Echo is a significant show for several reasons: it is the first TV-MA show produced for Disney+, the first Marvel series with a lead who is deaf, Native American, and an amputee, and the first production under the Marvel Spotlight banner, promising standalone stories for newcomers and lapsed viewers. Ironically, it’s a spin-off of Daredevil and Hawkeye, following Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) as she returns to her hometown, five months after leaving the Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) for dead. Let’s dive in, with spoilers ahead.
1. A 28 Minute Prologue
How does the show balance continuing on from Hawkeye with being a Spotlight show? It’s admittedly one of the clunkier aspects of the first episode, which presents Maya’s story chronologically, beginning with her tragic childhood in Tamaha, Oklahoma, in 2007. Scenes (including a deleted one) from Hawkeye are woven into the new footage, to ensure anyone who hasn’t seen the show knows everything they need to about Maya.
However, it comes across like a film version of a Wikipedia bio, and means 28 mins pass before we reach the show’s inciting incident (Maya shooting Wilson Fisk in the head.) It could’ve been more elegant, deploying a non-linear structure to advance the plot while filling us in on her backstory as she returned to her hometown. I’m not surprised Marvel reportedly cut down the show from six episodes to five, because this feels like two that were reedited into a single, chronological one.
2. The First Choctaw
Whereas Maya is Cheyenne (a Plains people) in the comics, here she’s Choctaw, one of the southeast nations forcibly relocated to Oklahoma (the state that derives its name from their language) during the Trail of Tears. Appropriately enough, the show begins with Maya’s cousin Bonnie (played as an adult by Devery Jacobs) telling her the story of the first Choctaw, led by the eponymous Chafa (Julia Jones). It was a really striking and unexpected way to begin what is essentially a crime drama, reminding us this is a Marvel series, and not one that will shy away (whether out of shame or lack of money) from the fantastical like the Netflix era shows.
3. It’s Daredevil!
Between the return of Kingpin, Hawkeye/Ronin (admittedly via archive footage), and Daredevil during the prologue, I felt really spoiled. It was great seeing Charlie Cox again in the red suit, and to have another of his trademark “one shot” fight scenes, which regardless of how many shots they’re actually composed of, really allows the actors and stuntmen to show off how much they’ve rehearsed. The biggest takeaway is that Matt Murdock was not absent during the five-year time jump in Avengers: Endgame, which makes me even more anxious to find out what else he’s been up to since 2018, especially as Daredevil: Born Again‘s title heavily implied he was killed by Thanos. (Also, this was probably the most we’ve seen of the Blip era since Endgame.)
4. Is This What They Wanted?
Maya reveals to her uncle, Henry Lopez (Chaske Spencer), that she doesn’t want to destroy Fisk’s crime syndicate, but to become its Queen, causing him to turn away from her in disgust. We must not forget Maya is an indigenous woman in a colonized land, and that her whole life has been shaped by Fisk, a descendant of settlers: what might her life be like had it had not been shaped by his lies, and her father’s role in his organization? She is haunted by nightmares of her ancestors, who presumably want better for her, and I imagine, thematically, the show is also asking what might America look like, had Natives not been lied to, manipulated, and mistreated through the centuries.
5. Native Women
It should not be taken for granted Maya is a woman as well as a Native and disabled character, something brought to the fore by the emphasis on her female ancestors, and the scene where the creepy security guard gropes her while carrying out a body search. I would advise you skip the rest of this section if you are sensitive about discussing the issue of sexual offences, including rape and sexual assault, especially since most Marvel projects aren’t TV-MA.
Still here? According to the federal National Library of Medicine, Native American women are almost three times more likely to suffer sexual violence than white, Black, and Asian American women, and the statistics are similarly horrifying for indigenous girls, boys, and men. According to the Department of Justice (via Amnesty International), 86 percent of the perpetrators are non-Native men, who generally fall through the gaps between Native and federal jurisdiction. Recent steps have been taken to close the gap, but whether this will improve the issue remains to be seen.
Continued belowThen there is the crisis of MMIWG2S (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit), an epidemic in the States and Canada that is so prevalent it has been given the aforementioned acronym. Via ELLE magazine, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center estimated 5,712 Native women and girls were missing in 2016, and this was likely a low estimate. Canada’s RCMP states that over 1000 First Nations women and girls were murdered from 1980 to 2012, a rate roughly 4.5 times higher than that of all other women in the country.
Some have questioned the need for Echo to be made. Some, understandably, have superhero fatigue: others are cynically using that to (unsuccessfully) mask their bigotry towards anyone who isn’t a straight, cis white man. So when someone asks why Marvel should make a (frankly, very short) show about Maya, I would respond: because Native women deserve a superhero show about them. I have not watched the remaining four episodes yet, but, if spotlighting an indigenous woman leads even only one person unacquainted with the issues they face to learn about them, then – regardless of the spotlight’s merits – it will have been entirely worth it.
Bonus Thoughts:
– This is Devery Jacobs’s second turn in a Marvel project in a month, as she also voiced Kahhori in What If…? season two. This probably reflects how there are relatively few indigenous actors, but I can’t complain as a fan (if you haven’t watched her newly concluded show Reservation Dogs, I highly recommend you do so.)
– I would describe the show’s cinematography somewhere in the middle when it comes to sophistication: it’s clearly digital when compared to Loki season two, but also brighter and more saturated than several certain Infinity Saga movies, or Jeph Loeb era shows.
– Biscuits (Cody Lightning)’s dog Billy Jack is named after the mixed race Navajo hero of a series of ’70s action films, directed by and starring Tom Laughlin (who was white.)
– Seeing the disabled kids skating with their walking aids made me glad Maya’s amputated leg was not overlooked when it came to being reflected by the rest of the show.
– I admit I guffawed when Fisk mentioned his father was murdered. (By who, Wilson? If only Maya had known, as it would’ve been quite the red flag.)
