Marvel’s first ‘Spotlight’ series is confused about what it’s trying to be, feeling like it has a hand tied behind its back despite there definitely being a good show in there somewhere.

With Marvel dipping their toes into the world of television, Matt Waters brings recaps and reviews of each new episode (you guessed it) every Monday.

Check out the full column.

Quick Review

• Don’t let anyone tell you this is bad. It’s not. It just doesn’t quite know what it is, with more going on than a Special, but with only five episodes it’s over before it can fully hit its stride. Marvel might have been throwing it under the bus.
• What action scenes exist are good, but they’re few and far between, and don’t last very long aside from an excellent sequence in the middle.
• Daredevil is in a single short scene. Kingpin isn’t at the level you might hope aside from a couple of fun moments, but Vincent D’Onofrio is always decent.
• Marvel can’t help but make bad final episodes, inject CGI where it isn’t welcome, and do the same generic ‘this character just got their name, costume and powers!’ sequences.
• Crucially, the Indigenous and Deaf representation is wonderful. No notes.
• It’s unclear what the future holds for the character. The cast are great and there’s more story on the table if they want, but nothing is announced, and the set-up for Daredevil: Born Again is surprisingly minimal.

Identity Crisis

After experimenting with ‘Specials’ in 2022, this was Marvel’s first ‘Spotlight’. The former were roughly 45-minute ‘one-shots’, while the latter seems to be code for ‘Netflix 2.0’, with slightly more mature content and grounded, character driven stories less connected to the larger Marvel tapestry. I think both are a good idea, with Specials befitting characters that don’t merit a full movie or series, as well as presenting an opportunity to get a little weirder with tone and genre. Spotlights also sound good for those who have grown weary of the multiverse and CGI.

The problem is there was clearly some indecision about which of these things Marvel wanted Echo to be. It has the elements of a full TV show (casting a really charming set of supporting characters), but with only five episodes, one of which is largely re-cycled footage and flashbacks, there seems to only be a Special’s worth of content. The characters pop in small interactions, but their stories mostly remain untold.

Perhaps the most egregious example is Bonnie (Devery Jacobs), Maya’s cousin who was devastated by her leaving town as a child and still tries to reach out to this day. Maya ghosts her and tries to go about her business in Oklahoma without even telling Bonnie that she’s back in town. They do get a reunion and it’s naturally awkward, but they never really go beyond that. Bonnie is forced to play translator for Fisk, which is a solid piece of villain work as she’s having to communicate threats being made against her own life. Maya temporarily gives her superpowers, they win the day, and then in the final scene Bonnie gives Maya a bit of a look at a family meal (that we don’t know if Maya even stayed for!) It absolutely doesn’t need to be wrapped up neatly with a bow, but the truncated nature gives it this really bizarre feel. I may be on an island, but to me it felt like they were portraying their relationship like Bonnie was a jilted ex-lover, and if it started from episode 2, I would have assumed they were telling a story that Maya was hiding from her small town queerness. Quasi-incestuous undertones aside, the character is just tremendously under-served, more so than any of the ensemble. A longer episode count could have fixed this.

Chula (Tantoo Cardinal) and Skully (Graham Greene) are potentially the most successful part of the show, with incredible chemistry, charming individual character beats and scenes with the rest of the cast, and their arc comes to a satisfying conclusion. Somewhere in the middle are Biscuits (Cody Lightning) and Henry (Chaske Spencer). Both are charming in different ways. Both have some fun little scenes. But they don’t really go anywhere. The wonderful Zahn McLarnon is back for a couple of scenes showing how Maya’s mother died, but then he peaces out. Maybe he was busy, but I was hoping to get to see a lot more of him. There was also clearly something going on with Maya and Kazi in Hawkeye, which would have been fun to explore with more flashbacks about her rise to take over her father’s New York operation. A full 8-10 episode season would have afforded them the opportunity to do more with all of these fine actors.

Also Alaqua Cox is good, and Maya is an interesting character! She’s far more gruff and withdrawn than the average Marvel lead and I think she only makes a joke like… twice. There’s a sense of visual storytelling with things like her trauma response and discomfort with intimacy. All really good.

