Echo

When my husband and I were dating, his family would regale me with stories of his childhood. Most of them were meant to be fun and funny, but there were some that carried a much more serious tone. They would always follow up the ones in the latter group with “He got that from his dad,” “Yeah, he’s just like Great Granddaddy,” or “That boy is just like his uncle was when he was that age.” It helps when older adults in the family are around to pass on these stories firsthand. You can see for yourself the joy they take in having played a part in their loved one’s make-up. They marvel at how their once very young child has evolved to define themselves as an extension of them. Echo presents such a passing on of generational lore through Marvel’s story of Maya, a deaf and mute Choctaw girl in Tamaha, Oklahoma.

The five-episode series opens with Maya who, at about 7-years-old,  loses her mother in a tragic car accident and then struggles to find her center. The loss of Maya’s right leg in the crash only compounds her challenges, although this is depicted more as an inconvenience for her than a disability. For such a young child, she expresses no pain or wonderment about her missing leg and seems to take it all in stride. Chula, Maya’s grandmother, blames her son-in-law William (Zahn McClarnon) for her daughter’s death. So, soon after his daughter’s recovery, he and Maya move from their home in Tahama to New York City to start a new life. 

Shortly after settling in New York, William hands over Maya to someone off-camera for martial arts training, skills at which she becomes quite adept as she grows into a young woman. But when 20-something-year-old Maya, played by Alaqua Cox (Hawkeye, Flash before the Bang), arrives at William’s auto shop on her motorcycle one day and sees him killed by a masked man, she handles her grief by indulging in crimes like burglary and motor vehicle theft. It is then that we meet the man who calls himself her “uncle,” and with whom she had become close since moving to New York City and beginning her martial arts training. 

Kingpin Fisk is played by Vincent D’Onofrio, who is best known for his many seasons as Detective Bobby Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In his heart-to-heart talk with Maya, he tells her “Let me help you release this rage in a more constructive way. Take your hurt, loss, and pain. Make it into something useful.” Kingpin encourages Maya to use her fighting skills to shake down and often kill his enemies. But when she later learns Kingpin ordered her father’s death, she shoots him and flees back to Tahama on her black motorcycle.

While Marvel’s crafting of the villains in this series are somewhat convincing, they are moreso entertaining. One of Kingpin’s cronies, Zane, played by Andrew Howard (Banshee, Mayor of Kingstown), is a small-framed British man who often wears sunglasses indoors and pants that are too short. Kingpin himself is a comical villain, a big bald man in a white suit with a raspy voice. While hulking and scary at times, he also has a sense of humor. At one point in the series, he brings Maya dinner, wine, and dessert. Not trusting him, she uncorks the wine and pours it into the sink when he isn’t looking. When they sit down, he unpacks the food and says, “Cookies from La Vane. Are they still your favorite?” She nods in the affirmative. He responds, “Let’s hope those don’t go the way of the wine.” 

Echo has an age-diverse cast, with actors from pre-adolescence to older adults. Tantoo Cardinal (Wind River, Killers of the Flower Moon) plays Maya’s crusty maternal grandmother, Chula, who avoids her, not realizing that she is punishing her granddaughter for the disdain she still carries for her deceased son-in-law. Through her, we learn that when we lose someone we love, as Chula did with her daughter, we sometimes blame others. Anyone in proximity to those blamed is often collateral damage. As he did in the movie Wind River, Graham Greene, who plays Maya’s granddad, Skully, injects humor and wisdom into the series. He flirts with Chula and imparts old-school knowledge to Maya to help her gain some empathy for her grandmother and some understanding of Choctaw culture. 

Echo is filled with an abundance of spiritual symbolism designed to tell the story of Maya’s ancestral origins. The embedded mini-films or historical pieces consume about ten percent of each episode, and their purpose is not made clear until the final segment. Because of this, watching the series can feel incongruous at times. These moments, however, are key to the series as they elucidate Maya’s struggles with understanding who she is and how she seems to have a special strength and courage, and a gift for combat that is typically reserved for Choctaw men. While some skills were taught to her, others were infused — passed on to her through five generations of Choctaw women who came before her.

Despite the important generational depictions linking Maya to her ancestors, watching the show can still be frustrating with respect to the lack of translations for its language use. Choctaw, for instance, is sometimes used by the characters, but on-screen translations are not consistently provided so that audiences who don’t know the language can follow the dialog and story. The same occurs with the frequent signing in the series. 

