Marvel's Echo: Bloodiest MCU series offers rare light at the end of the superhero tunnel

Echo follows Maya Lopez, played by Alaqua Cox. (Screen grab/YouTube/Marvel Entertainment)

In the third episode of Marvel’s Echo (Disney+Hotstar), a black-and-white throwback to early 1800s shows an indigenous woman’s uphill battle to be accepted as one of the ‘light-horsemen’. “To give life means nothing if I cannot protect it,” the woman seems to say through placards that take you back to the silent era of filmmaking. The sequence foreshadows the coming-of-age nature of this grisly and violent show and the ceilings that have to be broken within margins as well. It is in essence a homecoming for a woman who finds heroism not through vain, CGI-fuelled superpowers but through a sense of belonging. Made under the Marvel Spotlight banner, a new arm of the struggling superhero assembly line, Echo is the least super of all of Marvel’s streaming shows, but it is bloody, gnarly and maybe the most watchable of the lot. If nothing else, it is evidence there is life still in the MCU.

Echo follows Maya Lopez, played by the delightful Alaqua Cox, we were first introduced to in the somewhat salvageable Hawkeye. Lopez had last fired a bullet into the head of her criminal guardian figure, Kingpin, played menacingly by Vincent D’Onfrio. We begin in the aftermath of the altercation where Kingpin having survived, pursues an on-the-run Lopez. There isn’t as much a cat and mouse chase as it is a standoff between territorial tendencies. Kingpin raised Lopez in his image and in a Thanos kind of way, sees her as the inheritor of his legacy. Lopez, however, thanks to her moment of enlightenment, decides to return to her hometown in Oklahama. It’s here that the show really digs its feet, inhales a bit of folklore and lets out a cautioned squeak of hope.

Firstly, Echo is possibly the bloodiest Marvel has ever been. You see bones crack, blood spilled and bodies deformed in a manner that you haven’t seen in any of the studio’s films or shows. The new banner has been launched to make stories independent of the larger cinematic universe we are familiar with, and it seems to have liberated creators of that templated spiel about capes, crusaders and goofy bad guys. For once, a Marvel series feels lean, untouched by gimmicky CGI, flattery and cosmic escapism. It’s dark, painful, violent, has the husky tone of a noir and feels like something that could happen next door. Moreover, it is driven by a largely indigenous cast and takes its history and authenticity seriously enough to look like something out of real life as opposed to a studio lot.

Vincent D’Onfrio as Kingpin in Marvel's Echo. (Screen grab/YouTube/Marvel Entertainment)

Cox’s arc from villain in Hawkeye to a prickly hero in Echo still resembles the safety net that Marvel operates within (how many times have we seen that with Wanda), but this flipping of the character feels more urgent than unimaginative. Lopez is a deaf, amputee assassin, quite naturally unattractive for the superhero shtick that makes these spectacles click. And yet the action in Echo is breathtaking, ruthless and maybe the most exhilarating Marvel has been in a while. To the extent that you almost dread Lopez gaining a lame power, swirling her arms to create lightning blobs and shooting them across meadows with the disingenuousness of someone who doesn’t know what she is aiming at until it is shown to her in post-production. And though those comic books intrude at times, Echo is delightfully grounded in the knowledge that it need not repeat the handbook.

(Screen grab/YouTube/Marvel Entertainment)

In essence at least, Echo is the story of a woman who learns about her roots once she has plucked herself away from the poisonous trunk of resentment. She remains reprehensibly violent still, but tied to her Choctaw ancestry, it’s a violence born out of need, as opposed to desire. Ironically, it’s a rope that the creators of the series are willing to hand its bad guys as well. Villainy need not be a means to an end, but the means to find that place beyond pain where letting go becomes possible. Acceptance is the key to healing, so to speak.

It’s incredible that a five-episode series, with a deaf and mute protagonist (Cox is deaf in real life) feels like the best thing Marvel has done in a while. For a studio struggling to stir excitement and enthusiasm for its upcoming projects while clearing the dusty fatigue off of its underwhelming slate from 2023, there seems to be hope of a new dawn. Ironically, that hope rests with a change in tenor, in the subversion of its own tropes and in the studio’s willingness to contradict its own devices. Echo is hardly a perfect show, but it is at least willing to go where no story in the MCU has recently gone – drama via authentic history.

Echo is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar