Echo

Last weekend, Marvel released a new series, Echo, on to Disney + and Hulu. Echo follows Maya Lopez as she journeys home and reconnects with her Native American roots after splitting from her villainous lifestyle in NYC. Marvel decided to take a new approach and release all of their episodes at once instead of releasing week to week so I was interested to see how that would turn out.

Overall, I thought this was a decent enough small-scale show. It was so refreshing to see a Marvel show with such low-level stakes and street-level conflicts. There were no big spectacle scenes or a big flashy finale. The show just decides to focus on Maya as a character and explores her Native American heritage. I enjoyed the Native American aspects of the film and how each film had a little anecdote about an ancestor of Maya's family which all tie into the finale at the end. The show and acting also do a great job of portraying Maya's character without her actually saying anything Even though Maya is a deaf character and does not speak, she still manages to portray her emotion and feelings satisfyingly and effectively. You still get to learn Maya's personality without hearing any sort of tone in her voice. The best part of the show for me was the return of Vincent Donofrio as Kingpin. I loved him in Daredevil and this show just gives us more of what was great about his character. I can't wait to see what else they do with his character in future projects. Finally, I like how independent the show was from the greater MCU. You don't need to watch anything else to know what is going on. Anything important that happened in Hawkeye gets covered in the first episode of this show. I wish more MCU projects would be like this in that you don't have to do a lot of homework to understand what is going on.

However, there are a few things that I take significant issue with. The first major issue is that the main family subplot was super underdeveloped. The show didn't spend nearly enough time on Maya's relationship with her family. Because of this, the final episode and its payoff ring a bit hollow. The other issue I had which is the same for pretty much every Marvel show these days is that the ending was extremely rushed. I felt the last episode tried to cram way too much in and really didn't close things out in any sort of satisfying way. The show really needed to be a few episodes longer to truly flesh out some of the side plots that pay off in the finale.

In the end, while this show was great at delivering a street-level story and action, I felt that many of the subplots were too underdeveloped and that the finale was way too rushed for the show to deliver any sort of successful ending.

Score: 6.5/10 Grade: B- Recommendation: Watch it if you enjoyed Hawkeye