Echo Review: The start of something great

Amir Muhammad | February 27, 2024

We have finally gotten Marvel to budge and acknowledge their fanbase has grown up with the creation of more mature content.

Echo, created by Marion Dayre, is a show that follows the journey of Maya Lopez, played by Alaqua Cox, as she seeks vengeance on the Kingpin, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, because he killed her father.

In the first episode of Echo we are taken through a bit of her younger life. After her mother dies Echo has to find her own way in the world while being deaf and an amputee. We are also introduced to her family roots from the Choctaw Tribe.

“The Choctaw people's ancestral homeland spanned from most of central and southern Mississippi into parts of eastern Louisiana and western Alabama,” according to the National Park Service. “The Choctaw were fierce warriors, excellent farmers, and skilled traders. There are now two federally recognized Choctaw tribes.” 

After her father's death by the Ronin (Hawkeye), Maya seems to lose direction and gets into trouble with the law. That’s when the Kingpin steps into the picture. Maya’s father and Kingpin were business partners. So, Kingpin is practically family to Maya. He rushes in walking by all of the police and stops Maya from being arrested.

 Kingpin knew the only way to get her to stop her reckless behavior was to lie to her face, saying that his father was killed when he was 12, leaving out the fact that he was the one who did it. He saw that she had no direction and needed an outlet for her anger, so Wilson Fisk better known as the Kingpin sent her to work.

At that job, she is assaulted by a security guard who tries to get too frisky. Before anything can happen, she puts a stop to it by beating him up and embarrassing him, she then moves past that situation and finds more bad guys who she fights and beats.After she easily takes down all of them, the job is busted by Daredevil, played by Charlie Cox. This causes a fight between the two. 

The fight choreography between Daredevil and Echo is how I know I am going to enjoy the episodes to follow. It gave fans of Daredevil a chance to see him back in action before his new show, Daredevil Born Again. 

After that fight, we are shown a montage of Echo over the time she worked with Kingpin up to the point where we left her in Hawkeye’s TV series. She shoots Kingpin in the eye at the end of their partnership which symbolizes her severing ties with him for good. While bleeding out, she heads back to her hometown to patch herself up.I’m going to leave the rest out because  I highly suggest you watch the show for yourself.

It’s amazing that there is so much representation in one episode and Echo doesn’t let her being deaf or not having only one leg stop her from going toe to toe with her enemies.  Nothing holds her back from being a strong and independent character. 

 I think that this first episode did a good job setting up Maya as a character and making the viewer care about her. As opposed to shows like She-Hulk where in my opinion the main character isn’t properly set up.

We can see the care and effort the showrunners and staff are putting into these characters and it is incredible. I appreciate the character because the show is giving all sides of Maya without it being overpowering or being her entire personality. 

With all of that, I rank this first episode a 9/10 and classify it as a great start to this character's journey.