TV Review: Echo, season 1

TV #1 of 2024:

Echo, season 1

I’m torn in my reaction to this premiere ‘Marvel Spotlight’ production — a designation meant to indicate a series that, while canonical to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe, should stand on its own for any audience and focus on smaller-scale personal stakes that don’t majorly affect any ongoing storylines. (Looking back, you can probably identify plenty of previous franchise entries that should retroactively qualify for the label as well.) The problem is, it’s not really true of this particular program, which is after all a spinoff of 2021’s Hawkeye miniseries that reuses a villain from Netflix’s old Daredevil run. The first episode is a jumbled mess that tries to recap a few key points from those earlier shows, present new material as backstory for the anti-heroine lead, and establish what all she’s been up to in the meantime. It sets Maya’s own plot off rather poorly, and I can’t imagine it tracking well for any viewer meeting her or her ‘uncle’ for the first time here.

And that’s a shame, because Echo has a lot going for it that becomes clearer after that debut hour. It’s specifically a great showcase for the main character’s Choctaw community and her status as a deaf woman, with she and her family primarily communicating via ASL throughout the series. It’s also a superhero adventure that emphasizes channeling the strength of one’s ancestors, which is a pretty neat metaphor for the genre. Overall this is a welcome addition of representation to the MCU, and I hope that fans won’t take the Spotlight tag (or the weakness of that initial episode) as an excuse to skip it. It certainly delivers on the visceral street-level brawler feel of the Defenders era, which has been somewhat lacking in the CGI-superpowered extravaganzas that Marvel has more typically been delivering of late.

On the other hand, even in its stronger sequences, this title has some issues. The antagonist’s motivation seemingly comes and goes, as does Maya’s, although she’s in reactive mode so often that it doesn’t register as much. The short length cuts against the effectiveness of the piece as well, since four or five episodes isn’t nearly long enough to get to know the supporting cast, despite some solid performances there. We do get gestures at arcs for a couple characters, but generally, they aren’t fleshed out well enough to land with much impact. You can practically feel the studio meddling at times, like front-ending certain cameos, when it’s inevitably the quieter moments that help sell the project the most. Ultimately, then, three stars seems fair for a program that starts rough, noticeably improves, but ends while it feels like it’s still figuring out what exactly it wants to be.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, ableism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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