Echo entered the Marvel universe in 1999’s “Daredevil” Vol. 2 #9, introduced by David Mack and Joe Quesada. Known for her ability to mimic any physical movement she observes due to her photographic reflexes, she quickly became intertwined with characters like Daredevil. Echo’s connections deepened as her storyline evolved, including associations with figures such as Kingpin and the Hand.

Echo

After discovering that her adopted Uncle Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin) orchestrated her father’s murder, the deaf and one-legged mob enforcer and part-time ninja Maya Lopez returns to her small Oklahoma hometown for the first time in 20 years. However, she’s not there for a reunion. Maya has murdered Fisk and now plans on taking over his vast criminal enterprise as Queenpin.

1 Vacation

2 Shop

3 Amazon

Echo is another exquisite example of nu-Disney’s paint-by-numbers predictability. Girl boss with a bad attitude? Check.  A story that could (i.e., should) have been tightened up into an hour-and-a-half special but was unnaturally and unsuccessfully stretched out over the course of multiple episodes? Check, and check. Ruined by wokeness? Great big double-check with a cherry on top.

However, Marvel Studios’ Echo fails hardest in three ways. Its main character is an unrepentant criminal and murderer whose ultimate goal isn’t redemption or even revenge. Unlike other criminal leads in cinema Maya/Echo has no redeeming qualities and never has a “come to Jesus moment.” Every time Michael Corleone tried to get out of the Family business, they pulled him back in, but Maya voluntarily jumps in with one and a half feet.

When the story arc suddenly changes gears from conquest to survival, it’s too late to build any goodwill for the character, and the writers don’t try, anyway. They are perfectly happy with her as a selfish and meanspirited user of people, and they substitute personal growth for victimhood. Unfortunately, “she’s had a hard life” doesn’t do much to build sympathy when her next action after being given an ultimatum is to abandon everyone she’s ever known and loved to a ruthless monster whom she knows from personal experience will have no problem wiping them all out.

Secondly, and the libs are going to love this, her particular set of handicaps makes the character utterly laughably ridiculous. Daredevil works as a character because he has an extra sense that compensates for his blindness, and while the actual girl power that is randomly bestowed to Maya makes her sporadically stronger, faster, and more resilient than normal one-legged women, it does nothing to compensate for her deafness, nor does it make her bulletproof. Of course, she has double-plated plot armor to protect her.

Maya literally has girl power. That’s right, even though in her past 20 to 30 years (the show isn’t clear on her age), she’s never had an inkling of being powerful enough to single-handedly and easily dispatch a room full of practiced killers, this series introduces her to her new set of ill-defined powers that will deus ex machine her through whatever trial has befallen her, and best of all, she gets these powers from the spirits of her female ancestors because she “needs them.” She hasn’t earned them. She doesn’t deserve them. There’s no reason to believe that she will use them to benefit anyone but herself, but she is an American Indian woman, so… you know… stuff.

None of it is helped by Alaqua Cox’s single face expression, like she just found out someone drank the last of the orange juice.

Quite frankly, I could go on, but I’ve been struggling to get this review out because I couldn’t decide where to start. Echo is a series in which the lead character can and does make a machine gun out of a rollerskate in under five minutes. If you need more, the finale is so off-the-charts stupid that I laughed out loud, so much so that I had to pause it to avoid missing anything crucial.

If you’re looking for a way to waste several hours of your life for absolutely no payoff, watch Echo. It gives She-Hulk a run for its money as the worst MsheU series to date.

P.S. These series have consultants, right? Alaqua Cox doesn’t just exhibit horrendous trigger discipline; she thumbs the trigger to her second knuckle.

WOKE ELEMENTS

For The Honor of Grayskull! SHE HAS A VAGINAAAAAAA!

• Some of us might complain about Mary Sues and the proliferation of girl power in modern films and TV series, and it’s possible that some of us are even a little too sensitive to it.
  • Echo literally has girl power.
    • She gets her nebulous and ill-defined powers from her fierce female ancestors…because she needs them.
      • That’s not hyperbole. That’s canon. She gets her powers because she needs to have them.
      • In every episode, we get introduced to a new girl-boss ancestor.
  • Does anyone remember how Daredevil got the crap beat out of him in his series (which is still canon in this series)?
    • He was brutally trained by mystical warriors and has a superpower.
    • She was trained in a Tae Kwon Do belt mill and holds her own against an armed, fully armored DD before she gets superpowers.

Left Foot Green

• Maybe her character works in the comics, but a one-legged deaf person seems like they’d be relatively easy to best in both hand-to-hand combat and ambushes. There is a reason why both of those handicaps preclude people from active duty in both military and police forces. It sucks, but it makes sense.
  • They manufactured her powers in this series, so why not add a Spidey-Sense and a specially designed artificial limb with future tech? The reason is that the series exists for the sole purpose of virtue signaling.  The choices made were made for the sake of inclusivity instead of a quality narrative.

We No Like’em Pale Face

• The white villains are villains.
• The Indian villains are noble victims of circumstance just trying to make it in Whitey’s world.
• Every white person is deeply flawed.
  • A cartoon white couple without any self-awareness, asking stupid questions while shopping in an Indian store. The questions are the type that no one would ask and the purpose of the scene is purely to make fun of white people.
  • Evil criminal mastermind
  • White trash hillbilly
    • White trash hillbilly criminal without loyalty
  • Hitmen.