I’m a longtime MCU fan, but I’m not really ready for more content right now. It’s safe to say I’m experiencing Marvel fatigue, and it’s all thanks to the uninspired year of Marvel stories we just had. That’s why I’m not really looking forward to Echo, which will premiere on Disney Plus next week. Just like I wasn’t that excited about What If…? season 2, though the show turned out to be a big surprise.
I started it with the expectation that I would just stop if I wasn’t having fun. But What If…? Season 2 turned out to be more interesting than plenty of other MCU stories of 2023.
I have the same mindset going into Echo. I’m not really looking forward to this story, which will be released in its entirety on January 9th. However, there is one exciting thing we can look forward to in Echo: A one-shot battle scene that’s some six minutes long.
Just for that, I’ll tune in to see what happens in this one. Mind you, some big spoilers follow below, considering who might be involved in that fight sequence.
Echo director Sydney Freeland talked to TV Insider about the show. The fighting in the series also came up, including the one-shot scene that might involve Daredevil (Charlie Cox).
“When I first came on the project and in watching Hawkeye and reading the comic books, the thing that was most interesting and fascinating to me about Maya Lopez is the fact that she was a villain,” Freeland said. “And in the conversations with Marvel, their response was like, ‘Hey, let’s lean into that. Let’s explore that. Let’s see if we can push the envelope. Let’s go down the rabbit hole and just see where it goes.’ And that’s really what we tried to do.”
Before addressing the one-shot scene, Freeland explained that Echo would not have the huge consequences you expect from most Marvel stories.
“It’s not the fate of the universe. It’s a much more human story in its scope and scale. But at the same time, that also meant that because she’s involved in the criminal world, we wanted to lean into those aspects of her storyline.” she said.
“That means that in our show, people die, people bleed, people get killed. Bones break…,” Freeland said. “That’s kind of the point is that we wanted to show that there are real-world consequences at stake here.”
Echo is, after all, Marvel’s first TV-MA-rated original for Disney Plus.
As for that one-shot scene, “It’s six minutes long, and story dictates everything,” the director said. “Maya Lopez [enters] that scene as a teenage girl, but she [leaves] as a cold-blooded killer. And it was important for me that the audience is able to see that transformation happen in real-time.”
By this point in the interview, I don’t even care if Daredevil is in the story. It’s not about whether the show will have MCU cameos. Also, remember that Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) will appear in Echo, which practically confirms what we speculated after Echo. Maya (Alaqua Cox) didn’t actually kill him.
The way Freeland describes the story and the one-shot scene is what made me curious to watch it. Marvel is clearly going for something else here, a more mature story than what we’re used to. A story that will have some Daredevil vibes, if you will. And considering how limited it might appear to be in scope, the street level aspect of it, a story that might not even need big connections to the MCU.
All of that sounds tempting, assuming the story is good. That was the problem with MCU content last year, the quality of the stories Marvel wanted to tell.
As for the larger universe, the director teased, “All roads lead to and from Maya Lopez. So if we were going to introduce characters that fans might be familiar with, they had to be in service of Maya Lopez and they had to be in service of her story. What we didn’t want to do was bring someone in just for the sake of bringing them in, we wanted to have a story motivation behind it.”
Conversely, that also means Echo is the kind of show that I could just as easily skip if I don’t find reasons to stick around beyond the first episode. I’m just hoping I’ll get at least as far as that epic one-shot sequence.