The marketing for the MCU’s latest, Echo – in what more and more seems like a never-ending cavalcade of content – is both baffling and fascinating. Marvel is keenly aware of the criticism that their storylines are harder and harder to follow for the casual fan – now requiring an almost near Herculean effort for someone who is behind to catch up with all the threads, and a good number of them these days wind up going nowhere. (Speaking of Herculean efforts, remember when Hercules showed up in Thor: Love and Thunder?) It’s probably safe to say Marvel had a 2023 it would like to forget for multiple reasons.
Look, I am, for the most part, caught up. (I still haven’t finished Secret Invasion and at this point that is looking more and more unlikely.) But, yes, I feel it. I used to be honestly excited to watch a new MCU entry. Now it feels like work. This should not feel like work. It’s starting to feel like I watch this stuff to be a completest, and I’m not even a completest anymore. So Marvel has come up with the new “Marvel Spotlight” designation to, in theory, signal to viewers that Echo is different and doesn’t connect with the larger MCU universe. Which is kind of bizarre because that’s blatantly not true. True, there is, thankfully, no talk or explorations of multiverses here or a bunch of portals opening up in the sky (at least not through the first three episodes), but it certainly connects to the rest of the MCU as much as, say, She-Hulk did. In the first 30 minutes of the first episode, three prominent Marvel characters show up that have been in other things. Oh, also, this is a direct continuation of the Hawkeye series so I truly don’t understand the claim it has no connection to anything else. But I sort of understand why Marvel wants to make this claim because it is less reliant on the broader universe than other shows and movies have been. But if a viewer has seen literally nothing else, there will probably be a few, “Wait, who is this guy?” moments. Also, this particular criticism has more been directed at the movies than the Disney+ shows. People don’t love the idea of having to watch multiple episodes of a series just to watch The Marvels at the theater.
Oh yeah, as stated, Echo picks up where Hawkeye left off. As we saw in Hawkeye (and we see again here), Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) has shot Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), in the face – presumably killing him but we all know that wasn’t going to happen. Maya, now on the run from Kingpin’s goons, flees back to her home in Oklahoma where her family and friends don’t exactly welcome her back with open arms and are not thrilled with the danger she’s bringing back with her. Maya isn’t exactly in hiding, more, let’s say, regrouping as she enacts her plan to take over Kingpin’s empire.
What does set Echo apart from other MCU properties is Maya herself has no real supernatural powers. She does not have the ability to shoot laser beams from her body. The show does focus on her prosthetic leg and that she can’t hear, but neither of these traits limits her true power of basically a killing machine. Which, for the context of the show, earned it the first MCU “Mature Audiences” designation. Which basically means its tone (and lighting) is more similar to the Marvel Netflix shows than what we’ve seen on Disney+ to date.
Echo is a show I want to like but didn’t quite get there. As much as Echo wants to distinguish itself apart from the rest of the MCU – especially the more recent efforts that have turned off a lot of people – there’s, unfortunately, still a sense of, “here we go again.” How Maya’s Native American heritage is used, incorporating flashbacks to ancestors, is interesting. (And anytime Graham Greene shows up is a treat.) But the rest still, at least so far, feels like the typical MCU formula … only with some more violence. But over the first three episodes, just not a lot happens outside of a pretty nifty scene that I’d describe as the opposite of a train heist – Maya breaks into a New York City-bound train, not to steal, but to add a little surprise for her friends at Kinpin’s warehouse. But, again, as I write this I’ve only seen three episodes and, as you are reading this sentence, all five episodes are waiting for you on Disney+ and Hulu.
But see, maybe that’s not bad news for you. If you still like the Marvel formula with connections to other movies and series, well, here’s another. If you are truly looking for something that is not related to anything else and is truly its own thing, Echo isn’t quite that. Moon Knight comes much closer to hitting that button and, well, Moon Knight was pretty polarizing. Echo probably won’t be polarizing. Instead, Echo, at least so far, has just too much more of the same.
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