Echo - Review

When Hawkeye made his TV debut it introduced a number of new characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of which was Maya Lopez. For a character who didn't speak they did add quite a lot to some of the scenes and of course they had that ending with kingpin. If there was ever one character that I would never would have expected to receive its series on the of their own, it would be this one. Does echo make for compelling TV or is it nothing but empty noise?

Going into echo I didn't know what I was getting myself in for, a lot of the marketing leading up to it stressed how violent the show would be, with each episode starting off with a warning about the violence. So to have the very first episode be mostly back story about Maya and her life up until the end of the Hawkeye series, seemed to buck that trend. Of course there were moments in that 25 minutes of history about did contain some violence, but none of that would be considered intense. I will give them credit though having a lot of time there to establish who the character is first, rather than just being a mob boss, did make the character more appealing. Well I appreciate also what they were going for, showing the accident and how she lost her leg, part of me also wonders if that flashback sequence would have been better served being spread across all the episodes.

Now going in we knew that Kingpin was going to be a crucial element to the show, of course given the last time we saw him the implication that he was dead, there was always a possibility that the character was now more of a ghost haunting Maya. Obviously that wasn't the case, but it may have made for more unique story, and while I can appreciate her desire for revenge and to takedown the organisation that she worked in for many years, her actual plan seems like it was hobbled together from some sort of scrap pile of abandoned writers room ideas. The only time she actually does something to strike at the Fisk organisation, it hinges on the idea that something travelling from Oklahoma to New York on a train wouldn't bounce around. Don't get me wrong the entire sequence of her on the train was fun to watch, though some of the visual effects were very early PS3 at times, it just seemed more like a reactionary mission.

Of course we can't talk about Echo not address the amount of Native American influences that are spread across the entire series. The big ones are of course the language and how some of the characters behave, with the final episode essentially being a celebration of the people's history. I'm not here to talk about the legacy of the Choctaw people, but setting up the fact that Maya is from a long line of people with abilities, but she only discovers them at the end, seems very stupid. Across the MCU we've had countless people develop abilities from experimentation and training, this is the first time that there's ever been someone who was enhanced by lineage. My issue is not with that, it actually makes for a compelling character to be someone born into a line of powerful people, but the final scenes show her just knowing how to do everything, when the day before in the story she was totally confused and unable to accept things. People will argue that it’s because her ancestors lived through her that she knew, but she had ancestors when she was a child, a teenager and even when she lost her father and nothing happened then. If her abilities were appearing in each episode, causing her to re-evaluate plans or try to understand what was happening, then the final scenes would have made more sense, but as they are now it's just weird.

Perhaps one of the more interesting elements of this series is the expanded dynamic between Maya and Fisk, which is shown in the scenes between Alaqua Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio. The times in the flashbacks when they're sitting over having Sunday meal together, there's a connection between them, you can see that in how Maya looks up to Fisk, but then when we see them reunite after she shot him in the face, there's still a connection but it's frayed. The scene with the two of them in the hotel where Fisk shows Maya the hammer, which if you've not seen Daredevil you really need to, resonates more powerfully than I would have thought possible. If you've not seen Daredevil the hammer is what Fisk used as a young boy to bludgeon his abusive father to death and that's why he keeps it with him, it's a reminder that he's not weak. To see him offer up that tool to Maya and her reject it was something I didn't see happening and the way that the pair performed together it felt like that was a real relationship.

Vincent was always going to be fantastic in the role, he made the character his own in the Daredevil TV series, he shined again in Hawkeye and there was no reason not to expect him to do the same here. What I did appreciate was the fact that Alaqua had more nuance in a lot of her performances, something that she really didn't have in Hawkeye, given that that was her first time ever in front of a camera. There are times when she didn't seem all that confident in some of the up close shots, but then in some of the more dramatic scenes she felt right at home, which is a testament to how she's grown as an actress. The rest of the cast all felt great, I personally was super happy to see Graham Greene in the show as he's an actor that I absolutely find delightful to watch no matter the role. While there was a cameo from Charlie Cox’s Daredevil, it was great to see a more focused story and the cast really helped bring that to the screen.

I mentioned earlier that some of the scenes in the train sequence didn't really land from a visual effects standpoint, and there were other scenes that had the same lack of foundation. A lot of it was to do with the bird they used to help guide Maya through her journey and while from a distance the bird looked fine, the reliance on close up shots didn't work as the birds felt off. The animation of the bird was fantastic there was something about the way that it was lit that didn't fit in the scenes it was in, this is obviously me nitpicking, but when I important elements such as that bird isn't done right it detracts from everything else.

Coming to the show I really didn't know what to expect, I'm at the point now where I'm not watching all the trailers and TV spots, but to have a show billed as very violent, I was intrigued. The problem is it wasn't really any more violent than any other show we've seen before, yes there were a few times where there was a lot of blood, but there's no real difference between seeing it an implying it these days. Maya’s growth to obtaining abilities felt out of place given the story that they were trying to tell and while I would have loved to have seen her growing and understanding her abilities, with the show only running over the course of a week, to go from nothing to mastering it just seems cheap. There were some scenes in this show that delivered on character growth and for that I have to give it credit, however overall the story felt like a mix of multiple different elements, the violence didn't really appear and the end result was a show that just didn't land.

The Score

7.0

Review access provided by Disney

The Pros

+The scenes between Maya and Fisk, both in the past and present were incredible to watch

+Alaqua Cox felt more confident in her role this time around, which helped me connect to the character

The Cons

-The mystical abilities provided right at the end felt cheap and just pointless given the story

-Billed as violent, the show really wasn’t that bad, The Punisher from Netflix is what I was expecting and I got The Punisher from 1989