A brief history of Echo. No, not the nymph, the scary deaf biker lady.
Let’s talk about Echo. Brief
recap, we first met Maya Lopez while she lead a street gang, the Tracksuit
Mafia, working for Kingpin in Hawkeye. She has a long history with Wilson
Fist, as the crime lord was her godfather and later guardian after her father’s
mysterious death. Classic Hawkeye Clint Barton and Future Hawkeye Kate Bishop
crossed paths with the Tracksuits while trying to recover Clint’s Ronan costume
and a Rolex of some importance, stuff he’d lost track of post-Endgame battle.
They battled with the Tracksuits and Maya on several occasions, ultimately
leading to a showdown at a Christmas party. Over the course of the show it is revealed
to Maya that her father had in fact been murdered by Fisk, so she ends up
tracking him down and attacking him while the Hawkeyes battled the Tracksuits
and a vengeful Yelena Romanoff. The last we see of her is her taking a shot at
Kingpin. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
Ep 1: Chafa
I’m going to try to remain consistent
and say that Maya is ‘signing’ rather than ‘saying’ anything, as the character
is deaf and communicates exclusively through sign language. I beg your
forgiveness if I miss one and say that she ‘says’ something.
We open with a group of people rising
out of some kind of underwater lake. They drink water from a central spring,
and it causes the first woman’s skin to glow, drawing a bird to her. Their ceremony
is interrupted by a distant rumble and a quake beginning. Their underground sanctum
begins to crumble, the lot of them being buried. There’s a flash of light and
the people are outside in the open air. The unusual bronze of their skin flakes
off, revealing Native features, the woman that drank from the spring kept a spiral
pattern mark on her palms. This is revealed to be the mythological origin of
the Choctaw Nation, the titular Chafa being their first leader. This is all
revealed to be a story being told after bedtime between Maya Lopez and her
cousin Bonnie. Maya signs that Bonnie is her sister, Bonnie says they’re
cousins, but Maya insists they’re closer than that. We quickly cut to outside
the tent where they’re playing in to see Maya’s parents and her grandma, Chula,
and her boyfriend Skully. Later, as they leave, Chula mentions that “Biscuits”
will be upset he missed the campout, but Skully thinks he’ll get over it. Chula
sees a cardinal land on a post as they go and it’s clear that’s an ominous sign.
Back in the house, William Lopez
asks his wife Taloa if they’ll stay in the tent all night despite the rain. She
signs back that she thinks it’ll be five minutes or less before they come back.
And they run in a second later. Maya asks for Hot Chocolate, Taloa says they’re
out, but she’ll run to the store to get some, with Maya tagging along to get
the right kind. Cutting back to Chula and Skully, she’s clearly agitated about
something. Skully asks if the ‘ancestors are whispering’ in her ear, she doesn’t
respond. Over with the Lopez’s, Taloa realizes that her breaks aren’t working
right before they get hit by a truck at the intersection she couldn’t stop for.
Taloa is killed and Maya is obviously traumatized and lost her right leg from
the knee up.
We jump to Maya at the hospital. Skully
and Chula join William. He tells them that he hasn’t told Maya yet what
happened to her mom. He says he found out who cut their breaks and they’ve been
handled. Chula asks if he thinks that makes it better, to which he angrily says
it makes him feel better. Chula angrily says that she begged Taloa to not marry
William, saying those ‘Lopez boys are no good.’ Skully tries to get her to
leave, but she says it’s time for William to go. He says that Henry got him a
job, in New York and when he asks if that’s far enough, Chula says no. Skully says
that she’s hurting and William says they all are. He goes in to see Maya. She
gives him a picture for Bonnie and signs she misses everyone. He says that they
miss her too. Maya signs she blames herself for her mom getting hurt and asks
if she’s okay. William says and signs no to her blaming herself, and then
obviously has to explain what happened. Later, he gets her into his car as
Bonnie and Chula watch them go. Maya signs to them to ask if Bonnie can come
too, but obviously she can’t.
We jump to William and Maya in New York.
She has trouble in school, William does her best to encourage her, and gets her
into Marital Arts to protect herself. At one point she sees her father making a
handoff to someone else in a tracksuit before being greeted by her Kingpin
Godfather. She goes to spar and then we flash forward to an adult Maya kicking
MMA opponent’s ass. After that she rides her motorcycle to her dad’s auto shop
in time to see Clint in his Ronin gear killing everyone. She finds her dad after
he’d been stabbed and sits with him until he dies. He leaves a bloody handprint
across her face. (This is a callback to her comic counterpart, a part of her
costume is a paint handprint on her face). She sees her father buried, gets a
text from Bonnie telling her she doesn’t have to do this alone, but she seems
to ignore that. We jump to Maya trying to steal a motorcycle as the cops arrive
to try to stop her. She revs one of them, sending the motorcycle racing forward
and hitting a car. She’s nearly arrested but is pulled out by Wilson Fisk’s
intervention. Via an interpreter they talk, Fisk telling Maya that she’s not
alone and that he lost his father too. He offers to help her release her rage
in a more constructive way, via a job. He tells her to take her pain and make
it into something useful.
Later, Maya arrives at a bar and
meets with her… handlers, I guess, Davy and Edgar. They go into a meeting. The
two dudes get frisked no problem, but the security guard gets handsy with Maya,
who grabs him and pins against a wall to punish him. They go in, the two men
telling Maya that they’re going in to kill some guys that are trying to muscle
in on Fisk’s territory. With help from a plant, they break in and start killing
and fighting with the interlopers. There’s a really well done bit where we’re shown
how different the fighting seems without sound. Maya get’s tackled, wrestles
with a guy for a bit before snapping his neck. After that she goes back into
the main room and starts beating guys left and right. She seems to favor
kicking with her right leg, which is kind of terrifying when you remember it’s
a metal prosthetic. Davy congradulates her as they take out the last of them,
just in time for Daredevil to arrive and start beating them up. She faces off against
Murdock and the two fight. She puts up a good fight against Daredevil, but he
seems to be the better fighter. Edgar runs in to help her out, she escapes and goes
for a shotgun. Daredevil chases after her and they tussle some more. Eventually
she gets hold of a gun, but Daredevil vanishes in the confusion.
