SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details of Marvel‘s Echo, which debuts with all five episodes today on Disney+ & Hulu.
Turns out those predictions and wishful thinking that Marvel finally had lost the plot were a little premature.
Launching today on the increasingly integrated Disney+ and Hulu after an anemic year for the Kevin Fiege-run studio, the very real and unapologetic Echo is one of the most powerful things Marvel ever has made. To be honest, even with such top-tier talent as Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs, The English’s Chaske Spencer and the iconic Tantoo Cardinal on board, I didn’t think Disney and Marvel had it in them to be so audacious and savvy.
It’s great sometimes to be wrong.
Led by Alaqua Cox reprising her Hawkeye role assassin supreme Maya Lopez, the five-episode Echo strips away most of the endless teasing and cloying ethos of the past decade of Marvel films and shows and tells a complete story.
The result both breaks your heart and raises up your spirits.
The first small-screen offering from the newly minted Marvel Spotlight, the decidedly unconventionally straightforward Echo is exactly the tone and tenor the Feige-run outlet should be embracing to keep up with its fanbase and enlarge the MCU franchise figuratively and literally.
Note to Feige and Disney CEO Bob Iger: You have a winner in Echo. Don’t blow it, boys.
While the show picks up less than six months after where 2021’s Hawkeye ended with a revenge-juiced Maya/Echo putting a bullet in the head of crime lord Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), this Echo stands outside the greater MCU, for the most part – though there is typical post-credits scene in the final episode that implies a big Man Without Fear move come.
To some degree, even with Daredevil (Charlie Cox) swooping in for a bit of prologue, that removal from Marvel tropes is because series creator Marion Dayre takes the character out of Marvel’s usual New York City stomping ground and puts her on the road to her Tamala, Oklahoma hometown. Without enraging the House of Mouse by giving away spoilers, it is a shift that puts Maya/Echo back with family and the Native American culture she long left behind – and the sh*t subsequently hits the fan with a myriad of blasts from the past.
Dark and bloody physically and psychologically, as well as action-filled, Echo is rooted in the near-numbing grief of pain, loss and betrayal, as well as the history of the Choctaw people. Yet, meticulously melding genres, cultures, centuries and the pledge to “Make America Skate Again,” the much-delayed miniseries is equally steeped in resilience, reconnection and restitution too.
If there were nothing else was good about Echo, which is far from the case, the show certainly proves that a deaf and amputee lead actor can represent across many communities and scenarios. Even before things get more powerful and deeper into the secrets of some true evils, it also proves that Cox and her prosthetic leg can kick ass with the best of them, which is the coin of a couple of realms in today’s media landscape.
Straight out of working in an Amazon warehouse, the Menominee and Mohican nations’ Cox made her professional acting debut in Hawkeye just three years ago. The abilities she harnesses out of her disabilities and displays onscreen in Hawkeye and in much greater range in Echo are bested only by her obvious skills and charisma.
Saying more with a look in the boxing ring than most of her peers could squeeze out a two-page monologue, Cox is not simply a good deaf and amputee actor. Providing Echo with both its foundation and rocket fuel, she clearly is a very good actor who will shine in many productions and projects in what should be a long and very successful career.
In that vein, and a heads-up to Cox’s future directors and writers, the wide use of American Sign Language in Echo empathically leans into the lead actor’s situation and makes it a strength. Self-evident when you see it onscreen, the integrated use of ASL for everyone else around Cox also sets up an intimacy with Maya/Echo and other characters to forge a different sort of storytelling.
ASL encircles the main cast in a complete world. It invites the viewer in deep.
In fact, though rarely enacted onscreen to this extent, Echo’s use of ASL — like the show’s connection to the Choctaw — is a pretty smart way of making television that others should strongly consider. Going big by getting close to build narrative bridges, combined with an insightful visual palette, pays off for the story and the audience.
Jumping between much more than just two worlds, to paraphrase Maya’s father and deceased Tracksuit Mafia commander William (Zahn McClarmon), Echo has a loud and powerful voice. Aside from the debt to the Netflix-originating Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage series with more than a little John Wick and some old-school cable crime shows like Oz and Sleeper Cell, there is something in the eloquent Echo that exists beyond the Sydney Freeland- and Catriona McKenzie-directed TV-MA show itself.
In the midst of Reservation Dogs’ now-completed spectacular final season, the success of Billy Luther’s Frybread Face & Me movie on Netflix, What If‘s “What If…Kahhori Reshaped the World ?” episode and Oscar front-runner Lily Gladstone’s historic Golden Globes win this past weekend for her Killers of the Flower Moon performance, Indigenous stories and talent finally are getting some of the recognition they deserve.
Of course, we’ve been down this path many times before. As the flurry of cancellations in recent months on networks and streamers makes clear, we’ve all seen how it doesn’t go far for the underrepresented in the long run in Hollywood. We’ve all seen that, after a flurry of studio self-congratulations, Indigenous peoples’ stories and their presence on both sides of the camera fades away, to be replaced by the latest short-lived trend that makes white executives feel good about themselves.
Echo has the power to shatter that parochial pattern, or at least smash a big hole in it.
On one of the biggest platforms in the world from the media company with one of the biggest footprints and pedigrees, Echo contains the vigor required to kick a door of discrimination down because it has the power to resurrect the battered Marvel moneymaking machine.
In media and everywhere else, money talks and everybody listens — especially when a multibillion-dollar slate is at stake.
Watch Echo. Listen to Echo. As Maya/Echo’s grandmother Chula (Tantoo Cardinal) says: “Generations are echoing.” Hear the past, hear the future — it’s telling you something.
