Echo S01E03 Review: The Most Incompetent Kidnappers

Echo, Season 1, Episode 3: Tuklo

Another all right episode, I suppose, though just like episode 2, "Tuklo" follows a relatively formulaic narrative as far as these superhero stories go. We get some flashbacks to the ancient Native Americans to open up the episode, and this ancestor of Maya ends up getting some flashback cuts when we get an action sequence in the climax of the episode. Which... I'm not sure how much I like this. On one hand, I do appreciate the attempt to incorporate moments in the history of the Choctaw people into Echo, and the way Echo handles it jumps from one point in history to the next. But on the other hand... unlike Kamala Khan's great-grandparents, I am really not attached to the Lighthorsemen of this episode or the sports-players of the previous ones. I don't even know if they have names. 

I do like the quasi silent-movie format of the flashback, which fits into the themes of our mute protagonist. 

The present-day storyline continues to proceed a bit more, as the dude that witnesses the warehouse blowing up, Zane, gets to be the villain of the week. Doing kind of double-duty with him is Vickie, the shifty bowling alley jackass who was clearly going to betray Uncle Henry. Through some unfortunate moments of inconvenient ancestral flashbacking, Maya gets herself clocked in her head and captured by Vickie and his two bumbling civilians-turned-kidnapper minions whose name I really didn't bother to remember. 

And... I really do feel like this setup does kind of come out of nowhere, just to set up the 'kidnapping' storyline. Vickie and his goons also tie up Uncle Henry, and the unexpected arrival of Bonnie, out in search of any information of Maya, keeps ruining Vickie's grand master plan. They manage to get the drop on Bonnie and toss her into the same room with Maya, where we get the confrontation between the two cousins. Which... goes about as well as you'd expect, with a lot of "why didn't you call me?" and "you wouldn't understand" being thrown here and there. It's executed well for what's otherwise a rather generic script, it's just that I really do think that we really should've seen a bit more of adult Bonnie for me to be invested in this confrontation.

I do find the attempts at humour with Vickie and his bumbling kidnappers to be fun enough, as Henry lampshades how stupid Vickie is being. Zane and a small army of goons show up to essentialy take over the operation, and Vickie really thinks he has some kind of bargaining power as he tries to force Zane to pay him upfront. Couple the additional trouble of Maya McGyver-ing a nail gun out of spare parts and killing one of his associates, and Vickie panics and gets his stupid ass shot by Zane. Zane also chews the scenery a fair bit, though kind of shuts up when the action happens which I thought was a bit of a shame. 

We do get an action scene that I think is meant to recall the wacky toy factory fight in Hawkeye, and I do like the visuals of Maya using random arcade machines to beat the shit out of the goons. It still feels like a step-down from the Netflix shows, though at least unlike the Daredevil fight from episode 1, this one was a bit more colourful to watch. 

However, the fight gets to a stop because Zane has Bonnie on gunpoint. He's about to shoot Maya in the head when a call comes in, spooking Zane enough to leave with all of his men. Henry quickly wises up and realizes this is the Kingpin, and while Maya is initially skeptical, Henry ends up wanting to support Maya all the way. Maya and Bonnie part ways rather begrudgingly, with no real resolution. 

While all of this is going on, we do get brief cutaways to the elders in Maya's family, with Chula confronting Skully and getting into a good-natured argument about Maya's return. Skully tries to get Chula to make up with her granddaughter, and at the end of the episode when Maya comes back, he acts as the cool grandpa and tries to do the same with Maya. Maya ends the episode with a gleaming, golden armour for her prosthetic leg, which Skully wants her to show of as it represents the pride of a Choctaw warrior. 

And finally, at the end of it all, Maya goes off and drives around with her bike... and when she reaches home, Kingpin is right there, all suited up with an eyepatch. Boom, cliffhanger. 

And... again, it's an okay episode. It is a huge step-up from a lot of the more frustrating recent Marvel TV projects (Secret Invasion in particular) but that's not a huge bar to clear, and as I mentioned in the review... a lot of the things that happen here are pretty basic stuff in a superhero story. We still have a couple more episodes to go so I won't bitch too much, but the pacing is really quite slow to progress any of the storylines -- whether it's Maya reconnecting with her family, the mysterious ancestral powers (the glowing hands do not make a return in this episode), or if Maya's going to feel any sort of guilt for bringing her war to her town. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• In the comic run Phoenix Song: Echo, Maya goes through a journey through her ancestors, meeting one of them, who is the only female member of the Lighthorsemen, a tribal mounted police force that enforced tribal laws within Choctaw territory in the 1850's. 
• Zane is an adaptation of Teodor Zarco, the leader of the Black Knife Cartel, and was a minor antagonist in the 2017 Bullseye comic run. In earlier drafts, Zane kept his comic-book counterpart's name.