If there’s one thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe has managed to nail across its history, it’s the need for a consistent tone. Fluctuate too much and your huge catalogue of titles suddenly feel less like a cohesive, singular world and more like a disconnected string of stuff that sometimes references each other – like the worst parts of the DCEU for example (god rest its soul). Unsurprisingly, this if even more important in creating a TV series as maintaining a cohesive balance in storytelling is vital in molding many different directors into one, agreed, storytelling method.
Get it wrong and you have a disjointed, jarring and unpleasant feeling that will not only get on an audiences nerves, but more than likely get them to switch off before the season has even finished and this seens to be the problem with epidode 3.
Beginning with yet another prologue that features one of Maya Lopez’s intensely talented ancestors, we this time are introduced to Tuklo, a sharp shooting Choctaw woman who, in the late 1800s, joined her father into becoming one of the Lighthorseman, a brand of law keeper who roamed the old west. As Lopez mysterious gift of tapping into the talents of her ancestors seems to be kicking into high gear, there’s no doubt she’ll have good use for it in thanks to the next problem that’s about to come knocking on her door.
What exactly is that next problem going to be?Well, remember that guy Victor who cleans the skates in Henry Lopez’s skating rink? He’s got a mind to snag that reward that’s currently out on Maya Lopez’s head and has rung some unsavory characters with the details on her whereabouts. In fact, while Maya is temporarily distracted by a couple of fresh visions from her ancestors, Victor and his female associates manage to get the drop on her and when she awakes, she finds herself zip tied in one of the back rooms of the rink while “Vicky” and a captive Henry wait for those interested parties to come calling. To make matters worse, Maya’s estranged cousin, Bobbie comes calling and also finds herself a hostage when the most discomfort she was originally expecting from the evening was an awkward one on one with he relative.
Soon, Zane shows up looking for his bounty (you remember him, Maya blew up his weapons depot last episode) and Vicky realise too late that he’s inserted himself into a potentially fatal situation, but after the schmuck finds himself drilled full of holes, Maya uses her funky “echo” to her ancestors to free herself from her situation and bring some hurt to her would-be executioners.
However, when things most look their bleakest, an ominous phone call halts Zane in his tracks and he suddenly pulls out despite having the upper hand.
There’s only one man who has that level of pull and he obviously has some unfinished business with our heroine.
After a wobbly start, it seemed like Echo was quicy starting to find its balance in episode 2, which, in turn, hinted that if the improvements continued, the show might actually get the MCU’s 2024 off to a healthy start. Unfortunately, with Tuklo, it’s a case of one step forward, three steps back as the series easily turns in it’s worse episode to date by a fair margin. The main problem is a very strange tone which feels utterly divorced from the previous two episodes and a forced threat that just seems too poorly written and sloppily carried out to marry up with the previous two episodes.
It starts off fairly promisingly with the now standard “ancestor flashback” suddenly taking the form of a silent movie western as we’re introduced to the latest skill set that Lopez can draw from. While it feels utterly out of place to how the show has been laid out so far, it’s still a fairly cool stylistic flourish that mixes things up a bit but as the epidode goes on, it becomes fairly obvious that somebody, somewhere maybe skipped over a production memo or two.
The first problem comes from suddenly making Victor and his squabbling female companions credible threats to a woman that has not only fought both Daredevil, Hawkeye and a Black Widow to a standstill, but shot Wildon Fisk in the face and has super-powers to boot. Also, instead of having her escape captivity by simply smashing her way out and promptly beating everyone to to death (which has pretty much been her M.O. so far), the plot has her bizarre resorting to Macgyver style fuckery to escape, of all things, an average locked room by fashioning some sort of laser-scoped, blade-firing, rollerskate that barely works. Halting the action so Maya can get captured by a trio of dum-dums is a strange choice, but matters are made even worse by the arrival of swaggering gangster Zane whose performance is completely overblown for a show that’s supposed to be a celebration of all things gritty. It’s like watching a season of Netflix’s Daredevil only for it to suddenly turn into Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass for a single episode. Now, I love Daredevil and I adore Kick-Ass, but even I know that their diametrically opposed tones can’t occupy the same space at the same time and a strangely jokey fight scene only doubles down on the issue. Admittedly, the sight of Maya suplexing a goon through a pinball table is fucking sick, but the rest of the central brawl sees our hero making makeshift weapons out of gun controllers and skee balls and soon uncomfortable memories of Michelangelo’s sausage nunchucks from the second Ninja Turtles movie swim to mind, giving proceedings a threat-free, non-essential feel.
Now, I fully realise that filler episodes are often a necessary, frustrating evil when crafting entire seasons of television, but sticking one in the middle of a five-episode miniseries just simply raises alarm bells in the quality of the two remaining episodes.
Maybe the mismatched nature of the episode stems from the fact that this is the sole episode of Echo not helmed by Sydney Freeland, or maybe the early rumours of the show being something of a mess held more truth that we realised; but whatever the reason, episode 3 manages to diffuse any momentum the show was managing to build thanks to its many, strange directorial choices.
To be fair, it isn’t a total wash as we get a couple of genuinely touching scenes involving Graham Green’s Skully (who is proving to be a real standout), we’re finally properly introduced to Bonnie (Devery Jacobs, who also voiced Kahhori in last month’s What If…?) and Maya gets a formidable looking new prosthetic leg; but even a last second appearance by Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin can’t stop this installment of Echo from failing to resonate.
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We Have Issues 