I started reading Toriko recently, once I got caught up on Black Clover, and it’s pretty good. I’m not far in, so I don’t have a lot to say about it yet. I was struck by how old-school the first chapter was. Not in terms of attitudes (although no women characters a dozen chapters in…), but in how it’s put together. The first oversized chapter didn’t see Toriko fight the garara gator he was after at all, and that’s pretty unthinkable these days. There were several scenes where it’s notably slower paced than it needed to be, and not to emphasize anything. I’m reading it like, “Those panels could have been combined, that reaction thought didn’t have to be written down for the punchline to land…” It’s always fun to read older books and seeing what techniques haven’t been made, what norms and expectations haven’t been set, you know?
This week, SPOILER ALERT: I am going to talk about Echo, the Disney+ series about the titular Marvel hero. I was going to set this aside, because it just came out this week, but I have too many thoughts on it to wait. What else am I going to write about? The entire history of the evolution of life, from the first microbes? I think about that all the time, I can do it any slow week. So yeah, if you want to watch Echo without any information or opinions, don’t read this yet.
Overall, the show is alright, but disappointing for me. The first two episodes are very good, the third has a strange sort of transition that weighs it down, and the last two were the weakest, for my taste. Part of this is expectations and what I wanted the show to be: Echo is a really cool character, she’s got this dark and gritty vigilante thing going on, and I was excited to get into a hard action, violent crime show. This isn’t that. The first two episodes are more like that, which is why I liked them more. The issue with the rest of the show is that they drop the idea of being a gritty crime drama to shift into a different kind of show, and it feels unbalanced and messy. There’s a world where they kept everything consistent from the start and did every part of the show they were wanting at the same time, in the same vein, and it was much more successful.
The show starts by taking Maya Lopez, aka Echo, out of New York and back home to Tamaha, Oklahoma, after getting shot. There, Maya wants to partner up with Henry, her uncle who works for Kingpin, to take over the Fisk empire. She also has to wade through her family drama and is later confronted with the return of Wilson Fisk, who survived being shot in the head. Her dad worked for Kingpin, so when she moved to New York as a kid, Kingpin took an interest in her and helped raise her to be a crime boss type; she later learned that Kingpin had her dad killed, which is why she shot him in the head at the end of Hawkeye. Maya tries to enact her plan, and then Kingpin comes to town, and he asks that she come back to New York with him, and she has to decide if she wants to take his offer. While all this is happening, she’s having visions of the past from her ancestors, who she’s connected to by way of her direct relation to the first Choctaw woman, Chafa. Primarily in the last two episodes, this is how she has to decide what it means to be Choctaw and how to honor and be a part of her family again. The season ends with Kingpin kidnapping Maya’s cousin and grandmother to force her hand, and also try to attack the Choctaw Nation Powwow, and Maya beats Kingpin by having him face his trauma and then he runs away for no clear reason.
So first off, I think the way her connection to her ancestors and the powers she develops from them wasn’t handled well. During the last fight, I think she shared her skills with her cousin and grandmother, and at another time, I think she moved a part of a train that was crushing her prosthetic leg telekinetically. It’s not clear exactly what her powers are in this world: Can she share her skills with anyone, or just her bloodline; what happened on the train? No one explains or stops to ask about it. But that aside, I’m not against it. My issue with it is that it feels like another example of a long tradition in white American fiction where an indigenous character has the superpower of being indigenous. At the very least, Echo was the only indigenous Marvel superhero (which there aren’t a lot of) who had a power and general thing that wasn’t centered entirely on being indigenous, and that was cool because it’s nice when minority characters don’t have to be an ambassador for their people. Which…like, I don’t want to sound like I don’t want them to represent Choctaw culture, or that I don’t recognize how there are people who like that these heroes are strong because of who they are. That is a good thing. It’s just also nice when minority characters don’t have to walk around with a sandwich board of a culture day display, you know? I know I like it when bi characters don’t have to actively date people of multiple genders or constantly talk about sex and attraction in order to “prove” that they’re bi. Does that make sense?
Moving on from my pedantry, the thing that gets me about how her powers were handled in the show is that it’s so easy to imagine a way for that storyline to be represented in a tonally consistent, gritty, violent crime drama. That’s the kind of show you want for Echo; her deal is that she’s Kingpin’s adoptive daughter who turns on him and is ready to burn his world down to get her revenge. When she goes home in the beginning of the show, we see her reaching out to family for organized crime connections, not to resolve family disputes. The pieces are there. I think her wanting to be Queenpin is a mistake – she should have been trying to dismantle Kingpin’s empire, after “killing” him five months prior – but you can still work with making her own empire. The ancestors that we see her flashing back to also work well for that kind of show, if you play it right. They had a character on a path of revenge ambitiously reaching for power, caught between her fractured family life and her lingering familial attachment to a crime boss who manipulated her growing up, and this same family tension is overlayed with her feeling unmoored from her own culture and adrift in wider society. That’s a good show, right? It’s frustrating that they didn’t thread those needles.
