment. Each episode is named for one of Maya’ ancestors, and in the finale we learn the significance of the series title: these Choctaw women’s lives echo through Maya herself and give her strength. The first episode gives Maya a dream of an ancestor in America more than a thousand years ago, and Episode 3 features a young 19th-century sharpshooter in an “old-time” silent Western in the style of The Great Train Robbery. (And a note to Marvel/Disney: we would gladly tune in for complete seasons of each ancestor’s tale!) Morningstar Angeline, Dannie McCallum, Katarina Ziervogel, and Julia Jones inhabit the ancestor roles. Darnell Besaw, Isabella Madrigal, and Wren Gotts are well cast as younger versions of the main characters. Look for some great makeup and CGI effects along the way. Composer Dave Porter balances evocative historical themes with rousing action scenes.
So what gives with the short season? The character is fantastic. And she’s different… new. The supporting characters are even better. But not giving a story headlined by a woman–who is Native American, who is deaf, who is an amputee–a full season of episodes sure feels like a slight by the studio. It’s true that most Disney series need better editing, most having an episode or two that feel like padding. This series leaves you wanting more. The second episode of Marvel’s Echo is a revenge act that could have been a only a short scene, allowing the story to move forward with more layering in its stead. This is a series that could have used more exposition–more time to see what kind of danger Maya’s father was involved in, what kind of gang activity her uncle was reeled into, even how she survived driving from New York to Oklahoma on a motorcycle with a bullet wound. More Bonnie, Biscuits, and Billy Jack scenes would be welcome, along with more efforts to interweave Maya’s grandparents into the climax. Her grandfather seems to vanish at the end. But these are all nice-to-haves. Seeing what is missing helps to shine a spotlight on how great the five episodes were that viewers ultimately got with the resources given to directors Sydney Freeland and Catriona McKenzie and the writing team. The series has the potential to be much more. Hopefully this only the beginning for this character in a title role.
This is a show better than its source material. Don’t miss this great, albeit too short, series. All five episodes of Marvel’s Echo are now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