At his penthouse, Kingpin congradulates
her, saying none of his men have done half as well against Daredevil before. He asks if she found the job useful, she signs
it was, and he welcome her into his ‘family.’ We then get a highlight reel of
her training, scenes from Hawkeye, her fight with Ronin the lot. Fisk tells
her that he’s devoting his resources to finding her father’s killer. She signs
that he’s her’s when they find him and Fisk agrees. Ronin unmasks himself to
her and reveals that Fisk wanted her father dead. We jump to Wilson making a
run for it when Maya tracks him down. He tries to say they’re family but she
pulls a gun on him. She shoots him and we hear a thud.
Five months later, Maya drives out
to a truck stop. She hides between a pair of semi-trailers and reveals she’d
been shot recently and she’s bleeding. She redoes her bandage before continuing.
She drives through the day and night until she hits the Oklahoma Native
Reservation. Blood loss and exhaustion almost has her hit the back of truck but
she swerves at the last second. She arrives at Bonnie’s childhood home and
dismounts. She grabs the old hide-a-key and opens the door. Inside she does
some emergency medical treatment, stitching her wound close. She falls asleep
on the couch and has a weird vision of various people, including Chafa. She
wakes up and looks at an old photo of herself and her family. She hears someone
outside and goes to investigate. Turns out it’s Biscuits, the childhood friend
and cousin we didn’t get to see before. He seems overjoyed to see her, hugging
her and signing that she looks the same even after 20 years. He asks how long
she’s in town, and she says it won’t be long. He goes to show her around the
property. She signs that she wants to keep this quite for now and he agrees.
She rides into town and finds
Bonnie. She watches her cousin from a distance playing basketball with her
coworkers, a bunch of EMTs, before riding off without saying anything. She
arrives at a roller rink. She indicates she wants to see the DJ to the shoe
rental guy, he says no, but the DJ sees her and calls her over. This is Henry “Black
Crow” Lopez, her father’s brother. They head to a backroom to talk. The shoe
rental guy, Vickie, texts someone that he might have information on the “King
Killer.” In the back-office Maya confirms she’s been shot to Henry and he calls
in a specialist. Gretchen, the local mortician, arrives to stitch Maya up. Maya’s
a little freaked out by this but Henry tells her that Gretchen is who he calls
when… somethings need to disappear and she’s on the level.
After the impromptu stitching, Maya
goes with Henry to the local water tower. He takes her up to the top where he
has a telescope set up. He shows her Bonnie in it and then tells her that if
she leaves without telling Bonnie it’ll break her heart. Maya pretends like
that doesn’t bother her but it clearly does. Maya looks at the telescope and signs
for him to look. She’d focused on the Fisk Shipping building in town. She signs
that she just needs one train car to send Fisk’s people a message. Henry tells
her no, he won’t bring war to their town. He wants to know why she’s doing it.
She signs that the Kingpin had his run, it’s time for a Queen. Henry storms
off, saying he didn’t see her and they never had this conversation.
We cut to a hospital and an IV
drip. It’s revealed that Kingpin is alive, though he may have lost an eye. He’s
breathing heavily as the machines beep around him.
As far as pilot episodes go, this
one was okay. I’d say it was a little exposition heavy, but that is probably
necessary. Hawkeye came out just over 2 years ago, that’s a lot of time
to forget about a character, even one as popular as Maya was. Plus, they needed
to expand her backstory a little bit, give her some things to tug at our heartstrings
about above and beyond her dead dad. Dead mother plus estrangement from family
that clearly meant a lot to her will do that. Obviously, the fact she’s avoiding
her family as much as possible, Bonnie especially, is going to be a big plot
point going forward. The intro story about how the Choctaw People came to be was
a little odd, but given how Chafa is both the title of the episode and appeared
in Maya’s dream, I imagine she’s going to be important to the plot going forward
as well. Aquala Cox is still phenomenal as Echo. She’s incredibly good at
conveying emotions just with her face alone, which was probably a skill she had
to learn since she’s been deaf since birth. She’s also an amputee, so that wasn’t
some crazy camera work to make her look like she has a metal right leg, that’s
just her leg. While her scene with Charlie Cox’s Daredevil was short, it was a
very good scene to showcase Maya’s martial arts skill once again. Matt Murdock
is one of the best hand-to-hand combatants in Marvel, so being able to keep up
with him until he either decided fighting wasn’t worth it or he was actually
scared of you is impressive. And surviving the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is a
fast way to get into Fisk’s good graces. It was good to see Vincent D’Onofrio back
as Kingpin. We didn’t get much of him here, but he clearly hasn’t lost his
touch with making Fisk as intimidating as possible. He’s a powerful and
powerfully built man. I was wonder how they were going to handle Maya clearly
shooting him in the Hawkeye finale, but it seems like they’ll be taking
it in two directions. Maya is going to think she killed the Kingpin and
try to move in on his turf, and probably the local muscle will also be in on
this. Meanwhile Fisk is going to recover, maybe get a prosthetic eye, and
prepare to defend his turf from her and gear up to fight Daredevil again for Born
Again. That’s a tall order for a five episode mini-series, but we’ll see
how it goes. Good night, everyone.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/99101699
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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