Echo belongs right up there with the Netflix Daredevil show, the Netflix Punisher show and the Netflix Jessica Jones show. I’m sorry, it does. I got up at 3 in the morning, a little restless, and binge-watched all five episodes, and I don’t know what anybody’s talking about. This show is brilliant.
This is the first one out under Marvel Spotlight, which is their new, more mature line, if you will. And there’s a full video coming, so I’m not going to spoil a lot of it here. You’re getting the breadcrumb of the premise and where I landed.
Reacher, for Comic Book Characters
It does have a little bit of Marvel-isms in it. Those Netflix shows lived in a darker color palette, in a nighttime space, and this one lives somewhere slightly more rural. More country. It feels almost like Reacher for, quote unquote, superhero or comic book characters.
She goes to Tamaha, Oklahoma, which is a predominantly Native American area and town. She’s part of that community, but she’s running from what she believes she did, which is kill the Kingpin. The show is all about her exploring those things.
Somebody said they liked Jessica Jones, so they’ll probably like Echo. Yeah. This is really good.
That Opening Thirty Minutes
There are people who complained about the opening 30 minutes of the first episode. Their line is that it’s just recycled recap stuff. I hear that, but look, there’s some stuff in there. They got the same young lady who played her as a little girl to play her again as a child, and they gave us more context to all of that. I don’t know if they repurposed scenes that weren’t used in Hawkeye. I know there were a couple, but only in the timeline sense, meaning they show her as a child and then we evolve up with her.
Eventually you get to her very first mission for Kingpin, and that’s when we get classic, now classic, Netflix-style Daredevil, all red. He shows up and they have a really great fight.
The Daredevil Fight, and the Seams
Now, they try to frame the whole thing as a one-shot, and there are clear cuts in there. If you watch Corridor Crew or any of that stuff, you know what I’m talking about. You can definitely tell.
There’s one part people complain about during the Daredevil fight, where he gets up really quickly, and they say it’s all CG, it’s rubber-bandy. There’s no CG in that scene. What you’re seeing is the seam, the place where they hide one cut going into another, and he had to get up on wirework that came out a little too fluid for wirework. I saw it, and it’s fine. It’s a practical thing.
The fight scenes look good.
Are We Just Not Going to Like Anything?
The question came up of whether our expectations are so high for Marvel right now that anything they put out, we’re not going to like. I hope not. I think with some things, maybe.
I hated Secret Invasion. But I purposely went into Echo with an open mind, and I enjoyed it from the word go. Again, I’m in the bag for most comic book things. But this I enjoyed. You can call it a slog, and people have, but I went through all five episodes in one morning and it was quick.
The Lore They’re Building
I like the lore they’re building. We’re getting tons of great Native American lore, and we saw some of that in What If, with the new Native American hero who has those glowing swirls. Echo mirrors a lot of that. I don’t know that it’s connected, because I don’t remember if it was the Choctaw in the What If episode or not. But the Choctaw is the tribe she’s part of here.
All the characterizations work, all the actors do brilliant work, and I think it’s really, really good. It’s worth your time.
There you go. Now you know. And if knowing is half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.
If you’ve watched all five, tell me where you landed, and whether that opening half hour played like recap to you. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
