ECHO (2024)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I didn't see all of HAWKEYE, the Disney streaming series wherein the MCU version of Marvel character Echo debuted. But this wasn't strictly necessary, in that (1) Echo was a side character, and (2) the five-part ECHO series recapitulates the essentials of her HAWKEYE arc, The character of Echo (she has a "regular name" but I'll omit it for sake of clarity) follows a few aspects of her debut comic-book arc. If I had not read the 2011 sequence PARTS OF THE HOLE, I would not have known how much of the Hawkeye arc was derived from the comics-story. In the latter, The Kingpin befriends Echo's father, kills him, and then frames Daredevil for the crime, so that the super-athletic Echo-- who regards Kingpin as a surrogate daddy-- goes after the Man Without Fear. After assorted fight-scenes Echo finds out the truth and takes an Oedipal vengeance upon her bad dad, shooting him in both eyes.

It's just as well I did not attempt to follow what happened to the comic book version of Kingpin after Echo's vengeance, since I strongly suspect that the ECHO series went its own way from then on. One divergent direction was that the ECHO show, like 2022's MS. MARVEL, was meant to celebrate a marginalized culture within America, that of an Amerindian tribe. (Echo is of the Cheyenne tribe in the comics but in the live-action show she becomes Choctaw for whatever reasons.) ECHO proves considerably better at the representation task than the 2022 program, for all the scenes with the supporting Choctaw characters are pretty good. It's just a shame that, as with so, so many MCU serials, the show-runners had no idea as to how to craft a compelling protagonist.

As I noted in my PARTS review, Comics-Echo is no great prize. The ease with which Kingpin tricks his surrogate daughter into believing Daredevil is her father's murderer does not reflect well on Echo's brain power. However, she's still got a basic heroic persona. TV-Echo is absurdly over-complicated in that respect.

Daredevil isn't in the HAWKEYE series. In the TV show, Kingpin sets up Echo's father to get killed by the Avenging Archer, rather than bringing about the father's death through Kingpin's own agency. At the end of HAWKEYE, TV-Echo shoots Kingpin, but only in one eye. The first episode of ECHO recapitulates this history. It's implied also that Kingpin was responsible for the death of Echo's mother when Echo was a small girl, and that this somehow caused Echo's dad to flee the reservation to work for Kingpin in New York. In that bailiwick, separated from neighbors and family members, Echo "echoes" the Kingpin's ethics, becoming hard and ruthless as she works for one of the crime-lord's gangs. In that first episode, she has a big fight with Daredevil when the latter raids one of Kingpin's businesses, but the Man Without Fear has no direct effect on the course of Echo's story. Five months after shooting Kingpin and going on the run, Echo returns to her rez-home in Oklahoma.

However, the first three episodes dispelled any sympathy I might have had for MCU-Echo. Not only does Echo nurture fantasies of taking Kingpin's place as a gangland "queenpin," she immediately expects the members of her family to join her in fighting Kingpin's forces. Her uncle Henry, brother to Echo's late dad, attempts to dissuade her, but she endangers the people in her orbit with her bull-headed agenda. She's particularly unsympathetic in that she won't even make contact with her cousin Bonnie, though Bonnie repeatedly tried to keep in contact with Echo in her absence.

The writers finally have Echo re-discover a little of her humanity after she almost gets Bonnie and Henry killed. But the heroine suffers so little remorse that she almost seems like another incarnation of the MCU's favorite trope, "the conscienceless girl-boss." Also, Echo belatedly discovers that she's inherited a vague mystic healing-power from both her mother and an ancient cultus of female shamans, so she has to confer with her estranged grandmother to find out what's going on. Echo's selfishness isn't validated as much as that of Wanda Maximoff in WANDAVISION, but the Choctaw female's eleventh-hour conversion to heroism is still unconvincing. She makes contact with ancient Amerindian spirituality and more or less gets Kingpin out of her life without following the path of vengeance-- which had to be the MCU's path too, since they had future plans for the villain.

In the comics Echo's name came from her ability to emulate other fighting-styles, an attribute dropped by the MCU adaptation. In the TV version, the fourth episode finally rationalizes her superhero name by stating that she "echoes" the deeper cultural matrix of her people. While this wasn't wildly original, it could have worked, because all the Native American support-characters are well cast and decently written. But Alaqua Cox's one-note performance as Echo defeats the trope. The actress performs her fight-scenes well, so her casting wasn't a total loss. Too bad, for given that the original story isn't anything special, the MCU for once had a chance to be "better than the book."