It just didn’t feel like a project they ever had much confidence in, pushing back the release date amidst rumours about various projects being quietly cancelled. The first episode features so much recycled footage that it ruins it (you’d think a skippable ‘previously on’ montage would have sufficed, instead of repeating parts of scenes whole-cloth throughout!). They also end with a ‘This season on Echo’ sequence, which isn’t something they’ve ever done before, and feels a bit like begging people to PLEASE keep watching. I understand it’s a less prominent character, portrayed by a less famous actor, spinning off a series that got mixed reviews (I loved it, personally), but still. Stand by your projects! Set them up to succeed! You’ve released longer things that were a lot worse than this!!!

The Action Is Good, But Limited

Much like the cast are charming but don’t have enough time to be developed fully, those hoping for Daredevil or Punisher style wall-to-wall action may be disappointed.

To be clear, I don’t feel that is required, and I would very happily watch eight episodes of these characters sitting down and talking. It’s just that much like with the touting of a certain pair of characters (more below), they did heavily push the action in the promotion of the show. Almost every shot in the trailers was from one of these scenes, but there aren’t actually that many such sequences. The ones they do have are pretty fun, not hitting the highs of those Netflix shows, but better than the average Marvel fights, both in terms of choreography and how they’re shot. The camera moves! You see (some) punches connect without cutting to a different shot! They’re all on physical locations/sets!

Episode 1’s mob dispute-turned Daredevil fight is fun, but pretty brief. There are cool moments like Matt leaping backwards between some warehouse shelving, and a dumbass enforcer jumping through a door and shooting people before he hits the ground. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a scratch on what we’ve seen involving this character in the past, with a couple of obviously whiffed strikes, but a decent little tease of more to come, you might think… but… not really!

Episode 2 builds to a scene featuring Maya boarding a moving train, infiltrating one of the cars, planting a bomb and jumping onto a speeding truck. It’s clumsy in a good way. There are some cool shots of big leaps, little close-ups of Maya smiling to herself, and there is a sense of intrigue about what she’s even trying to do. The problem is, like so many modern productions, the lighting is AWFUL. You can barely see what’s going on, so they lose a million points for what seemed like a well-conceived and performed sequence.

Episode 3 is the crowning achievement, with an extended brawl through a skate rink that makes for a fun venue for a fight. Maya smashes heads into arcade machines, whips people with the metal chords from fake guns, vaults over air hockey tables, and blood splatters across a disco ball. There’s a stealth element, gunplay, martial arts and it’s all moodily lit and scored. Good stuff.

Episode 4 has nothing, unless you count Fisk beating a dude in an alleyway. It’s a big exposition episode. That’s fine!

The finale teases a large blowout, with dozens of armed men threatening to ruin the town celebration, and Fisk taking Maya’s family hostage. Buuuut they resolve both in quick and narratively unsatisfying ways. Biscuits drives a monster truck over the vans full of goons. Henry shoots the mini-boss from thirty feet away. Maya activates CGI mode to beat Kingpin. No big fight. It’s super disappointing!

And that’s it. If you came to the show wanting Daredevil-Lite, you’ll get it, but only three times, one of which is short and another of which is poorly lit. Still, Episode 3 rules.

Bad News for Daredevil & Kingpin Fans

The show is a continuation of the events of Hawkeye, which brought Kingpin into the MCU, with Maya shooting him in the face as a cliffhanger. They also touted that the series would set-up Daredevil: Born Again and used Vincent D’Onofrio heavily in promos for the show. All very exciting given the high quality of the old Netflix series and a new season in production.

The thing is… they probably should have used them more/better or not bothered at all. It wasn’t fair to fans to tease them with this big role for both characters given what we actually get here. Daredevil is in a single two-minute scene in the first episode, interrupting Maya’s first mission and fighting her to a standstill. It’s fun! Buuuut given that’s his sole involvement, wouldn’t it have been better to deploy it as a surprise cameo rather than putting footage of it in the trailers and confirming Charlie Cox’s participation? He even makes it into the (very cool!) opening titles for that episode!

