Main cast: Alaqua Cox (Maya Lopez/Echo), Chaske Spencer (Henry Black Crow Lopez), Tantoo Cardinal (Chula), Devery Jacobs (Bonnie), Cody Lightning (Biscuits), Graham Greene (Skully), and Vincent D’Onofrio (Wilson Fisk/Kingpin)
Director: Catriona McKenzie
Tuklo starts out introducing another Mary Sioux that gives this episode its title, and honestly, the three people faithfully following this show on their own free will have seen these flashbacks before. Yes, it’s another girlboss being put down by the mean men around her until she sort of proves to them that she is perfect and awesome all along.
It’s the same boring arc that we have all seen so many times in Disney crap these days, but the folks in that place are determined to keep yelling at everyone understands that, to create a better place, they should bend over backwards and make it easy for women to imagine that they are awesome and better than everyone else. After all, if men don’t contrive to create an easy mode for women to play in, how else would these strong, independent females endeavor to earn their victories?
Speaking of which, I have a suspicion that, given the frequency of these flashbacks and the one-note repetitiveness of these things, Maya’s final form is going to be the spirits of these Mary Siouxes doing a Captain Planet or Voltron and merge with Maya to make her become the ultimate Mary Sioux?
That will be disappointing, because they did the same thing with Rey in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and doing that again will be predictable and one-note. Then again, maybe all these diversity hires went to the same school of one-note plotting.
Anyway, in this episode, Zane the Kingpin-wannabe has Maya and friends kidnapped in some skating ring, fights happen, and… er, that’s it.
Oh, and the real Kingpin shows up at the end like it’s some kind of exciting cliffhanger when the people behind this show had been screaming all this while to watch this show for Kingpin and Daredevil because even they aren’t dumb enough to believe that people will be rushing to the front of the line to watch Alaqua Cox and her fellow female cast members take down men twice their size and weight when these women look like they barely lift on a good day.
Nearly the entire episode takes place in the skating rink, and I am subjected to so-called gangsters doing an amateur hour as they snarl, yell, and shoot another while conveniently allowing Maya to break free of her bonds to execute the might of the resting bitchface.
They also try to fight the strong powerful women like the fools they are, not realizing that the powers of being a woman include forcing the poor stuntmen to stand still and wait for Maya and friends to successfully execute half-hearted power moves. Seriously, I think these people have completely given up on doing halfway decent fights. It’s that or they have given up on the show hiring female lead actors of an action show that, for some reason, don’t get in shape or learn how to land a blow convincingly.
This episode also has Maya being conflicted over her relationships with Chula and Bonnie, which can be seen by how the furrows on her forehead get more pronounced than usual and maybe she does that sign language thing a little faster. It’s really impressive how Alaqua Cox can keep the same facial expression throughout all the running time of three episodes and counting. Maybe that is Echo’s true superpower: a mightier resting bitchface than Captain Marvel and Rey Palpatine!
Then again, maybe I’m too hard on Ms Cox. If filming had been as horrific as it was rumored to be, with directors that had no idea how to direct and the whole horrifying resulting mess had to be forcefully beaten into some semblance of coherence in the editing room, I’d likely be sporting the biggest resting bitchface too if I were her!
Echo is such an incompetently made show, and mind you, this show allegedly had been redone a few times before they gave up and released all the episodes in a single go to let the show just die like that. How bad is the original version of this show? The answer to that question is no doubt the stuff of nightmares.
