Echo review: A bloody debut for an exciting anti-hero
Disney+Echo, Marvel’s latest mini series, is finally here and its filled with abundance of blood, betrayal, and familial drama.
At long last, the first of Marvel‘s new year projects is set to premiere, all five of of Echo’s episodes premiering on Disney+ and Hulu.
A spin-off of 2021’s Hawkeye, the series follows deaf Native American assassin Maya Lopez as confronts her complicated past while evading the ire of her former boss/adoptive uncle Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin.
The first three episodes Echo were given to press, so here’s your spoiler-free review of the beginning of Echo before you decide to dive in when it premieres.
A traditional sad backstory with a twist
Like most of her MCU contemporaries, Maya suffers a fate similar to her comic book counterpart where she suffers the loss of a beloved parent early in her life. However, unlike other Marvel characters, she’s shown to handle her grief in an exceedingly brutal and dark way.
Though we’re used to seeing Marvel characters walk on the side of good, Echo is an incredibly grey character; you understand her motivations, though it doesn’t excuse her heinous actions.
Maya may seem like the typical MCU child of a single parent, she closely follows her other’s parents footsteps in a way that course corrects the rest of her life in exciting and dangerous ways.
Jumping between who you are and who you could be
Along with losing one of her parents, Maya also has to grapple with the fact that she was shunned from her community by those most important to her.
Early in the season, Maya and her father William discuss the idea of a dragon being able to jump from its fictional world to the real one, and how doing that action would make the dragon stronger. This seems to be the metaphor for Echo as a whole, as Maya was shunned from her Choctaw community and embraced by Kingpin’s life in New York City.
Though she tries to jump between these worlds over the course of the season, Maya has little success trying to balance it all as she’s pulled at complete opposite ends of who she is as a person. It’s a bit unclear if Maya will choose one side or the other as she’s trying to bridge the two, but, as the MCU has shown us before, you can’t really have your cake and eat it too.
Finding solace in silence
Some of the most stand-out moments in Echo come from the show’s sound design, as it attempts to make you take in the world through Maya’s eyes. Numerous action sequences have pockets of utter silence that elevate the scenes; the fights act as a prism for her experience.
Through these moments of silence, you can recognize Maya’s fear, bravery, pain, and so much more. She may never talk in a traditional sense, but Maya uses her deaf identity to make sure the audience understands where she’s coming from at all times.
While Maya is not the first MCU character to have hearing issues (Clint Barton suffered from loss of hearing as well), she is the first deaf MCU anti-hero and the show wants its audience to understand her from all perspectives, right down to the nitty-gritty of her daily life.
Non-tradition horror within the MCU
Echo is the first Marvel show to receive a TV-MA rating – and for good reason, as the majority of its fight sequences are incredibly hard to watch.
From a certain warehouse scene to an incredibly well-choreographed arcade fight, Maya isn’t someone to mess with, having zero hesitation when it comes to taking people out with ease.
The MCU has seen a lot of death and destruction in its day, especially with Thanos’ snap, but Echo takes those fears and shrinks it down to the smallest level.
While Maya isn’t trying to stop a world-ending threat, her self-contained mission is still very important and, since she was the leader of one of the biggest criminal organizations in NYC, it’s refreshing to see that she’s able to perform her duties without being censored.
Echo Episodes 1-3 score: 4/5
Echo is fantastic for multiple reasons. It’s able to showcase the anti-hero’s deadly skills while having the audience root for her, and while the first three episodes focus on Maya and her tragic backstory, it also gives fans an insight into a criminal organization that had to deal with the fallout of the Snap.
While most MCU projects tend to shy away from this point, Echos goes the extra mile and forces its audience to deal with the idea of how the Snap affected the world and how the actions of certain people within that time frame could have a rippling effect throughout your entire life.
The only ask we have for the series is a better exploration of the relationship between Kingpin and Echo, which was first hinted at in Hawkeye. Though the first three episodes gives the audience a taste of how deep their bond goes, the final two episodes will properly cement how Echo became loyal to Kingpin as a child and how that foundation was shaken to its core.
All in all, Echo is such a rich show that explores a type of character the MCU has never dealt with before. Though it’s unclear how she will fit into the world at large going forward, there’s no mistake that Maya will prove herself to be a formidable force going into Phase 6.
Echo is now streaming through Disney+. For more content about the show, check out the list below:
