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.