Echo review: A quietly lovely (and very bloody) entry in the superhero canon

There’s a moment halfway through Echo (out January 9 on Disney+ and Hulu)—a years-later spinoff of the mostly cheery (and underrated) Hawkeye series—where a seemingly small plot point plays out in such a way that feels unexpectedly moving and speaks to the power that these superhero stories have when they manage to pair the perfect actor with the perfect character. And that’s what Marvel seems to have done with Echo star Alaqua Cox.

The moment is essentially a version of the standard “superhero getting their suit for the first time” sequence (though that’s not exactly what it is), but the emotionality of the scene sneaks up on you and, in retrospect, feels like it’s on a similar level to Robert Downey Jr.’s iconic final line in Iron Man or Chadwick Boseman revealing that he’s the Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War. This is Cox getting her moment like only she could because of who she is as a person, and it’s kind of incredible.

Cox, who debuted in Hawkeye (literally, because that show and this show are the extent of her onscreen acting career at this point), stars as Maya Lopez, a deaf Choctaw woman with a prosthetic leg whose father was a low-level criminal working for Wilson Fisk (a.k.a. the Kingpin, with Vincent D’Onofrio reprising the role here from Hawkeye and Netflix’s Daredevil). As seen in Hawkeye, Maya’s father was murdered by Ronin in his post-Thanos snap murder spree, though it’s eventually revealed on that show that Robin was tipped off by the Kingpin himself—oh, also, Fisk thinks of Maya like his own daughter, and he has spent her whole life shaping her anger and violent instincts into a weapon.

But if that seems like a weighty bit of backstory, Echo is reluctant to spend too much time on it, even as almost every second of the series is indebted to the events of two other shows that not every viewer might be completely familiar with. The first episode flies through the events of Hawkeye, including flashback scenes of young Maya that were already in that show paired with new flashback scenes (though Echo gets some real juice out of reprising the Kingpin’s original Hawkeye cameo), creating an awkward middle-ground between assuming viewers don’t know it at all and trusting that viewers will already be deeply familiar with the existing canon.

That all becomes a bit easier to ignore once Maya hightails it out of New York, believing she has just killed the Kingpin after the events of Hawkeye and will now be on every two-bit mobster’s hit list. She hides out in her old hometown in Oklahoma—a hometown that happens to be full of old friends and family members who seem vaguely aware that her father was a criminal and that she’s following in his footsteps. (Special shoutout to Graham Greene from Dances With Wolves as Maya’s grandfather, who carries a lot of Echo’s emotional depth and also gets a funny scene screwing with some dumb white people.)

Maya has a mission in mind now that the Kingpin’s throne is vacant, and she’s also been having mysterious visions of the Choctaw creation myth (in which the tribe’s first people emerged from a cave and became humans), but, of course, the Kingpin’s not really dead. It takes more than being shot in the eye to kill Wilson Fisk, which is as true here as it was when Maya did the same thing in the comics. (Speaking of, writer Brian Michael Bendis put a fun gag in his Daredevil comics after Fisk got shot in the face by Maya, with his wife selling one of his properties to the only New Yorker more evil than the Kingpin.)

Over the course of its first few episodes (only three were screened for critics), Echo gradually draws out the explanations for why Maya is back in her hometown and why everyone is so wary of her, but the short version is that she’s there to do some violence—and she succeeds. There’s only one annoyingly dark action scene set atop a moving train, but other than that Echo has some solidly brutal fight scenes, many of which are choreographed around Cox’s use of her prosthetic leg in a way that seems more like her just being awesome than treating it like some kind of superpower, which could’ve been a little crass.

This was spoiled in the trailers, but there is also an appearance from … another Marvel superhero with a connection to Maya in the source material, and though his appearance comes earlier and is shorter than his fans might’ve expected, it is handled well and is used to hype him much as much as it’s used to showcase how cool Maya is. It bodes well for that unnamed character’s hypothetical future, and it kind of answers some questions that someone may or may not have had about how much of his history is canonical to the MCU.

Throughout all of that, it’s impressive just how good Cox is here. She carries the show completely with her body language, facial expressions, and signing, and it genuinely feels special that Marvel is introducing a hero here who is a deaf Native American woman who uses a prosthetic leg played by a deaf Native American woman who uses a prosthetic leg. As tired of superhero stories as people may be, it’s really goddamn cool that they can be used for stuff like this.

Echo premieres January 9 on Disney+ and Hulu