Like, there isn’t a throughline of her struggling with guilt over killing Kingpin. Despite everything, she still has these memories of him being like a father to her and caring for her throughout her life; even if she thinks she shouldn’t be guilty, you can easily imagine what she’s going through. That’s an easy thing to compare and contrast with the guilt and pain she has with her grandmother forcing her and her father out of town and never reconnecting with her cousin. At the start of the show, the bullet wound she has is described as “things catching up to her,” and she insists to Uncle Henry that she has a plan with blowing up a train at Kingpin’s henchman’s New York warehouse. A plan that, one assumes, ends with her being in charge, and a previous part of that plan was what got her shot. Except we don’t hear about her plan, or what she wants to do as a crime boss. It’s not clear what was going on at all. She also doesn’t at any point have issues connecting with her culture, or show interest in getting reconnected. She tries to get a handle on her visions, doesn’t take multiple chances to kill Kingpin when she really ought to, and has a tearful reunion with her mother, all of which results in her trying to heal Kingpin’s pain and then he runs away? Is she not going to be a crime boss now? What changed her mind? If she wanted to get set up in New York, why did she go to Oklahoma? You see the issue, right? The storyline with her visions and reconnecting with her roots overtakes the crime drama storyline while still wading through it, so we never finish a story we start with and end a story we don’t see the beginning of. What does this show want to be?
That’s where I think the “burn his world down” storyline makes more sense. Imagine all of this happening in a show that feels like Daredevil on Netflix. She got shot trying to take down one of Kingpin’s operations, so she goes home looking to recruit Henry’s organization so she has real manpower. Henry’s refusal forces her to take action on her own initially, while also keeping her in town longer and dredging up family drama. She’s confronted often with not knowing who she is anymore. We have her cousins Bonnie and Biscuits reminding her how she didn’t use to be this way, and her grandmother Chula is pushing her to leave the white man’s world behind and helping her deal with her visions of her ancestors. Those ancestors aren’t just examples of where her skills and abilities come from, either; we see them dealing with the same struggles as Maya, with family drama in Lowak’s time and Tuklo dealing with some plot by white people to disempower or do away with the Lighthorsemen. While all this is happening, she’s also remembering times when she was happy with Fisk, and is still struggling with how to reconcile that with what she knows he was actually doing with her. We see Maya moving forward with her plan, and Kingpin and his organization send a kill squad after her, so each episode has another big, bloody fight with a gang of criminals, and also we know what Maya’s plan actually is. Fisk does force her to choose between family and him, and he makes it clear from the start that he wants her to be his puppet (of course, he still talks in a sweet way). All this culminates with Maya choosing her family and accepting the guidance of her ancestors, and ends with a satisfying, bloody battle with Kingpin, where she fails to kill him once again. However, she doesn’t feel defeated from that failure, because her family and people have helped her see that revenge isn’t the justice she wants for herself. And also, it wouldn’t be the second Marvel Disney+ show that ends with the threat of genocidal terrorism, just for funsies.
In theory, you could do a similar show where she’s trying to be a crime boss, but I don’t like that as much, because I’m not sure what would change her mind from such an ambition. But yeah, that’s what this show should have been. The latter three episodes didn’t have nearly enough fighting or crime drama, and no one in her life is trying to get her to reconnect with being Choctaw. It’s generally not gritty or violent enough for my tastes, or to live up to the world Echo lives in. There’s already some obvious pieces for what the show could have and should have been, and they’re misused. The issue with how her powers are connected to her ancestors more about how the show failed to balance the different aims and elements it contained, and it’s not hard to imagine a show where they get it right.
All of this makes me miss the days of the Netflix shows. They weren’t all good (Daredevil S1 and 3, Jessica Jones S1, and Luke Cage S1 were the good ones), but the best of them were all made to be TV shows. They were all made with a consistent tone and a sense of what they were trying to do, and all the pieces were generally working in the same direction. They weren’t this Disney+ mess, where the shows are too often made like really long movies and they just throw in the things they want to do wherever, with seemingly no care for how it holds together. Even the bad Netflix shows still felt like they were made as shows, instead of long movies. Just decide what you want to do, give people enough episodes to do it, and use all your pieces for the same end.
Weekly Thoughts 1/13/24
Life in the Gutters 