Echo doesn’t really sound like a Marvel series (review)

Few, if any, powers, a not-very-likeable anti-heroine and a down-to-earth whodunnit set in Oklahoma. We are really very far from Loki.

Don’t call it Marvel but “Marvel Spotlight”. It is under this recently created banner that the studio’s brand new superhero series arrives, which thus distances itself from the MCU. Of course, Echo is still part of the same world (officially integrated into phase V). Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), young Native American taken in by Wilson Fisk, is entitled to her own series after having been a secondary opponent in the previous series Hawkeye from Disney Plus. The fighter takes center stage this time, she who has never been more than a secondary character of Daredevil in the comics.

Spoiler alert! Echo therefore picks up just after the events of Hawkeye. Maya has just shot The Kingpin, after learning that he was behind her father’s death. She decides to run away, to leave New York to return to her native Oklahoma, where her grandmother, her cousin and especially her sister still live. Having left for Hell’s Kitchen with her father as a teenager, Maya had cut ties with her family and her Cheyenne origins. While organized crime hunts her down, she must reconnect with her loved ones and her Native American roots to protect her community and complete her revenge.

Abandoning magical powers, Gems and other multiverses, Echo brings Marvel back to Earth, in its most naturalistic series to date. In this setting in the depths of America, the series takes on rural and social thriller overtones, evoking both the condition of the local “Natives” and the precariousness of these deprived regions, far from big cities. The atmosphere is gray, gloomy, in the footsteps of a not really sympathetic anti-heroine, whose only gift is her ability to fight, boosted by her hearing disability giving her increased reflexes.

As a result, little or no big show in Echo. The atmosphere takes precedence over the action, while the shadow of the fabulous Kingpin of Vincent d’Onofrio – indestructible godfather of Maya and Hell’s Kitchen – always ready to unleash hell in anger. The ambition is laudable, even if the thriller, bloody from time to time, is not as dark as it should be. We feel that the production is navigating in-between, oscillating between the need not to completely lose Marvel fans (Maya still has the magical ability to connect with her ancestors!) and a palpable desire to do something more daring. It is not always successful, but in the end, Echo is really not a Marvel series like the others, and that’s already a victory.

The 5 episodes of Echo will be put online in full on Disney Plus this Wednesday, January 10, 2024.