Because Maya is deaf, mute, and unable to read lips, she communicates through ASL (American Sign Language). Some of the main characters are fluent in the language, such as her father’s former friend-in-crime, Henry, played by Chaske Spencer (Blind Spot, Twilight Saga franchise), who also speaks as he signs. Her grandparents, Skully and Chula, know it somewhat and occasionally speak as they sign. Still, other main characters don’t know ASL at all, such as Kingpin, who eventually purchases an AI gadget that does the signing for him. The lack of electronics used in this mostly dark-lit, rural-situated series makes the sudden appearance of leading-edge technology feel like a time warp has been inserted in the middle of an episode and near the end of the series. It is as if the filmmakers decided this on a whim because they suddenly realized that Kingpin wouldn’t be able to communicate with Maya otherwise.

The varying degrees of fluency in ASL among the characters, though, is not problematic. What is problematic is the failure of the filmmakers to consider that much of the audience is neither fluent in ASL nor Choctaw, and thus are unable to follow the dialog when the lines are not spoken or translations not made available on-screen. In addition to the images, language is needed to connect the audience to the characters and the story.

Foreign films provide full subtitles in well over a dozen languages; Echo provides few for its Choctaw and ASL translations. It is as if a different crew member was assigned to this task every day of filming, and someone forgot to tell each person that they needed to do this. Or it’s as if someone neglected to tell the editor. Or perhaps the project simply ran out of budget. That someone signed off on Echo’s release without performing appropriate quality assurance is problematic. Unfortunately, the result is a multimillion-dollar series that delivers a frustrating and off-putting cinematic experience for its audience.

Music dynamics like mezzo forte, pianissimo, and crescendo give character to music by varying its highs, lows, and even tempo throughout a song. In doing this, dynamics help keep us engaged in the music — making our heads bob, our bodies sway, and even moving us to cry sometimes. Film, as well, should stir such emotional, seemingly natural variances in our responses. Audience members should feel something. 

Maya’s expressions throughout the series, however, remain unconvincing even when she witnesses her father’s death and gets her metal prosthesis jammed between two railroad cars. These should result in a seismic jolt that sends chills down the audience members’ spines or makes their eyes get big. Instead, each scene comes across as just another scene. As the protagonist in the series, Maya needs to keep the audience engaged in the story by varying the intensity of her facial expressions and body language as needed for the scene. This is especially crucial given her lack of oral speech. The audience can’t hear her frustration so that it has a chance of feeling it. 

I think, for example, about Marlee Matlin’s characters in shows like Children of a Lesser God and West Wing. The audience knows when her characters are happy, smitten, pissed-off, and even being playful. The comparison is not intended to pit one person who is deaf against another. It is to highlight the importance of being animated on-screen when hearing and speech are not available to you. I suppose it can be argued that these could indicate personality differences between actors. Perhaps. It is still necessary, though, for an actor - any actor, to find ways to engage the show’s audience or they will lose them.

There are also happenings in the film that the protagonist can do nothing about. For instance, Henry owns a skating rink in Tamaha. He and Maya are kidnapped and held at the rink by criminal wannabes hoping to hand her over to Kingpin for a bounty. Maya has an opportunity to overtake the incompetent perpetrators, but instead, pushes them out of the room and locks herself back inside. This is confusing to me even after returning from yet another weird David Yurman commercial. Now, no one watching the series to this point is surprised about what happens to the criminal wannabes when Kingpin’s guys arrive. At any rate, Maya eventually escapes the room she could have left some time earlier, and beats six, seven, eight of Kingpin’s men in hand to hand to feet combat, that is, before yet another David Yurman commercial comes on! The writing for this series is perplexing, unconvincing, and frustrating. 

The problems with Echo notwithstanding, I think sometimes we forget that our strength and courage, while we often own them, are not flukes. Like an echo, much of who we are were passed to us as gifts from those who came across the generations before us. Unfortunately, this theme in the series is clouded by the show’s problems. I once read that Stevie Wonder spent ten years writing his hit song, “As.” He would work on it, walk away from it for a while, and come back to it later to work on it some more. “As” was finally released in 1976 and it was well worth the wait. While Echo didn’t necessarily require ten years, it did require similar nurturing, so that the audience could enjoy the experience and appreciate its themes.