Echo Season 1 Episodes Ranked
Earlier this week we got all of the episodes of Marvel’s first TV-MA show on Disney+ with Echo. So today I’m going to be ranking all 5 of the episodes. Let’s get started!
5. Maya (Episode 5): Unfortunately, I thought the finale to this season was quite underwhelming. This is the shortest episode of the season and I think that hurt this episode, the episode had to wrap up everything in a short amount of time. None of the ideas being explored in the season felt like they came to a satisfying conclusion here. They introduce the idea of Maya having powers in the episode that comes out of nowhere. I get that it’s tied to her origins in the comics. I felt like this should have been more prominent through-out the rest of the show. I didn’t like how they went from a very grounded and street level show, to now our main character and her family have powers. Take Syndrome’s great quote from The Incredibles, “when everyone’s super, no one will be”. What made this show unique and distinct in the first place is all but gone when you move into the finale. Some of the stuff with Kingpin was handled nicely, they set up what Kingpin will be doing in Daredevil: Born Again. There’s some interesting stuff they do in here, but overall a fairly underwhelming final episode to the show.
4. Lowak (Episode 2): One of the things I appreciated about this show is that each episode has one very memorable action sequence. Episode 1 had the Daredevil one take fight scene, episode 2 has this train heist sequence that is done very well. It’s a cool spy sequence, we don’t get a lot of those in the MCU. There’s also several cool visual techniques in here, like we see texts she gets appear on the screen. Small details like that make the episode stand out, it feels more creative then some other recent MCU projects. I think what holds it back is the episode is fairly short, on Disney+ it says the episode is 40 minutes long. But it does the opening credits and has a little bit of closing credits. So the episode is only around 30 minutes long and it’s trying to do a lot here. Most of these MCU shows are 6 episodes long, this is only 5 episodes and I think in some ways this show would have benefited from that one more episode added in. I think episode 2 is a victim of that, this doesn’t make the episode bad by any means. I didn’t hate this episode, I also didn’t love it either. To me, this episode was good enough, it was fine.
3. Chafa (Episode 1): A solid first episode, but the big issue here is that it’s telling us a lot of information we already know. It recaps what Maya went through in Hawkeye, but I didn’t feel like it was necessary and we could have gotten more new stuff in this episode. As it was doing the recapping stuff, I wasn’t bored. I was really just waiting to get to the stuff that we hadn’t seen before. Then the episode goes from dark to this 80s inspired skating arena, the music choices felt tonely off with the show that was established. Now on the positive side of things, the one action sequence with Daredevil was very cool, that was the stand out of the episode. This episode did a lot to establish the themes, ideas, and plot lines of the season. We set up all of the relationships that Maya has with her family members, so we have a good basis for what her family is like and how her family feels about Maya. Even one aspect that stood out is seeing people’s reaction to Kingpin in the episode. Little lines of dialogue tell you all you need to know about Kingpin’s popularity and threat level in New York City. Those details worked for me in the episode.
2. Taloa (Episode 4): An episode that was lighter on the action, but had a lot of solid story and character moments inside of it. We get a lot more of the relationship and dynamic between Maya and Kingpin, those scenes are very cool. You get a few right there at the beginning, including the scene heavily shown in the trailer that’s a very cool scene. Even the stuff we get in the hotel room towards the end was very interesting, it shows this complex relationship between Maya and Kingpin. You get the dynamic we were waiting to see which is Maya and her grandmother, you see both sides of their views on how certain events went down. You feel the emotions of those scenes, the show was really teasing a lot of this earlier on and you get the pay off to it here. What holds this episode back from being #1 for me is some of the flashback stuff wasn’t as interesting. The flashbacks in previous episodes were far more interesting then the elements in this episode. Overall, another very solid episode that had a lot of elements that I appreciated.
1. Tuklo (Episode 3): I thought this was one of the more well rounded episodes of the entire show. Where we got a lot of plot and a lot of action and it all mixed together very nicely. Like I said earlier, every episode has that one action sequence that stands out and is memorable. Here we get one in the skating rink, it’s very cool and Maya uses the environment around her to attack the bad guys. While it’s doing that, it’s showing flashbacks in black and white to her ancestors. It’s just these little touches all along the way that make it stand out and pop a little more. The sequences are more memorable because of it, and it’s not just Maya beating people up there’s things catching your eye. We get a lot of the story threads coming together in this episode, we get the reunion between Maya and Bonnie in this episode. We understand Bonnie’s point of view on her relationship with Maya. We see where Maya’s grandmother is coming from on some of these elements. It all leads up to a cliffhanger where we see Maya’s reaction to learning Kingpin is alive. This is easily the best episode of the show.
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