I have some very mixed feelings about Kahori, Marvel’s new animated Mohawk character and Echo, Marvel’s live action Choctaw hero. I thought I’d write about them here in the hopes of maybe giving some folks a new perspective to chew on. I’ve never read any comics with Echo in them and Kahori is new, so my thoughts here are going to be based only on what I saw on the screen this week.
I signed up for Disney+ solely for these two shows – What If, Season 2 and Echo – and my plan is to deactivate now that I’m finished. With Reservation Dogs wrapping and the recent, incredible, Killers of the Flower Moon, I was excited to see where we might go with Indigenous characters in speculative fiction stories. Even the title of Kahori’s episode, “What If Kahori Reshaped the World” got me all worked up as it sounded like it could be close to some of the ideas I put forth in Coyote & Crow. And while the Hawkeye series where Alaqua Cox debuted as Echo wasn’t my favorite, she was certainly a bright spot in the show.
I’m sorry to say though, that both series, and their respective Native characters, were really a pretty big let down. I know that’s probably going to rile some feathers, but please hear me out.
Let’s start with Kahori and What If…?. As with season 1, I like the premise of the show, the voice acting is top notch, the animation style is fun.
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Many of the specific characters from the first season are present as carry overs into this season. And in fact, two of the “main characters” are from the previous season. While there were episodes in this run that didn’t connect to the final episode (I thought the “What If…Hela Found the Ten Rings?” was a lot of fun), the set up for the season immediately made me think that Kahori’s episode would somehow be a major turning point for the season or, at the very least, a major plot point for the arc of the finale and where it was headed.
But we’ll get to the season finale in a minute. Let’s start with Kahori’s episode. I’m not going to do a recap here. Instead, I’ll just dive in to my criticisms. I think the MCU has a longstanding tradition of making the Infinity Stones do whatever they need them to in service of a plot. I’m happy to give them some latitude. But creating a pocket dimension where people go there and get powers because they are there and then when they leave they get to keep their powers? I just wasn’t in on it. Especially when the powers are the worst kind of extension of the Infinity Stone Deus Ex Machina. What is it that Kahori can actually do? According to the MCU fandom wiki she has: Superhuman strength, durability, speed, agility, stamina, reflexes, a healing ability, extended longevity, cosmic energy manipulation, forcefields, telekinesis, teleportation portals, elemental manipulation, and flight. So….everything?
I liked her setup. I liked her background and the idea of a cursed lake. I didn’t mind the conquistadors (always down for some colonizer villains). I was really engaged when Kahori was working to convince the others within the Tesseract to come back with her to help her people. That was some great writing and lovely tension. I liked that, like many heroes, she starts as just a normal person with a good heart, thrust into unusual circumstances.
As we got to the point where she and her allies were defeating the conquistadors, I got really excited. I had no idea where the story would go. And I could tell by the run time that the episode was almost over. I thought, “Oh my gosh, we’re about to get a whole season of Marvel heroes influenced by the changes Kahori makes during the Columbian exchange.” But no. She goes over and puts the queen of Spain in her place (Cool, cool). But then it just sums things up. ‘Kahori brings about world peace.’ The end.
Wait, what? I don’t blame writer Ryan Little for this. I think he did a great job within the parameters he was probably given. And none of the voice actors or animators are to blame here. They did a wonderful job. Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs voices Kahori and I could see the actor playing her in live action, easily (although, my vote would be for an older Kahori, played by someone like Julia Jones. YMMV). But if how she ‘reshaped the world’ amounted to no more than a few throw away lines, what we really have is just an origin story here. Kahori gets to exist, but we learned so little about her or to understand her powers or her relationship to her clan or to the Tesseract, that the whole episode felt like setup without payoff.
I’d heard through the grapevine that Kahori returned in a later episode of the season though, so I withheld my judgment. As the season progressed I became positive that it was going to become a situation where the modern MCU heroes involved would have to tap into Kahori’s world, her different timeline, to fix some sort of problem. And that we’d get to see the world that Kahori had helped make.
But no. In the end, Kahori was just…there. I mean, was there anything Kahori specifically brought to the table that the writers could not have easily swapped for a Dr. Strange variant, or Captain Marvel, or a Scarlet Witch variant? It was nice to see the character again, but there was no reason it had to be her.
And I think that’s my real issue with the character. Kahori is a great idea. Beautifully drawn and acted. And made from a place of care and thoughtfulness. But there were so many opportunities missed here to tell a really cool story. How about basing Kahori’s powers on her beliefs and culture? Or making those beliefs key to some sort of understanding how the Tesseract worked, allowing her to tap into it when the conquistadors could not? How about showing why Kahori, specifically, needed to be the one to change the world? And other than ‘peace’, what did this new world look like? What was that world like when Strange Supreme stepped into it to bring her into the wider story? Did none of the other Marvel characters exist? Did Odin see Kahori as a threat the same way he saw Hela and the Ten Rings? Did Asgard and Kahori clash? Did Kahori and the Eternals work together to end the Celestial threat?
