Marvel's Echo Brings Forth A Set Piece We've Never Seen On Screen
Marvel's "Echo" is breaking a lot of barriers by simply existing. To begin with, it's the debut of the Marvel Spotlight banner, which aims to deliver more grounded, character-driven stories that are set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe but don't necessarily require an extensive amount of homework to understand. But more importantly, it's the first time that a Choctaw woman and the people of the Choctaw Nation at large have taken the spotlight in a major Hollywood production. On top of that, "Echo" star Alaqua Cox was born deaf and actually lives life as amputee with a prosthetic leg, just like the character she's portraying.
All of this makes Marvel's "Echo" quite a milestone in representation. In order to capture this underrepresented communities accurately, director and Navajo filmmaker Sydney Freeland made sure to bring in creatives who also represented these communities. As the filmmaker explained to ABC 7 Chicago, "The first thing that we did is that we made sure that we had deaf writers in the writer's room. We made sure we had deaf consultants behind the scenes. We had an ASL (American Sign Language) master who would translate our scripts from English to ASL, because one of the things that I learned is that the two languages are actually very different from each other."
It didn't end there either, because having a story that unfolds from within the Choctaw people meant having Indigenous writers, actors, and cultural experts on set. And with that representation comes another first, one that provides a compelling set piece that we've never seen on screen before, and it's right at the beginning of the second episode of "Echo."
'People say it's all been done before, but...'
It's a precarious time for Marvel Studios, as audiences are getting a little tired of superhero fare, both on the big screen and on television. Whether it's an over-saturation of the market, general boredom, or just something that doesn't feel quite so formulaic, the standard superhero fare just isn't cutting it anymore. That's where "Echo" hopes to stand out, as it provides a more edgy, mature series that actually landed the TV-MA rating. But it also stands out in another interesting way. As Freeland told Entertainment Weekly:
"People say it's all been done before, but there's a set piece in the second episode that I can honestly say has never been seen before on film. A big part of that came from our collaboration with the Choctaw Nation."
Since the biggest action set piece of the second episode is a train heist that Alaqua Cox's Maya Lopez pulls off with some assistance from her cousin Biscuits (Cody Lightning), we know that's not the sequence Freeland is talking about. Instead, the filmmaker is referencing the mesmerizing opening sequence where we watch a Choctaw Nation tribe engaging in a stickball match. The game has touches of lacrosse, but these Choctaw people aren't playing with athletic gear on. It's bodies hitting bodies, no shirt, no shoes, no problems, other than the potential for serious injury in an aggressive, fast-paced match. This kind of sport from Indigenous people hasn't been portrayed on this scale before.
This is Choctaw Nation
As you watch the match at the beginning of "Echo" episode 2, which you can see a bit of in the featurette above, it feels like it's from the kind of intense sports drama that gets released every few years. In "Echo," it serves as a flashback to set up some of Maya Lopez's ancestral origins, but as the Choctaw Nation itself explains, the game was "used as a method of mediating social relations, village conflicts and tensions between tribal members as well as other towns or districts." In fact, it even "served as an alternative to war in diplomatic concerns between tribes when actual weapons could be avoided."
There's gotta be even more of a story to be told with these kind of authentic cultural details, and this is exactly why the kind of representation that a show like "Echo" offers is important beyond checking off some demographic boxes. Honestly, I could watch an entire movie based around these intense stickball matches.
Every episode of Marvel's "Echo" is available on Disney+ now.