Echo Finds Marvel Desperately Trying to Recreate the Netflix Glory Days

Marvel and Disney+ dropped a brand new live-action series Echo, and even just two years ago, that Marvel logo alone would’ve made it the biggest news of the month. Marvel kicked off its new era in 2021 by bringing its A-list stars to the small screen, with shows like WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier sucking up all the public discourse for weeks at a time.

This was the reason, we were told, the street-level world Marvel’s previous TV leadership had built on Netflix had to die. Marvel wanted to elevate its TV game to the same level as its big-screen blockbusters, which meant Netflix’s incredibly successful run of Marvel shows, that included hits like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and The Punisher, came to an unceremonious end as Disney moved to retake all its superhero rights and bring them back under the big Mouse umbrella.

Which brings us to Echo, Marvel’s latest show and the biggest, most awkward step in Disney’s push to try and recapture some of the glory days of that Netflix era. Disney has been slowing down its Marvel machine over the past year, in search of a “less is more” approach to stave off an already-building fatigue. Echo lands in a weird space from that in-between time. It was commissioned when Marvel was ramping up with spinoffs galore, taking the minor character Maya (aka Echo, played by Alaqua Cox) from the Hawkeye miniseries and giving her a solo adventure.

At the same time, in a move that seems to signal Marvel realizes fans still miss the good ol’ days from the Netflix Defenders era, the studio is slowly starting to reintroduce some of those elements into its new shows. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, a mainstay of the Daredevil series on Netflix, first resurfaced in Hawkeye. Charlie Cox’s Daredevil has also popped up, first in Spider-Man: No Way Home and then in a more substantial role in She-Hulk. It’s been a bit clunky, but for the most part, fans have been understandably thrilled to see those characters make a return.

Echo aimed to thread the needle even more, with Fisk back as a surrogate uncle to Maya, and Cox’s Daredevil popping up in the series’ first episode. Marvel understandably leaned into that connection with its marketing campaign, with Daredevil and Fisk playing key roles in most of the trailers. But it turns out, the Daredevil appearance is nothing more than a glorified cameo, with Echo facing off with Daredevil in a flashback fight. It makes for a great action scene, to be sure, but feels like a fake-out for fans hoping to see more of the character after She-Hulk, all while we patiently wait for the reportedly-troubled Disney+ revival series of Daredevil as it undergoes a major creative overhaul.

One key selling point for Echo was that it marked Disney+’s first TV-MA rated Marvel show, a move to bring the tone and content more in line with those Netflix shows, mostly for blood and violence. And it certainly lives up to the billing, with set pieces across the five-episode drop bringing the blood and broken bones at a comparable rate to the old Netflix series. There are gunshots with actual blood (a relative rarity in the MCU), and extended fight scenes that feel like they were pulled from the cutting room floor of the extended-shot brawls that made Netflix’s Daredevil series so memorable in the first place. That bone-crunching, street-level approach is a niche the Netflix shows carved out perfectly, and though Echo captures the flash, it still doesn’t have the substance. 

Maya herself is an interesting character with potential, but her motivations here are thinly drawn, and the driving narrative of the entire show—her desire to take over Fisk’s criminal empire after shooting him at the end of Hawkeye—never truly makes all that much sense. Especially when you realize Maya believes she killed Fisk already. She wanted revenge for her father’s death, which is why she shot Fisk in the first place. Vengeance has been attained already, so where is the motivation to take over his empire? She already cut the head off the snake (to borrow a line from Hydra, another Marvel villain stalwart). We never really get a good answer, and if anything, it seems like a conflict setup simply so Maya can get in some good fights and eventually realize what she really needed all along was to rekindle her relationships with her family and her heritage. It’s not a bad story, but one that never truly takes off because there’s no good reason she didn’t just reconnect with her family in the first place. No half-baked Fisk Empire revenge plan required.

As for connections to the larger MCU, this series is the first under Marvel’s new “Spotlight” banner, which was billed as a shingle that is more standalone and less connected to the mainline Marvel Universe where folks like Thor and Captain Marvel hang out. And for the most part, Echo sticks to building out and exploring its own corner of the comic book world, crafting an origin story about Maya’s powers and an ancient connection to the Choctaw Nation. It turns out Maya’s loosely-defined powers are due to her connection to the original Choctaw leaders, and we get episodic flashbacks to different generations of strong Choctaw women in this family line. It all comes to a head in a rushed series finale, where she channels those warriors of the past to take on Fisk and some of his goons in a brief battle at a Choctaw cultural event.

This final face-off with Fisk is also where one of the more surprising twists comes in, one that (“Spotlight” banner notwithstanding) clearly is teeing up a storyline that could impact the wider Marvel TV and movie universe. Maya taps into some emotional healing abilities, and uses them on Fisk, forcing him to grapple with his childhood trauma of killing his own father. Scratching at the emotional scar rattles Fisk, and we end with him retreating back to his plane to fly back to New York City. But on the plane in a brief post-credit scene, he catches a news segment where NYC anchors are discussing a listless mayor’s race, and how what the election really needs is a “brawler” and political outsider to shake things up.

As Marvel Comics fans are likely well aware, Fisk does serve a memorable stint as NYC mayor in the comics, a position that gave him all kinds of power and influence to cause trouble for our favorite superheroes along the way. As Fisk stares at the segment and begins to ponder, we cut to black.

Setting Fisk up as the mayor of NYC is an incredibly interesting and promising set-up—but it’s also a story we can’t help but wish we could’ve seen play out in the OG Marvel series on Netflix where these characters originated, and not the ret-con version Marvel is trying to hack back together now. Which essentially encapsulates the problem Marvel finds itself in, now. Those original shows captured lightning in a bottle, and if Echo is any indication of how they plan to handle these stories moving forward in the fully connected Disney+ era, things aren’t looking all that bright.

Trent Moore is a recovering print journalist, and freelance editor and writer with bylines at lots of places. He likes to find the sweet spot where pop culture crosses over with everything else. Follow him at @trentlmoore on Twitter.

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