The Stunning, Scattered Images of Marvel’s ‘Echo’

Through lengthy flashbacks, we learn of Maya’s history—that her mother Taloa (Katarina Ziervogel) was killed in a car crash, that she was disowned by her grandmother Chula (Tantoo Cardinal), and that she was raised in New York by the murderous Kingpin, who turns out to have also killed her biological father, William (Zach McClarnon), years later. Though these family ties do eventually take center stage, they remain in the background for the majority of the show. Instead, the initial episodes revolve around Maya’s attempts to sabotage Kingpin’s illicit business ventures in Tamaha as a means of continued retribution against him, which eventually brings him into the fold. However, the blinkered focus on this plot (which involves an action scene set atop the moving locomotive Maya attempts to infiltrate) renders the series awfully imbalanced. It isn’t until the fourth of its five episodes that she even realizes that Kingpin is still alive (his fate, at the end of Hawkeye, was left uncertain, though his sprawling crime empire remains intact).

In the meantime, Maya’s reluctance to reconnect with her estranged grandmother and her far-flung childhood friend Bonnie (Devery Jacobs) ends up being her defining attribute, and by delaying this development, the show robs itself of potentially powerful drama, in favor of a story where the protagonist mostly sneaks around and avoids people for four whole episodes. However, the characters she does interact with prove delightful in their own right. Her grandmother’s flirtatious old flame, Skully (Graham Greene), veers between sharp-tongued and tongue-in-cheek. Her goofy, enthusiastic cousin Biscuits (Cody Lightning) is ready to help with Maya’s train heist at the drop of a hat—even it means wrecking their grandmother’s precious truck!—and Maya’s dynamic with her middle-aged uncle Henry (Chaske Spencer), a roller rink owner forced to work for Kingpin, is perhaps the series’ beating heart. Most dialogue is in subtitled American Sign Language (Cox, like her character, is also physically and aurally disabled), and Cox and Spencer create years’ worth of backstory through their gestures and body language alone, even when they aren’t communicating. You can discern all you need to know about their history and their relationship through their smiles, their scowls, and their sarcasm towards one another—not to mention, their deep mutual concern.

The other key relationships in the series—between Maya and various women in her lineage—are abstract, but culturally vital. Throughout the show, she experiences visions of progenitor Chafa, driven sports woman Lowak (Morningstar Angeline), and cunning vigilante Tuklo (Danielle McCallum), who seem to briefly connect with her through spiritual visions. Their own flashbacks are vividly presented too; Lowak, who plays an Indigenous stickball game cir. 1200 AD, is shot through a wide lens that exaggerates her determined movements, while Tuklo’s late 19th-century tale is presented in the form of a black-and-white silent film. All but one of the episodes were directed by Navajo filmmaker Sydney Freeland (except the third, helmed by Aboriginal Australian director Catriona McKenzie), so the show maintains a consistent focus on Indigenous culture and language, even if this supernatural element of ancestors echoing through time ends up spread too thin to make a real impact on Maya.

It takes until late in the fourth episode for anything resembling a central dilemma to emerge (this off-kilter structure is unsurprising; the series was long-delayed thanks to a creative overhaul, ground-up reshoots, and being truncated from an eight-episode order). Finally confronted by Kingpin, the man who raised her—and whose own tragic backstory is depicted in previous shows—Maya is presented with the opportunity to fully embrace the violent side of her lineage he represents. It isn’t until after this moral conundrum arises (i.e. in the show’s finale) that she finally begins to recognize parts of her Native heritage, and with her late mother’s kind nature, leading to her being able to more fully connect with her ancestors, and draw strength from their stories. It’s a tremendously subversive idea when placed in the superhero genre, a kind of tale in which rugged individualism is usually paramount. Instead, Maya’s strength is drawn from a sense of history and community, whose visual manifestations—through visions and spiritual visitations—prove immensely powerful, albeit in isolation.

The problem, however, is that this cultural embrace isn’t part of any meaningful narrative contrast. The physical and thematic antonym to Kingpin’s violence (a sudden reveal of the specifics of Maya’s heritage) doesn’t emerge until the final episode, and en route to this climactic confrontation, there’s little sense that Maya has been robbed of her Native identity, despite being partially raised by Kingpin in a white household (she may have left Oklahoma at a young age, but she was in constant contact with her father until he died in Hawkeye).

There’s a fluidity and verve to the action scenes (not to mention, a fair amount of blood spatter) that sets Echo apart from most other Marvel shows. But it also suffers from the MCU’s pervasive problem of its characters’ vital developments and realizations simply being treated as switches to be flipped, rather than difficult dilemmas to be engaged with. The form this approach takes in Echo renders the story a mere series of cultural emblems which, while no doubt significant, are haphazardly strung together, in a way that reduces their emotional meaning only to their immediate visual context by—ironically—muddying their sense of history. That the women in Maya’s family are powerful and resilient makes for memorable imagery, but little more. Despite it being tied up in a neat and tidy bow, the story they’re part of never finds a sense of balance, so the strength on which Maya draws feels nominal at best.

As of now, there’s no indication as to whether Echo will receive a second season (or whether it’ll be treated as a one-off miniseries, like Hawkeye before it), but even the open ending to Kingpin’s story involves a set up for an entirely different series—Daredevil: Born Again—rather than a rigorous reckoning with the inherited violence that lives on in him, and in Maya. Instead, the show’s conclusion echoes its introduction, with concerns of the wider Marvel universe superseding what ought to have been a powerful and singular saga about cultural inheritance.

All five episodes of Echo are now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.