“Echo” arrived on Disney+ and Hulu on January 9, 2024, as a five-episode miniseries and the tenth television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is a spin-off of “Hawkeye” (2021), and it belongs to Alaqua Cox. She plays Maya Lopez, a deaf Choctaw woman who once ran the Tracksuit Mafia, a criminal gang working for Wilson Fisk. The show is built around her, and when it remembers that, it works.
The premise picks up five months after “Hawkeye.” Maya is being pursued by Fisk’s organization. She goes home to Oklahoma, where she has to come to terms with her past, reconnect with her Native American roots, and embrace her family and community. Marion Dayre and Amy Rardin are the head writers. Sydney Freeland leads the directing team.
Trailer, via Marvel Entertainment.
Alaqua Cox and the Fights
Cox is the reason to watch. Freeland said Maya is in “a very vulnerable, emotional place” with “all this bottled-up emotion and rage and feeling inside of her,” and that Fisk is able to exploit it. That is the spine of the performance, and Cox carries it without a line of spoken dialogue.
The show does not give her a power from the comics — Maya cannot perfectly copy another person’s movements, which Freeland called “kind of lame.” Instead, stunt coordinator Mark Scizak built her fights around Cox’s prosthetic leg, describing the style as “a very grounded mix of MMA and a bunch of martial arts.” That choice is the best decision the series makes. The action is close, heavy and specific to the body doing it.
Then the show hands her a flashback with Daredevil. Charlie Cox returns as Matt Murdock, the blind lawyer from Hell’s Kitchen who leads a double life as a masked vigilante. He fights Maya while she is on an early assignment for Fisk. Executive producer Richie Palmer said the inclusion was done in a way the creatives hoped would feel like part of his story. It does not. It is a cameo wearing a plot.
The Family in Oklahoma
The supporting cast is where “Echo” gets its texture. Chaske Spencer plays Henry “Black Crow” Lopez, Maya’s uncle and William’s brother, who owns a local roller-skating rink and is still connected to Fisk’s criminal empire. Spencer said Henry “feels guilty” that William died and that Maya’s return makes him face things he is not ready to yet.
Tantoo Cardinal plays Chula, Maya’s estranged grandmother. Cardinal explained that at the start the two are “pretty fractured and they are not in a good place,” given Chula’s anger after the death of her daughter, Maya’s mother, which led to Maya and her father leaving.
Devery Jacobs plays Bonnie. Cody Lightning plays Biscuits. Graham Greene plays Skully. Zahn McClarnon returns as William Lopez, Maya’s father, from “Hawkeye.” Darnell Besaw, Cox’s cousin, plays a young Maya. Isabella Madrigal plays a young Chula.
That is a deep bench. The problem is what the show asks them to do with it. The reunion story is the emotional engine, and the crime story keeps interrupting it. Andrew Howard recurs as Zane, one of Fisk’s henchmen, and every time the show cuts back to the organization, the air goes out of the room.
Vincent D’Onofrio Returns as Fisk
Vincent D’Onofrio is the other big return, reprising Wilson Fisk / Kingpin. Freeland approached him to appear in “Echo,” and he was excited to return to a darker tone for the character, similar to “Daredevil” rather than his portrayal in “Hawkeye.” You can feel that intention. Fisk here is quieter and more threatening than the version that stalked through “Hawkeye.”
But he is also the show’s crutch. Maya’s story is about a family and a homeland. Fisk is the thing pulling her back toward a different, more familiar show. The series never quite decides how much of him it needs.
What Five Episodes Do
Five episodes is a strange length for this. It is long enough to establish a world and too short to live in it. The first episode opens with archive footage of Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton / Ronin from “Hawkeye,” which is a reminder of the show this one came from rather than a reason to care about the one you are watching. Richie Palmer Sr. and ML Gemmill voice Fisk’s parents, Bill and Marlene Fisk, in the final episode. These are the kinds of touches that suggest a bigger, stranger series was possible.
Development started by March 2021, when Cox was confirmed to be returning and Etan and Emily Cohen were attached as head writers. The series was formally announced in November 2021, when Dayre was revealed as head writer, with Freeland set to direct by March 2022.
Filming ran from late April to late August 2022, in the Atlanta metropolitan area, including Atlanta, Peachtree City, Social Circle and Grantville, Georgia. In May 2022, Marvel revealed further cast members and that Catriona McKenzie would also direct; Rardin’s involvement was revealed in September. By August 2021, casting was underway, with Marvel Studios looking to cast deaf Native American or Latinx women. That search produced the best thing about the show.
The rollout mattered too. “Echo” released in its entirety simultaneously on Disney+ and Hulu. It is also, on the evidence here, mostly a label.
The Case for the Show
There is a version of “Echo” that is genuinely good, and you can see it in stretches. It is the version where a deaf Choctaw woman goes home to a roller rink, a grandmother who cannot forgive her, and an uncle who cannot forgive himself. It is the version where the fights are built around a prosthetic leg and a body that has been through something. It is the version where the hero has no comic-book copy power because the people making the show thought that power was, in Freeland’s word, lame.
- Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez / Echo
- Chaske Spencer as Henry “Black Crow” Lopez
- Tantoo Cardinal as Chula
- Devery Jacobs as Bonnie
- Cody Lightning as Biscuits
- Graham Greene as Skully
- Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk / Kingpin
That is a cast any show would want.
Where It Falls Short
The trouble is that “Echo” keeps reaching for the Marvel machinery instead of trusting its own people. The Daredevil flashback is the clearest example. It is fan service in a story that does not need it, and it undercuts the one thing the series has that no other MCU show has: a lead whose interior life is the whole point.
Fisk is a better fit, but even he pulls the show away from Oklahoma and back toward a criminal empire the audience already knows. The series is at its weakest when it is being a Marvel show and at its strongest when it is being a family drama with a body count.
The five-episode structure makes this worse. There is not enough room to develop the grandmother, the uncle and the cousin, and there is too much room for the henchmen. The back half of the season spends its energy on plot mechanics that the front half did not earn.
What the Show Leaves Behind
“Echo” is a real swing and a partial miss. Cox is a genuine screen presence, and the decision to build her fights around her body rather than a comic-book power is the kind of choice more superhero projects should make. Freeland and her team clearly wanted to tell a story about a Native American woman coming home, and when the show stays with that, it has weight.
But the show does not stay with it. It keeps checking in with Fisk, keeps flashing back to Daredevil, keeps reminding you which franchise you are in. The result is a five-episode series that feels like a pilot for something better and a trailer for something else. The family in Oklahoma is the show. Everything else is noise.
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