Echo Review: The Latest Victim Of Superhero Fatigue

Only three episodes of "Echo" have been screened for critics, but I'll be surprised if the opening ident has stopped being funny by the end of its run. Less focus has been placed on the immediately recognizable intro with a litany of iconic figures, scored to the triumphant, bombastic MCU theme, in favor of a dialed-back, self-consciously "prestige" title card announcing the studio's new offshoot: Marvel Spotlight. Obviously modeled after Focus Features or Searchlight Pictures as the new "indie" branch of a major studio, this new brand has been designed to win back the casual audiences who want stand-alone stories and haven't kept up with the overlapping cinematic universe.

It's a good idea, in theory, but I can't for the life of me work out why this is the strategy that's been adopted to market a series that's a spin-off of both "Hawkeye" and Netflix's "Daredevil," standing alone only in that the first episode functions almost entirely as an extended "previously on..." segment for newcomers.

You don't need to have seen those shows to grasp "Echo," thanks in part to this never-ending recap, but it's still a victim of the studio's need to make everything part of an interconnected saga, failing to play down its ties at every turn. As a result, I can't imagine anybody but the Marvel die-hards tuning in; it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that the studio can recapture the spark of its initial projects anytime soon.

That the first episode, directed by Sydney Freeland, is the most promising of the three is the most immediate call for alarm here. The episode charts the story of Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), first introduced in "Hawkeye" as the leader of Kingpin's Tracksuit Mafia, mapping out how a deaf, Native American teen rose to that position, and the repercussions of her decision to flee from New York back to her hometown in Oklahoma. In essence, the episode functions solely to piece together several archival sequences from earlier series, but the new scenes do bring with them a sense of promise — in particular a "John Wick" inspired one-take fight scene in which Maya breaks bad and sides with the enemy.

The series is rated TV-MA, the first Marvel Studios series to have done so (the Netflix series don't count), but you'd be forgiven for not clocking this — the aforementioned fight is brilliantly staged and choreographed, even if it is derivative of better action films, but it's as bloodless as the typical PG-13 MCU fare. Still, it sets the ball rolling nicely enough, with a level of panache and creativity that's been sorely lacking from the increasingly micro-managed efforts the studio has released of late. It's so well done, in fact, that I could even forgive it for the fan service cameo it throws in at the end, which has already been repeatedly spoiled on social media, but I will refrain from doing so here. That character reportedly features more extensively later in the season — they hadn't yet rematerialized by the close of the third installment.

The propulsive energy of that scene, unfortunately, doesn't carry over elsewhere, with the Oklahoma-based set pieces feeling generic within the over-saturated genre by comparison. One sequence on the roof of a train only serves to remind audiences of the bullet train scene in "The Wolverine," a film mostly written off by critics at the time that now feels daring in a way these movies rarely do.  Meanwhile, smaller-scale fights — such as a roller disco siege in Episode 3 — struggle to sustain tension, despite resembling home invasion thrillers at their most stripped down.

That roller disco setting is noteworthy, however, for offering the biggest existential question as to how the series functions within the wider continuity of the MCU. Donald Trump never became president in this universe, with several fictitious Presidents holding the keys to the Oval Office throughout the saga – so why does the roller rink have a large banner featuring a groan-worthy pun on Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Skate Again"? The implications of this set-dressing choice gave me more food for thought than the series itself. Presumably, this is set in one of the Marvel multiverses that have politicians as realistically dreadful as our own.

The other driving force behind the Marvel Spotlight project is to tell more character-driven stories, to re-engage audiences with a genre that has become too untethered from reality to invest in. "Echo" is far more successful on that front, embedding its anti-hero within a community that will be directly impacted by her actions. Unlike countless MCU projects of late, which sideline the ramifications of characters' decisions by never focusing on the general populations they've been chosen to protect, the series has a sincere investment in its non-super characters, affording them lives and careers outside of the overarching plot. It's a pleasant change for this franchise, which even when it does focus on believable figures — such as Kamala Khan's family in "The Marvels" most recently — tends to push them to the side at the first possible opportunity. This series understands that making real people as central to the narrative as possible goes a long way. Admittedly, nobody has too distinct a personality here, but one step at a time.

Another positive is that the groundbreaking representation of Native American and hearing impaired people within this genre isn't of the ham-fisted variety; it doesn't have the same cynicism within its execution as, say, the first openly gay character in "Avengers: Endgame." The vast majority of the cast and crew were taught American Sign Language (ASL) before entering production, and its careful integration within character interactions is one of the show's most quietly powerful tools — with such a physical manner of speaking, it proves effective at demonstrating their various states of mind, often without a single word uttered out loud. For the characters that haven't learned the language, their interactions with Maya prove revealing for opposite reasons, with these dynamics representing the most intriguing aspects of the character drama.

But these smaller-scale moments, or the grittier innovations within the action sequences, aren't enough to make me fall back into the MCU's arms. It's too entwined with earlier series to stand on its own, and the few interesting creative decisions that make this stand out from the wider franchise aren't enough to sustain an otherwise generic story. It's made with more care than any Marvel project of late, but at this point in the ongoing saga, that alone is not enough to get me back on board.

"Echo" premieres on Disney+ and Hulu on January 9.