ECHO: Season One

Name: ECHO: Season One
Item: ECHO: Season One
Author: Lillie Jaenchen

"Confronting Ghosts from the Past"

Content: -2 Extreme caution for older teenagers and adults.

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

ECHO is a new Marvel series on Disney+. It picks up the story of Maya Lopez, a deaf street gangster, after the events of HAWKEYE. After killing the Kingpin, the top gangster in New York City, for killing her father, Maya finds herself hunted by Kingpin’s men. She decides to hide and defend herself from her childhood home of Tamaha, Okahoma. While there, Maya starts having strange dreams about her Native American ancestors while walking on eggshells around her estranged family members, especially her grandmother and cousin. Also, she finally retaliates against Kingpin’s men and is approached by a very much alive Kingpin.

ECHO is mildly entertaining. It has moral, redemptive themes about family, forgiveness and processing grief. For example, Maya must learn to forgive her grandmother for disowning her and ignoring her, her godfather for the death of her father, and herself for the loss of her mother. However, the series goes about this in the most violent way possible. Thus, every episode is riddled with strong graphic, bloody violence. ECHO also has references to Native American lore, including ancestor worship.

Content:

(B, C, Pa, FR, L,VVV, N, A, MM):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Light moral, redemptive world focuses on forgiveness, where title female character must learn to forgive her grandmother for practically disowning her while at the same time learning to forgive the man who murdered her father and took her family hostage, she also has to learn to forgive herself for the loss of her mother when she was young and the loss of her father, even at the end when she defeats the villain she plants a magical seed of thought to show that she still cares about him and wants him to be a better person, plus heroine’s grandmother attends a Christian church service in one scene in Episode Three, but there is a pagan undertone with the Native American magical system that seems to be a generational passing of the torch, which also almost feels like ancestral worship;

Foul Language:

Each episode has a few obscenities and Episode One has a strong profanity;

Violence:

There is a ridiculous amount of graphic violence in this series, it is so violent that at the beginning of each episode it has to inform viewers that this was intended for mature audiences because of the violence, such as heroine is shown in the first episode in various gang fights, one of which involves breaking a man's spine, in that same episode she has a tussle with Daredevil and shoots her boss in the head, heroine Maya blows up an entire weapons storage in the second episode while at the same time fights guards off a train, heroine in the third episode ends up having to brutally beat up Kingpin's men with various arcade and skating equipment, head villain brutally beats a man and confesses to killing his own father in the fourth episode;

Sex:

No sex;

Nudity:

In a few flashback scenes, some of the various Native American men are depicted without shirts, one instance is during the origin of the people scene, and the second is a lacrosse tournament, a beginning cave scene implies that the people are naked, but when the beings leave the cave and become human, the women are in fact clothed;

Alcohol Use:

Alcohol is used twice, once in a flashback during a Sunday dinner with villain and heroine, and in a scene where villain and heroine reunite and he gives her a bottle of wine that she pours down the drain;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Strong miscellaneous immorality includes various characters lying about certain actions, such as villain lies to his adopted daughter, heroine lies to her cousin and uncle, there is kidnapping in the episode “Tuklo” where Maya, Bonnie, and Henry are kidnapped by Henry’s former employee and in the episode “Maya,” where Bonnie and Chula are kidnapped by Kingpin to draw out Maya, there are several cases of dysfunctional family units such as is raised by a single father after the death of her mother and then by her godfather Uncle Wilson aka the Kingpin who’s a bad role model as well, heroine’s grandparents are separated, but it’s never clear if they are truly divorced because the two still care deeply for each other, and at one point Maya goes to a casino to talk to villain, but no gambling is shown.

More Detail:

ECHO is the newest installment of the Marvel Studios Cinematic universe as a series featured on Disney+. This series takes place shortly after the events of HAWKEYE and follows the adventures of the gangster villain Kingpin’s adopted daughter and former right-hand woman, Maya Lopez, a Native American who’s also deaf.

The series opens with the tragic loss of Maya’s mother, which leads to her moving from her small town of Tamaha to New York City, where she grows up to be a decent fighter. However, while there, her father is killed and she’s raised by her “godfather” Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, who controls the city’s gangsters.

During the events of the Disney+ series HAWKEYE, Maya learns that Fisk had her father killed, so she “kills” him. This is when the main story in the new series begins, when Maya, on the run from Kingpin’s men, returns to her childhood home of Tamaha.

While in Tamaha, Maya has strange dreams of various ancestors of her family, who seem to be directly related to Chafa, considered to be the first of her Native American tribe, the Choctaw Indians. While in her childhood home, she starts to unwillingly connect with various members of her family, including her Uncle Henry, her cousins Biscuits and Bonnie, her grandfather Skully, and her grandmother Chula. In addition, she causes problems for Kingpin’s organization by destroying their shipping lanes, which brings unwanted attention and destruction to her small town.

While engaged in fighting Kingpin’s men, Maya learns that Kingpin is alive and wants Maya to rejoin him. Maya finds herself in the dilemma of rejoining the Kingpin or dealing with the echoes of her past, and reconnecting with her family.

Quality wise, the show itself is a little intense at times. One of the first things to know about each of the five episodes, there is a warning of mature content, which is not something normally seen at the beginning of most Marvel movies and shows. This is almost exclusively due to the amount of gratuitous violence that occurs in each episode. In addition, the story itself is a little all over the place because it is reliant on two other Marvel Studios shows, those being HAWKEYE and to a smaller extent DAREDEVIL. In addition, the magic powers that Maya suddenly gets in the final episode, although briefly shown, are not explained well.

That said, the series is not all horrible. Maya herself is both deaf and missing a leg. Many times in the show the show goes from having the ability to hear to not being able to hear, giving a much stronger connection to the protagonist. The show is also an interesting insight into Native American culture along with the Deaf community. In addition, the music of choice in every scene is on point and properly reflects the mood of each scene.

However, the series as many worldview issues. The program does have a moral worldview especially with the main themes being familial forgiveness and processing grief, but there’s a pagan undertone with the connection to Native American lore and pseudo ancestral worship. In addition, the show is overflowing with violence. This includes car violence, gun violence, physical contact violence, and bladed violence. The violence isn’t even tame, it’s almost too graphic in many cases. In addition there are small moments of nudity, some implied and some shown. The implied nudity is female and only in one episode, and the shown nudity is upper male nudity, exclusively in scenes about Maya’s ancestors.

Despite all of that, ECHO has very little cursing and no sexual actions, sort of keeping to Marvel’s standards. Overall, the series is slightly entertaining, but it is barely acceptable for adults, and definitely should not be shown to children.