Main cast: Alaqua Cox (Maya Lopez/Echo), Chaske Spencer (Henry Black Crow Lopez), Tantoo Cardinal (Chula), Devery Jacobs (Bonnie), Cody Lightning (Biscuits), and Graham Greene (Skully)
Director: Sydney Freeland
Alaqua Cox in her media rounds promised that Echo would be gritty and violent, unlike the other M-She-U crap on Disney+. Well, so much for grit and violence, because just like all the other hype linked to Disney crap these days, it’s all about over promising but never delivering.
There is no cameo in this episode, so there is no reason to watch Lowak unless one is really enamored of the character of Maya Lopez, so that would mean all six people out there would be so very excited.
Maya, in the grand tradition of an idiot female character in a slasher movie, believes that she has killed Kingpin but she didn’t check so, oops, that tubby lard is still alive. She doesn’t know that yet, as in this episode, it’s still all about establishing the character as well as some side characters as if this season had 18 episodes instead of coming to an abrupt close after three more episodes.
Anyway, in this episode, the key development is that Maya, after some waffling, decides that she’d take down Kingpin’s operations after all, so she uses the standard MCU girlboss powers of plot armor and convenient quick cuts to plant a bomb on a train and then get away with Biscuits’s help. The fact that she hasn’t been discovered is all due to her unique superpower of making sure that everyone she has to deal with is a bigger nincompoop than her.
She hits a snag on the way out, but this is just an excuse for the show to introduce another strong female Mary Sioux, the titular character of this episode, in flashbacks that mysteriously pop inside Maya’s head. Lowak inspires the present day Mary Sioux to somehow find the plot convenience strength to miraculously escape certain death and ta-da!
Seriously, these Disney diversity hires can’t do proper superhero stories anymore. Whenever they hit some snag in their plotting, their sole solution is to hand wave any issue away with a convenient “Well, it just happens, alright!” plot development.
Meanwhile, everyone in the episode, aside from a couple of white tourists from the city, can use sign language perfectly. Maya has a prosthetic leg given to her, because women in Disney shows these days are given everything just for being born with the right genitalia, and various secondary characters talk a lot to dump more exposition on me.
These people are acting like they have all the time in the world to get to the point. Echo is shaping up to be a discount store version of insert some generic B-grade action flick here, only with pacing issues already evident so early in this season.
This is not good, especially when there are only three episodes left and we all know this crap isn’t getting a second season anytime soon.