When Kingpin returned in Hawkeye, I commented that he was worse than he’d been in Daredevil, but Vincent D’Onofrio is still compelling even in first gear. While I’m pleased they restored him to human levels of strength rather than being able to punch people ten feet across a room, this just isn’t really close to what was achieved with the character a few years ago. It’s not BAD. It’s just not as good. The scene with him beating an ice cream vendor half to death for being rude to Maya feels like a deleted scene from Daredevil. Some of their interactions are genuinely interesting, such as her refuting that he loves her by pointing out he never bothered to learn ASL (whereas he did learn Mandarin to get ahead in the criminal underworld!), and his always fun emotionally manipulative behaviour. I enjoyed him having an interpreter quietly murdered while they ate dinner (which Maya of course couldn’t hear).

But there was just something off about it all. His arrival in Oklahoma felt like it was green-screened despite it being a real location in other scenes. Their first conversation felt like it was trimmed down to fit the runtime. Their second one felt like a repeat of the first. His appearance in the finale was bland (aside from making Bonnie sign all of his threats against Maya’s family, that was dark).

He’s a phenomenal actor who genuinely enjoys playing this role. Write it better for him!

The Marvel Of It All Strikes Again

Despite claiming this is a more grounded project divorced from their multiverse saga, it still felt like the generic MCU elements reared their ugly head to ruin a good time.

We’ve already gone over the first episode being so heavily indebted to what’s come before, but it also features a sequence driven almost entirely by CGI that recurs throughout the series. It’s their attempt at portraying genuine Choctaw mythology; the belief that their people came from underground or were from another world, as well as a version where ‘The Creator’ made them from clay and warned that if they were exposed to the sun they would crack. That’s fine. The problem is I don’t want to see ugly CGI in a show like this. It felt like a scene from The Eternals. It also felt suspiciously similar to the Kahhori episode of What If…? (Devery Jacobs coincidentally voiced Kahhori), which makes sense if they’re both pulling from legitimate Native American folklore, but releasing the two projects back to back is just a bit… messy. I just really hated seeing these glowing supernatural beings a half dozen times throughout the show, and even more so as the very first scene. Not a good way to start.

Much as the first episode felt like it was powered by obligation, the finale had the same vibe as so many third acts and final episodes in the MCU. It felt like it was written separately, or the events were dictated from up high, with little negotiation on how to weave it together with the story being told up to now. ‘Forget all that stuff you were doing, we have to get our main character wearing their superhero costume, using their nebulous CGI superpowers (flawlessly despite not having tried before) and somebody must say their superhero name out loud. Then you’ve got 3 minutes to wrap everything. We don’t care how.’

I’m not sure Echo needed to have full superpowers, anyway. In the comics she is an expert mimic, but that’s not implied to be a superhuman feat, but rather because of her sight being so keen due to her deafness. The cliche of losing one sense heightening the others. I can only assume they thought it’s too similar to Taskmaster. You know, that poorly received villain from that poorly received movie? Who cares?! Kang and The High Evolutionary have identical powers.

The other driving factor could have been their commitment to tying her character name to Native American mythology. Previous generations are echoing through her. It’s a little corny when they say it, but it’s conceptually sound. I don’t hate her getting vivid ‘memories’ of her ancestors, and learning small lessons from each of them. In fact it’s a smart way to split the difference, giving her extra skills without infringing on Taskmaster’s gimmick. What I do object to is the generic glowing hands and apparent super-strength gimmick they go with. Worse still, being able to temporarily lend it to Bonnie and Chula. Just a really bad final sequence, and the powers themselves don’t feel necessary. She’s a badass survivalist. Can’t that be enough? I know several of the Defenders have powers, but I thought she was good as she was and wouldn’t have felt out of place if she didn’t have magic.

Representation Is Always a Good Thing

Earlier I said that Maya’s estranged grandparents might be the most successful element of the series. While their actors are really good, part of what powers their arcs is the actual best part of the show: the Native American representation.

Much like the Kahhori episode of What If…?, Marvel worked with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, as well as hiring Native American writers, directors and of course actors. Many of the vendors at the powwow celebration are real. The elaborate stickball scene features real stickball players. Choctaw artists helped make costumes. All of this is good. I also really dug the soundtrack and have sought out a number of the tracks.

Likewise, they put a LOT of work into the use of sign language. The principal cast and crew took lessons so that they could communicate a little with deaf lead Alaqua Cox. Deaf actress and writer Shoshannah Stern received story credit on an episode, and Douglas Ridlof returns as an ASL consultant following Eternals and Hawkeye.

