Directed by: Sydney Freeland and Catriona McKenzie
Distributed by: Disney
Written by Anna Harrison
30/100
The most damning thing about Marvel’s “Echo,” one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s slew of Disney+ series, is that I, who have written pages upon pages about the MCU and devoted countless hours to it, delayed watching it and writing this review for over a year. When the show was greenlit in 2021, Disney and Marvel were still riding on the high of Covid-boosted viewership; by the time “Echo” dropped in 2024, interest in Disney+ shows had waned, especially a spinoff of the serviceable but unmemorable “Hawkeye.” Unfortunately, “Echo” does nothing to reignite fervor in the MCU—had it dropped three or four years ago, I might be more forgiving, but at this point, it’s merely another drop in a battered bucket.
Last we saw Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), she had shot her proto-father figure, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), in the head after opening her eyes to his vicious and manipulative nature. Determined to dismantle Fisk’s empire but needing to lay low for a while, Maya returns home to Oklahoma (which is very clearly Georgia), where she’s confronted with a past she has tried to outrun. It’s clear that “Echo” has aspirations to Netflix’s “Daredevil,” given its (unearned) TV-MA rating and emphasis on “realism” (as far as Marvel goes, anyway), but rather than gritty and dark, it ends up being tedious and unfocused.
Maya herself, clearly meant to parallel Fisk (and thus Daredevil (Charlie Cox), who does make a brief cameo), instead comes off as petulant and mean with little depth—I am all for Marvel putting an unlikeable female character at the center of a show, but you have to make your lead character interesting to pull that off. Maya, despite rich potential, falls flat. Alaqua Cox does her best, but “Hawkeye” was her first acting gig, and she doesn’t yet have the chops to pull off this thinly-written role. Even her excellent supporting cast (notably Chaske Spencer, Graham Greene, and Tantoo Cardinal) can only do so much in five episodes.
Those five episodes, it should be noted, each have a minimum of three writers. That is, historically, a bad sign. So too are the rumors of reshoots and extensive retooling in post-production, slimming down the episodes from six to five, and talk of multiple cut plotlines. It’s clear that something in “Echo” went horribly wrong; episode two, for example, has six writers with “story by” credits and four with “teleplay by” credits. Characters like Maya’s cousins Bonnie (Devery Jacobs) and Biscuits (Cody Lightning) are set up to be integral to her story in the first episode and then barely appear for the rest of the series. Zahn McClarnon likely has less than ten minutes of screentime as Maya’s father, William, which should be an offense punishable by law. Then it turns out that Maya and all the women in her line have some sort of ancestral power as they were descended from the mythological Chafa, the first Choctaw, and she gets glowing hands—surely there was a better way to represent her connection to her Native heritage and past than something this cheesy?
It’s a shame, because “Echo” has moments of ingenuity, such as a flashback filmed entirely like a silent movie, complete with intertitles, and to have this kind of representation in a Marvel television show is no small feat: it stars a deaf amputee and is populated almost entirely by Native actors. I do not rejoice for the failures of “Echo,” and can only hope that its cast can be better served elsewhere, where they are not unceremoniously dumped onto a streaming platform and left to rot.
“Echo” Trailer
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