After being introduced in 2021’s Hawkeye series, Maya Lopez (played by Alaqua Cox) is back and ready to take control of Wilson Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) enterprise. She returns to her hometown of Tamaha, Oklahoma, to confront her Uncle Henry (Chaske Spencer) — still a Kingpin loyalist — and ask him to help her dismantle Fisk’s local operation. When he refuses to get involved, she enlists her cousin “Biscuits” (Cody Lightning) and his truck to help plant a bomb in a Fisk shipment on a train. When the shipment is opened at its final destination, Fisk Shipping is destroyed and Maya has officially announced her arrival back in Tamaha. From there, henchmen galore try to stop her until Kingpin himself shows up to offer Maya one last chance to come back to New York. She has a spiritual awakening and eventually refuses but that decision brings danger to her Uncle Henry, cousin and childhood best friend Bonnie (Devery Jacobs) and her grandmother Chula (Tantoo Cardinal). She must discover her gift to protect her hometown from Fisk’s revenge.
Whether it’s one of the best fight scenes in MCU miniseries history, the creative directing to let the audience feel how a deaf Maya experiences the world or the authenticity of the portrayal of the Choctaw people, Echo is everything you could hope for. Compared to other series’ in the Disney lineup, the size of just five episodes made it feel short-changed and, with Disney Plus releasing all the episodes at the same time — a strategy they specifically set out to avoid since the platform launched — suggested it was going to be a “throw away” project for Marvel.
Thank God that’s not the case.
Echo is filled with depth. Depth of character, depth of culture and depth of relationships, just to name a few. After their recent lackluster run of projects (Quantumania, Thor: Love and Thunder, Secret Invasion, etc.), Marvel needed a win. And, with season two of Loki followed now by Echo, they’ve got two back-to-back. It’s installments like this that help squash the narrative that the super hero genre is dying.
Cox is so engaging and interesting, it’s easy to forget that Maya Lopez is actually her first on-screen acting role. The directing, writing and pacing gives the audience the sense that they’re in the town’s population themselves. During the course of the series, the rooting interest goes from Maya’s redemption story to whatever outcome saves the Choctaw community and back.
This series isn’t without it’s problems (Bonnie is an underused character, there was an obvious stitch during the epic opening fight scene, there wasn’t enough emotion when a young Maya drove away from her cousin, etc.) but, overall, Echo is a massive success on so many fronts. Indigenous people should be celebrating this series, the deaf community should be celebrating it and even Marvel fans as a whole can celebrate that maybe, just maybe, their beloved world is back.
JKG SCORE: 7.5
Untitled Film Project 