Echo

The latest addition to the vast Marvel universe does not find its groove right away. Once it does, though, particularly in the conclusive fourth and fifth episodes, Echo earns justifiable praise for representing a new, more daring direction for the studio and its many interconnected sagas.

While slow to start, is one of the more intriguing entries in the MCU in quite some time and could represent a potential new direction for Marvel. Of the three episodes shared with critics, everything past the introduction of the first one only gets better as we start to see this world and characters develop.

Echo is a refreshingly gritty, grounded, and unflinchingly violent superhero story – though its connections to the larger MCU continuity may run deeper than advertised. Amid nods to vintage Westerns and premium crime dramas, Alacqua Cox delivers a culturally authentic and captivating antihero worth rooting for.

What distinguishes this is how it opens a window into American Indian culture and heritage while telling a brisk, exciting mystery that steers Disney+ to a new horizon of not only more complicated and edgier storytelling but one told from an often overlooked perspective.

From a purely Marvel entertainment perspective, “Echo” is an OK crime series with a glum vibe and almost no superheroics, or at least not in the first three of its five episodes Disney made available to critics. In other ways, though, this further adventure of Maya Lopez/Echo — the formidable bad-gal Alaqua Cox introduced in the 2021 “Hawkeye” series — is an appealing creation.

Though there are stumbles in the show's pacing, and it's clear that budgetary restrictions kept the series from elevating the action sequences a bit more, Marvel has made a secondary villain's story more engaging than I had anticipated.

If you approach Echo like the five-episode movie that it is, you’ll be a lot more satisfied with the pace of the limited series’ storytelling. It’s certainly darker than much of the MCU fare we’ve been seeing, but it’s also one of the MCU series that’s most grounded in reality and family, which is refreshing to see.

Although it is more engaging than its peers, “Echo” often feels like it's unraveling within itself, and before our eyes, sometimes becoming a mess of threads that continue to become tangled as the episodes go on. Still, it's quite easy to get sucked into this world, despite Maya being surrounded by unfamiliar characters. Something here has clicked.

It’s actually pretty good — and one of the stronger MCU shows overall when it comes to accomplishing what it sets out to do.

Where Maya ultimately benefits from the moving parts and people around her, “Echo” thrives when setting itself apart from the Marvel machine and creating a whole new legacy.

More than anything, Echo still feels like the product of a broken MCU TV system (and in some ways, it feels a little bit like just another stepping stone to rope Daredevil and Kingpin into this universe), but the risks it does take and the connections Maya does make ultimately elevate this series.

“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. .... Where “Echo” comes to life — often enough to make it a short, harmless binge — is in the spaces between action and history.

Echo may be far more impressive than anything to come out of the recent multiverse. Sadly, though, she is still forced to mirror the mistakes of her Marvel forebears.

Though inconsistently paced and lacking in character development, Echo is still an interesting look at a pretty remarkable hero, with some thrilling fights — and the more adult tone is a welcome new direction for the MCU.

In the midst of Marvel fatigue, the franchise desperately needed to do something different. Is Echo the perfect solution? No, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

It’s a series of moments that alternately had me thinking, “Huh, that feels different and right” and “Huh, I can’t believe somebody was able to do that in a Marvel show.” At the same time, there were far fewer moments that I found exciting and almost no moments that rose to the level of scale and spectacle that viewers have come to expect from Marvel’s films and at least hope for from Marvel’s recent Disney+-affiliated TV shows.

Marvel appears desperate to pivot away from the full-throttle escapism audiences flocked to in the first place. Echo tries to break new ground. But in the end, it repeats the error committed by recent Marvel movies by locking into an underwhelming groove from which it cannot break free.

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.

A third-rate snoozer that further waters down the once-mighty Marvel brand.

In theory, streaming is the venue to roll the dice on less familiar concepts and take creative risks. On its own, though, the latest addition to Marvel’s Disney+ portfolio feels too small boned even by those standards, creating an “Echo” that doesn’t leave much more than a ripple in its wake.

Well-intentioned about the people, communities, and narratives it’s telling, and a tip of the cap can be given to the diverse lead and characters who drive the show. But honestly, these characters are mostly let down by lackluster energy, flat pacing, and early draft writing that’s never particularly involving.

Had the series been tapered down, the pacing would have aided in capturing Maya’s pent-up emotions and vulnerability, keeping viewers invested in this antihero overall, and not just enraptured in the fighting and shooting sequences. Unfortunately, despite its positive and important elements, “Echo” mostly feels like filler.