After shooting Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, Maya Lopez returns home…

Echo is the follow on season starring the eponymous hero who we first met in the MCU in 2021’s Hawkeye. A bit part there, this series showcases Echo in a five part storyline that, although based solidly in existing landscapes, takes us away from the MCU as part of Marvel’s Spotlight branding.

Spotlight is intended to provide viewers with a show where they don’t need to have watched dozens of hours of other shows and movies for it to make sense.

Echo does not achieve that entirely. As a follow on show it necessarily relies on what came before in a way that Moon Knight didn’t. And in that regards the first episode is a mess – attempting as it does to give us a solid grounding in where Echo comes from, her experiences to date and why this show exists at all.

Unfortunately this means the opening of the series is a disjointed collection of different times and events, some of which you’re likely to have seen before and, if you haven’t they’re largely shorn of context and are just jarring.

I’m glad to say that once we’re past this clumsy segue the rest of the season gets better and better until it ends with, what was for me, a brilliant resolution.

Echo, actual name, Maya Lopez, is played by Alaqua Cox. She’s portrayed as the brooding reluctant hero we’ve seen men play countless times before. She even has a motorbike a la Tom Cruise. This approach to painting Echo on screen is, for me, great. It solidifies who Echo is while also calling back to all those male heroes and daring them to say anything about the kind of person Echo is trying to be.

What’s even better is that it gently deconstructs these male archetypes – taking them apart bit by bit. Lonesome hero, reluctant hero, comedy sidekick in the shape of Biscuits. Everything’s here. Even the return to the small town beginnings.

Yet Echo steps beyond these tropes, undermines them, takes them and does something more interesting. In many ways, Maya Lopez is a great study in toxic masculinity and how it damages us down the generations and how it doesn’t discriminate between genders.

We see the idea of the lone hero taken apart. We see the idea of being the same as your enemy to win taken apart. We see how it really takes a village to get anything done. We also see how the unresolved wounds and damage we carry with us drive so much of the pain we cause others.

Echo doesn’t say that being at peace with yourself will cure your ills but it makes the strong case that healing and being in community are vital parts of what it means to be a complete human and it does this well.

So well that it manages, largely, to sidestep the need to end the season with the normal nonsense of blowing up a town and reducing all arguments to the hitting in the face kind. It’s smarter than that and, if you’re prepared to see it, consistent with the arc Echo starts on at the beginning.

Maya Lopez had her family taken away from her and this series gives her a chance to get it back. Except she doesn’t seize this chance, others make it, construct it and help her find her way because, in the end, this is how these things are done.

Verdict: Excellent work all round and I look forward to more of this kind of slightly more adventurous story telling from Marvel.

Rating? 8 choices out of 10.

Stewart Hotston