Maya Lopez's ruthless behavior in New York City catches up with her in her hometown; she must face her past, reconnect with her Native American roots and embrace the meaning of family and community.
Echo is a new installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's the tenth Disney+ MCU series and serves as a spinoff to Hawkeye (2021).
I'm one of those few people who enjoyed Hawkeye decently enough, my opinions on it have changed since then and I don't think it's quite the 9/10 series I was making it out to be, but I still think it was solid enough and worked mostly due to the performances. While I did enjoy Echo as a character in Hawkeye I always thought making a series about her was very out of nowhere, but that's not to say there wasn't any potential.
Because there are are some decent parts to the series, for one thing the acting is honestly pretty solid. Alaqua Cox gives a solid performance as Maya Lopez her interactions with the other characters are genuinely touching at times the moments with her and Vincent D'Onofrio are among some of the best moments. The two really do a great job of creating tension, speaking of which Vincent D'Onofrio once again does a fantastic job as The Kingpin, although he's only in the series for a few episodes every time he appears on screen he knocks it out of the park. It really does get you excited to see the future of where he is going to take this character.
There are also some solid sequences that are genuinely touching as well (particularly in Episode 3), they is definitely an attempt to make these moments standout among the overall amount in any MCU Disney+ series and I think this series does an okay job with that.
That's where it ends for me however because there are way too many missteps that can't be ignored. For one thing the series is 5 episodes long, meaning character moments, the writing and the build up to the final episode all move at a very fast pace that ends up getting very sloppy which again is frustrating because there was some level of attempt to create something interesting narratively.
The other problem is the power switch, a choice that that does not make any sense at all narratively and doesn't fit with the source material. This happened once before with Mrs. Marvel which while that decision was also quite bad at the very least the series was still entertaining, Echo is unfortunately not very entertaining and is quite dialogue heavy which would be fine if it were at least compelling. But that's not the case here, as I said the fast paced really rushed moments that would otherwise be very important for the characters making for a very weak payoff.
Finally as a series I really don't think it succeeds with making Echo an interesting character, sure we are given details about her native roots but we aren't shown a whole lot of it. And I hate repeating myself here but the pacing completely destroys her character moments, it's all rushed and sloppily put together to make a very disappointing final episode that isn't quite on the same level as embarrassing as the one in Secret Invasion (2023) but it falls very flat unfortunately.
Overall Echo had a lot of potential, it had the right ingredients just the wrong way to fully execute them. Which is a common problem with a lot of these MCU shows and is probably only going to get worse.
Echo is available on Disney+
4/10 D+
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