Marvel’s Faint Echo

I t’s no surprise that Marvel Studios has fallen from its glory days. The dying franchise’s foray into mature, gritty content is just another addition to that unfortunate trend.

Take the new series Echo, which features a female, deaf, Native American, amputated superhero for the sake of diversity. It might be the most boring Disney+ television series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because it’s headlined by a character no one cares about.

The story takes place after the events of the Disney+ series Hawkeye. By the end of that show, Maya Lopez (a.k.a. Echo) seemingly kills her mentor and father figure, Wilson Fisk (a.k.a. Kingpin). Now she finds herself on the run from her former boss’s criminal empire and returns to her hometown in Oklahoma to reconnect with her family, community, and Native American ancestry. Maya soon discovers Kingpin may not be dead after all (despite her having shot him point-blank in the face) and must face the man who threatens everything she holds dear.

With a generic plot over the course of five episodes, Echo struggles to capture the audience’s attention because of its slow pacing. The same can be said of other MCU Disney+ shows. This problem is most apparent when the deaf protagonist has to sign her words when communicating with others. Other media, such as A Quiet Place, have made the most out of sign-language communication by making it more integral to the story. In the 2018 horror film, sign language adds to the suspense and rules of the story because its characters must not speak to stay alive. But in Echo, this mode of communication feels like a drag. Each dialogue scene, filled with silence most of the time, is turned into a laborious chore that overstays its welcome. Considering the show’s runtime is roughly 3.5 hours (including credits), those scenes should move the story forward and develop Maya’s character.

That leads to another problem with Echo: Maya is not a sympathetic character. She should be, given that she has the makings of an origin story with the death of her parents. But Alaqua Cox plays her with about as much charisma as a block of wood. Maya acts more like a villain than an antihero, making it difficult to get behind her actions and motivations.

One example is Maya’s unapologetic response to bombing one of Kingpin’s operations, an act of war that leads his goons to her hometown. When confronted about bringing the fight home, she naïvely says via American Sign Language, “I say when it starts. I say when it stops. That’s not chaos. That’s power.” But she doesn’t have the power to control how the bad guys are going to respond. And sure enough, she and two of her relatives get kidnapped by the next episode. Maya eventually escapes her predicament, but she remains unrepentantly selfish throughout the entire show without thinking of others or the long-term consequences set into motion by her actions. That’s not a hero.

The series also has no compelling story. It seems more preoccupied with touting indigenous history than with making its protagonist relatable. Native American representation is not necessarily a bad thing if it’s handled well by talented creatives (e.g., Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River). But the cast and crew fail to incorporate it into the story in a way that’s not laughable. By the finale’s climactic battle, Maya essentially embodies her Choctaw ancestors’ spirits (who are all female, by the way) and passes on their powers to her cousin and grandmother in order to defeat their enemies.

A certain amount of suspension of disbelief about superheroic feats is built into any comic-book adaptation. But the best adaptations at least lay out their own rules intelligently and clearly, and they stick to them. Echo fails at even this. Maya’s powers, besides her martial-arts training, are that she can tap into her female ancestry and emit cosmic energy whenever she’s in trouble (i.e., whenever the plot needs to move forward). In the comics, Maya can copy the fighting style of any opponent, thanks to her photographic reflexes. Echo executive producer and director Sydney Freeland said the original abilities were “kind of lame,” according to Variety. But having your main character mimic fight moves rather than rely on vague, inexplicable magical powers has much more dramatic potential. Alas, Marvel is too concerned with identity politics to make the right storytelling decisions.

The vagueness of Maya’s powers doesn’t help Echo’s choppy and unrealistic fight scenes, either. Acting like a heavyweight brawler, Maya beats up 200-pound guys (mind you, with a prosthetic leg) in a way that would be more believable if she were quick and agile. The male actors often have to slow down to allow the actress to catch up to them, especially during her overly choreographed fight scene with Daredevil (Charlie Cox). When the Man Without Fear shows up, it’s clear he can easily overtake Maya. However, the show makes it appear as if they’re evenly matched. This does not come across in the one-shot fight, in which it’s easy to tell the punches and kicks don’t connect. Echo attempted to emulate the one-take hallway fight scenes in Netflix’s Daredevil series, but failed to make it look authentic.

Moreover, Daredevil’s very appearance in Echo is built on a marketing lie. All the trailers were designed to hook in Daredevil fans, teasing appearances by its titular hero and main villain, Kingpin. But the blind lawyer turned vigilante appears for only 98 seconds of screen time during the aforementioned fight scene. Kingpin may feature more prominently, but he is wasted, if not tarnished outright. While it’s great to see Vincent D’Onofrio in the role again, his portrayal in Echo is bad enough to make one wish he hadn’t returned. (Maya defeated Kingpin by making him cry. Don’t ask. It’s as bad as it sounds.) What the Daredevil and Kingpin cameos illustrate is that the show-runners, writers, and directors did not have enough confidence in their own product to let it stand on its own. So they brought in two fan-favorite characters to generate hype for their lousy show no one asked for.

Echo is just another nail in the coffin of the MCU — a franchise that’s hard to care about anymore.