It’s an extremely low bar, but I was pleasantly surprised that a company as large as this, with an intended audience so broad, was willing to make a show where a huge amount of the dialogue is subtitled, either because characters are speaking Choctaw, or they’re signing. True enough, some of these characters speak while signing, but Maya never does.

If you have no other positive feelings about the show, I think it’s hard to deny they did the work to sensitively portray both Indigenous culture and deafness.

Episode Ranking

Honestly, I’ve got a definite number one and a clear number five, but this series bleeds together to such a degree you really could flip a coin on the middle of the pack.

Let’s start at the top. Episode 3 feels the most fully realised vision of what the creative team intended this series to be. It’s got character work, progresses multiple small stories and has a tonne of action. I think this is the show fans may have thought they were getting when they announced it would be a more adult project in the vein of the Netflix shows. You could potentially even watch it in a vacuum and skip the rest of the series and have a pretty solid time.

Bringing up the rear is the finale, an all-too common outcome for Marvel television. It may have worked as-is if there had been more episodes to build some of the characters further. I like Henry. I like Biscuits. I like the grandparents. Zane is a perfectly acceptable mini-boss. The powwow is visually engaging. But that stuff just doesn’t land as well as it might have. On top of that, it reminded me a LOT of the Ms. Marvel finale, snapping out of the story they had been telling for several episodes so they could do some generic CGI stuff in a slightly over-designed costume. The signature ‘here’s our latest hero!’ treatment. Gone is the fun choreography and vaguely interesting camera work, and instead we’ve got glowing hands and goofy ‘the grandma is a superhero now!’ moments. There’s no final showdown with Kingpin. No gauntlet of thugs to unleash the full extent of Maya’s new abilities against. It’s over in a matter of seconds. The episode just feels like an overly abrupt ending to an overly abrupt series.

The rest? I slightly prefer the character work from the second episode, and the train sequence is fun despite being terribly lit. Cox, D’Onofrio and Cardinal are good actors, but episode four is pure exposition, and while that can be fun on a first watch, in six months time I’ll remember more about the ‘re-pilot’ than the penultimate entry. And speaking of remembering, episode one both has one of the best scenes in the show and is overly devoted to re-used footage and flashbacks. I’ll remember the fight scene, but the episode has too much of an inorganic feeling for me.

1. Tuklo (Episode 3)
2. Lowak (Episode 2)
3. Taloa (Episode 4)
4. Chafa (Episode 1)
5. Maya (Episode 5)

The Future

COULD you do a second season? Sure! Maya only just got her powers and she’s only just begun to mend bridges with her family and learn to open up. There’s clearly a whole bunch of unfinished business with Kingpin. But it really feels like this was always intended to be a one-and-done, and you could just as easily read the final scene as Maya stopping in to say goodbye instead of sitting down for a meal with her family.

As of this writing Echo has NOT been confirmed to appear in Daredevil: Born Again, so it’s entirely possible their 2 minute fight will be their only interaction. They don’t necessarily have to fall in love like the comics, but I do think they’re interesting together and I’d like to see some more meaningful exchanges. She could still show up in the series and they just want to keep her a secret, but yeah. Fisk decided he wants to be Mayor of New York in the mid-credits scene though, so… there’s that!

Not that this should necessarily mean anything, but the series has been added to a Defenders playlist on Disney+, and Feige recently said screw it, all the Netflix stuff is canon now. An earlier version of the first episode’s script called for Matt to be searching for Jessica Jones, who allegedly had a return in She-Hulk cancelled already. Punisher is in Born Again. They’re clearly doing something, and Echo makes plenty of sense alongside them as a street-level hero.

All of that being said, Echo is the latest in an unfortunately long line of characters Marvel have debuted with no clear plans on the horizon to use them again. It’s fine to be more turned off by the shared universe stuff and want more self-contained stories… but they used to be better at that aspect too. They managed full trilogies for Iron Man, Captain America and Thor within five-six years, with sequels to projects announced shortly after the release of the original. Do we need a second series? No! But shouldn’t there be a press release for The Defenders or confirmation she’ll be in Born Again, or SOMETHING? Marvel haven’t given a lot of these new characters a chance because they’re all just tossed out into their never-ending web of projects without a clear roadmap. Do better.