By Mike Hale
Maya Lopez is, in the Marvel television universe, a deaf Choctaw girl whose mother dies and whose father then moves from Oklahoma to New York City to work for a criminal kingpin (conveniently known as Kingpin). After her father also dies, Maya — embittered and alienated — is groomed for a life of crime by Kingpin and becomes a deadly underworld enforcer. Eventually, one betrayal leads to another and Maya heads back to Oklahoma and the real family that she hasn’t seen for years.
That’s more or less what happens in the first episode of the Marvel miniseries “Echo,” which premiered all five of its episodes last Tuesday on Disney+. I don’t feel bad spelling it out because those first 50 minutes of the series are an origin story that is also, to a large degree, an extended Previously On summarizing Maya’s role in the earlier Marvel-Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” And “Echo,” in turn, is an entr’acte setting up a future series, “Daredevil: Born Again.”
Such are the demands that pull ever harder on any individual piece of narrative etched into the Marvel cinematic circuit board. Committed fans can shrug off or even enjoy the incongruities fostered by corporate storytelling. But no one should feel like a killjoy for thinking, well, that was repetitious (and perhaps, as a consequence, pretty perfunctorily scripted), or for being bemused when Daredevil does an extraneous one-minute flyby just to maintain the brand.
That’s one direction in which “Echo” is tugged. But there are other forces at play. That Maya, aka Echo, was conceived — more than 20 years ago — as deaf and Native American (Cheyenne in the comics) means that in the 2020s, her story will inevitably be taken as an opportunity for the celebration of identity and heritage.
That’s fine in itself, but within the five relatively short episodes of “Echo,” it sets up a tug of war between an action-thriller imperative and a cultural-historical imperative that ends up as a losing battle for both sides. The show’s writers, including the creator and showrunner, Marion Dayre, have failed to braid the two strands in interesting or dramatic ways. (It’s not a good sign that each episode lists from three to seven writing credits.) Instead, what could be — and occasionally is — an entertaining Southwestern noir has its energy sapped by the intrusion of Choctaw history and myth, while the history and myth are devalued by being put at the service of what is mostly a formulaic thriller.
It doesn’t help that the historical elements are handled in a broad, gimmicky fashion that is probably meant to make them accessible but just plays as trying too hard. While Maya (Alaqua Cox) battles her former partners from New York, who track her down in Oklahoma, she has visions of a succession of female ancestors who look out for her and offer her their supernatural powers. That’s about all there is to it, so to give those elements more weight on screen and to provide an impression of originality, the show tricks them up.
Scenes of a Choctaw creation myth are rendered in an effects-heavy “Avatar”-ethnographic style. A 13th-century ancestor takes part in a high-stakes game of stickball straight out of an inspirational sports movie. A 19th-century ancestor who joins a tribal police force is presented in a thematically appropriate (for the deaf Maya) silent-movie sequence. All of these scenes have a bland, prettifying effect and a lack of any narrative momentum; it feels as if they take up more screen time than they actually do.
The balance of the show is, rather than a superhero story, a family crime drama that is more naturalistic and more violent than the Marvel norm but never really catches fire. The dramatic arc has Maya caught between the tribal family and tradition she had left behind and the artificial, corrupted clan created for her by Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), so you know where things are headed.
The confrontations between Maya and her grandmother (Tantoo Cardinal) and her cousin Bonnie (Devery Jacobs) are nominally touching but feel generic, and the action is compartmentalized into long, 10-to-20-minute set pieces — on a moving train, in a roller rink, at a festival — that are also overly familiar. Maya learns to channel mystical Choctaw energy through her hands, but she does not have the ability to perfectly mimic opponents’ movements that originally gave the character the superhero name Echo; the show’s title is rationalized by a late, limp reference to how she “echoes” her ancestors.
Where “Echo” comes to life — often enough to make it a short, harmless binge — is in the spaces between action and history. Graham Greene, as the goatish owner of a pawnshop who used to be involved with Maya’s grandmother, brings some welcome humor and soulfulness to scenes in which he counsels Maya or haggles with white tourists. (Leaning reverently over a figurine, he mumble-chants, “Buy the damn thing, buy the damn thing.”) Cody Lightning is also amusing as Maya’s feckless but loyal cousin Biscuits, proudly informing her that his dog’s name is Billy Jack.
Perhaps the most compelling performance comes from Cox’s cousin, the tremendously engaging Darnell Besaw, as the younger Maya. She benefits from getting to play more scenes than anyone else with the always excellent Zahn McClarnon, who has a relatively small part as Maya’s father.
Cox, who grew up on the Menominee Tribe reservation and is deaf and has a prosthetic leg (Maya loses a leg in the car crash that kills her mother), does not exhibit a wide range of expression or emotion, but the part doesn’t really require it — she can get by on physical presence and on an ability to communicate resentment, sorrow and wounded pride. If that gets old, it is the fault of a show that wants Maya to be a human being rather than a superhero but can’t get out of the habit of writing her as a construct instead of a character.