I don’t necessarily need answers to all of those questions. But I think if you title an episode “What If…Kahori Reshaped the World?” and then carry that character over into an epic finale episode, you should probably have thought some of this through and covered it somewhat in one or more episodes.
So yeah. If we see more Kahori, I’d like some definitions put on her powers and why she’s so different from Carol Danvers power-wise. I’d also really like to see some more of how she reshaped the world. And at least a line or two to explain why she’s so good at speaking English. Like…that requires some leaps. Making an alternate history character where they are never colonized speak the language of a country that’s just a tiny island with no real influence in this alternate world? *side eye*
Maybe I’m being picky here. I don’t know. Let’s move on to Echo.
How about that cast! Tantoo Cardinal, Graham Greene, Zahn Mclarnon, Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, and even Dallas Goldtooth, Julia Jones, Tatanka Means, and Jana Schmieding got some cameos. This cast was full of Native acting royalty. I squeed more than a few times when I got to see these folks in an MCU show. And Vincent D’Onofrio is just always a joy as Wilson Fisk. He just has that character down in a way that few other actors have ever been able to capture the spirit of their character.
And while I didn’t grow up in Oklahoma and haven’t spent anytime in the Choctaw nation, my sense from friends is that they did a pretty good job of capturing Tamaha and the local vibe and culture.
Sadly, those are all the positive things I can muster to say about the Echo series. I’m just going to be blunt here. I’m not sure Marvel knew what to do with her character. She had a simple, satisfying arc in Hawkeye that left her with some closure. But the only thing Marvel could think of for Maya was to undo that arc and then replay it over five episodes? Frankly, very little happened in this show. This could have been a 90 minute movie with no problem.
Don’t get me wrong. I LOVED the creation scene in the first episode. So cool! And that got me excited. But over the course of the show, there was so, so little given to Alaqua Cox to work with. It’s hard for me to judge her as an actor because I haven’t seen her in anything besides Hawkeye. But even there, she seemed to have more to work with. And frankly, if you’re going to put an actor up against the likes of Tantoo Cardinal or Graham Greene? You better bring your writing A Game. It was tough for me to watch Cox in scenes with them because they felt like more well rounded characters than Maya. There was more life in the relationship between Chula and Skully than there was between Maya and Fisk.
And after five episodes, I’m still not sure what the plot or goal of the series was. I’m not sure what that ending scene was about. I’m not sure what Maya did to Fisk or why he walked away from her afterward or what the effect was. The whole finale was so ‘What the Fuck?’ that I honestly said that outloud when the credits rolled.
Is Maya a hero? A villain? Neither? Something else? What drives her? What does she want? What’s her next move? These are all questions that should have been answered, hinted at, or addressed during the course of this show. Instead, I feel like I know Maya less than I did when the show began. Worst was that they made out her relationship with Bonnie as something so important and vital and yet, I never saw evidence of that on the screen. And at the end, there was no dialogue, no scene between them, no closure or growth. We got a one second glance that – based on their lack of development together over the course of the show – really didn’t mean anything.
Frankly, I could go through episode by episode and gripe about plot holes, inconsistenices, poor character motivation, and on and on. So many missed opportunties (we haven’t even touched on her deafness or prosthetic leg, which could have been so much more interesting or integral to the plot). But instead, I’m going to say this. I appreciate Marvel giving us two Native American characters in the span of a month. I appreciate that they did at least a decent job, if not a good job, of not villainizing or fetishizing Native American cultures and beliefs and portraying us as complex humans. I appreciate that so many incredible Native actors got a chance to shine or pop into the MCU for a moment.
But frankly, both of these characters deserved more. Because what I saw in these two shows is the symptom of a larger issue I’ve had with the MCU for a while. There’s a laziness there that is built on some sort of formula they think they’ve cracked. Certainly there have been some decent movies from Marvel since Avenger’s Endgame, especially Gaurdians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Overall though, the MCU’s biggest sin, in my opinion, is that it has gotten boring and predictable.
And as someone who desperately wants to see more Native representation in speculative storytelling, boring and predicatable is just not something I can tolerate. I don’t think any of these criticisms fall on the writers or the actors. In the end, they don’t always have a ton of control over what ends up in the final piece of media on our screens. But I think both series underscore the fact that if we want to see more and better Native representation on our screens, we’re going to have to dig in and put more Natives in showrunner and producer roles and take a top down approach to our stories.
Despite all of the above, congrats to everyone who worked on these shows and I hope they are a huge successes and that they propel you all on to greater things. Wado.
/end rant.