[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the season finale of Echo, “Maya.”]
The final episode of Echo features a sequence that you couldn’t have predicted coming: The climatic confrontation between Maya (Alaqua Cox) and Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) could have gone a lot of ways, of course, but Chula (Tantoo Cardinal), Maya Lopez’s estranged grandmother, kicking some serious ass after an infusion of power passed down from the ancestors was easily one of the least-expected — a delightful surprise that brought Echo full circle on a number of levels.
While each episode of the new MCU drama got progressively shorter as it ran, the five-episode limited series did deliver a complete story — by design. Echo arrives as the inaugural installment of the Marvel Spotlight brand, which executive producer Brad Winderbaum says is a label indicating that “This a complete meal in and of itself.” (It’s funny, how talking about MCU properties starts to feel like installing a new piece of software on your computer: “You don’t need to install the Hawkeye plugin on your machine to download Echo,” and so on.)
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The “Marvel Spotlight” distinction means that theoretically, there could be a second season of Echo, or Maya Lopez could show up in other MCU properties — right now, speculating on those questions feels foolish, as Marvel’s entire strategy for the next few years feels like it’s in flux to some degree. What is confirmed is that these five episodes put focus on a character unlike any the MCU has seen before, and Maya’s story is a compelling addition to the franchise no matter how it’s categorized.
As someone who hasn’t gotten completely burned out on superheroes (yet, anyway), I confess that my sentimental favorites of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are the movies and shows that do something a little different. The early episodes of WandaVision remain a deranged treat; Taika Waititi bringing his signature weirdness to Thor: Ragnarok was a breath of fresh air; the cultural details Ryan Coogler and Destin Daniel Cretton brought to Black Panther and Shang-Chi feel really special.
This can be a trap that, among other things, led to me getting way too excited about the first two episodes of Secret Invasion (turns out doing John Le Carré in the MCU works better when the writing is a little stronger). However, I like championing examples of the MCU pushing outside the creative limits we might associate with big blockbuster pictures, taking chances and delivering the kinds of surprises you won’t see in other genres — the gift that was the “Memory” scene in The Marvels, for instance.
