Oklahoma Chic

Marvel’s ‘Echo,’ now airing on Disney+, is the apotheosis of Oklahoma Chic, where the Sooner State has become as ubiquitous a location for TV shows and movies as Seattle was for romantic comedies in the 1990s. But where Seattle was the center of cultural trends back in the day, the current Oklahoma gold rush serves more as a societal corrective. ‘The Watchmen’ turned a spotlight on the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Tulsa King,’ starring Sylvester Stallone, is a Sopranos knockoff that tells us that Oklahoma can Break Bad too.

‘Echo’ is more of a piece with Starlin Harjo’s excellent sitcom ‘Reservation Dogs,’ which recently concluded a three-season run, and with Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’ All three products seek to perform corrective surgery on current perceptions of Native Americans. The natives in Reservation Dogs are Muskogee, Scorsese’s movie takes place in Osage Country, and Echo focuses in on the Choctaw Nation. But only Echo makes “Indian Country” seem like a place you might want to visit on vacation sometime. This is Disney, after all.

Though the subject matter in Echo is “dark,” we’re talking about Marvel, so despite some occasional scenes of brutal, almost gratuitous bloodletting, Echo is, at its core, a squishy family drama. This is Marvel’s first “Spotlight” production, a kind of Disneyfied version of the “street-level heroes” stuff they were doing on Netflix a few years ago. As such, Daredevil makes an appearance in the first episode, waging an exciting warehouse battle with our titular heroine, leaving us all wanting more Daredevil. We always want more Daredevil.

Instead, we get more Echo. A lot more Echo. She is Maya Lopez, the descendant of what we eventually learn is a long line of Choctaw women with special powers that they can trace to a mystical cave at the center of the Earth. We’re in comic-book territory, so we have to go with it. Maya is deaf, which makes her even more special and mystical. For plot reasons, Maya, as a little girl, ends up losing a leg and moving from Oklahoma to New York City, where she becomes the special friend of the crime boss Wilson Fisk, also known as The Kingpin, who transforms her into a cold-blooded assassin who can hold her own in a fight with Daredevil.

The show, which takes place over five relatively brief episodes, traces Maya’s journey from New York back to her hometown of Tamaha, Oklahoma, which is kind of semi-run-down but mostly functional Choctaw Mayberry. She broods, rides her motorcycle, reconnects with family, and occasionally splits open skulls until, like the Disney heroine she was always meant to be, she connects with her true power and learns to love again.

In the Marvel comics, Maya Lopez is an assassin who becomes known as “Echo” because her deafness heightens her other senses, giving her the uncanny ability to learn other people’s fighting styles and associated skills. For instance, she is a world-class concert pianist, which she picks up from watching people play the piano. In the TV show, it’s because her powers “echo” down from previous generations, giving her access to swirly symbols that glow from her hands.

The problem with Echo is that Alaqua Cox plays Maya. Cox is Native American. She is deaf, has a prosthetic leg, and definitely looks the part. But this is her first role of any type, and it shows. Though she handles the fight scenes well, she has set her facial expression to a permanent glower, to the point where, when she smiles for a second in the fourth episode, it’s actually a surprise.

Cox is not a particularly good actor. But the show surrounds her with an excellent supporting cast. Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal, actors who could have won awards in any decade, play her grandparents. As Maya’s Uncle Henry, Native American Chaske Spencer, who recently owned the screen in the little-seen Emily Blunt Western vehicle ‘The English,’ is extremely good and quite magnetic, even if the show gives him half his scenes in a weird 80s-retro roller rink. Cox has a lot of business with him; I found myself wanting him back on screen as much as possible. And Vincent D’Onofrio as the Kingpin gives an almost ridiculously iconic performance, an earthbound Thanos with a tragically baroque backstory. He is one of Marvel’s, and pop culture’s, greatest villains.

But despite Cox’s flat affect, and possibly because Marvel managed to condense the show’s runtime into almost movie length, Echo works pretty well in establishing a new character for a somewhat flailing brand, and in expanding the Marvel universe in a non-multiverse way. Though Cox doesn’t necessarily show it in her face or demeanor, her character’s arc is affecting and believable, and she is welcome to pop into other Marvel projects, just like she popped out of the Hawkeye/Daredevil street-level universe.

As for Oklahoma chic, the Kingpin stays at a Choctaw casino when he visits Tamaha hoping to turn Maya back over to the dark side. I have spent my share of nights at a Choctaw casino, trying and only semi-succeeding to achieve poker tournament glory. Oklahoma has its charms as a TV location, but I wouldn’t want to live there.