1x04 Taloa

[7.6/10] This is my favorite episode of the show to date because it gets to the heart of Echo. Maya Lopez is not just sundered between two worlds; she is pulled between two parental figures: Chula and Fisk. The hard truth is that she’s got deep anger for both, which makes it hard to find her footing in either realm, whether it’s Tamaha or New York. “Taloa” is a confrontation, hell even a reckoning, with both of them, which gives it a force that’s been intermittent at best in the mini-series to date.

I recently learned that Echo’s lead writers are a veteran from Better Call Saul and a veteran of various teen dramas, and I think that reflects in the show’s vacillating tone and tenor. Thankfully, despite some silliness, this episode leans into the former, and the Breaking Bad-style hard conversations between family members in both your real family and your crime family.

The main source of that silliness is Kingpin. Again, I get that this still a Marvel show, but his nigh-magical sign language translator device is goofy to the point of being distracting. In fairness to the creative team, the device serves a story purpose. Fisk would rather invest in advance technology than go to the personal trouble to learn how to sign. But it’s not the most elegant way to convey that idea, and it’s hard to take the (pretty important!) scenes where the device is used seriously.

Likewise, the scene of his “final lesson” left me rolling my eyes a bit. Fisk having his ASL translator killed to demonstrate the idea that “we are the only ones we can trust” to Maya is too cartoony for my tastes. It’s churlish for me to complain about such things while complimenting Breaking Bad, since Gus Fring pulled similar tricks in that storytelling universe. And again, it serves a purpose, with Maya realizing the way that Fisk manipulated her as much as he showed genuine care for her. But the over-the-top, “mature” comic book-style plot point felt like too much to me.

All of that said, I still liked Maya’s confrontations with Fisk. I still read him as an abuser, but one who thinks he’s doing right, who at least believes that he loves Maya, even if his means of showing her love is as twisted as he is. There’s a palpable tension when they sit down together, a venomous magnamity in Fisk who’s ostensibly come to make Maya his successor, and the bitter recriminations of a young woman who’s waking up to the way her surrogate father may have treated her like a tool rather than a loved one. The dialogue is a little on-the-nose, but the performance are good, and the interpersonal-dynamics between the characters are sharp, which counts for a lot.

Their closing confrontation in Kingpin’s hotel room compelled me just as much, if not more. In truth, I’d forgotten all about the backstory of Fisk’s hammer and his father’s murder that was depicted in Daredevil. It’s been a long time since that show’s first season, and yet, while the dialogue isn’t seamless, the script does a good job of providing context for audiences who understandably missed an only semi-canonical television series from nearly a decade ago.

But for those of us who did watch it, there is power in Kingpin handing Maya the implement he used to slay his own abusive and asking her to complete the cycle with him. There is an Emperor Palpatine-esque quality to his invitation: seeking a successor, wanting someone worthy, and wanting a resistant protégé to accept that role by taking them down. And in an episode that makes generational patterns repeating themselves, there is power in Maya refusing to perpetuate that cycle. She won’t become Fisk; she won’t inherit his personal pathologies and moral deficiencies. And that refusal comes with extra force given how much she’s like to wreak vengeance upon him for all that he’s done to her.

The confrontation with Chula is much more grounded, naturally. She’s a local grandmother, not a mob boss, after all. But it’s no less potent. Through her, Maya comes to understand the mystical experiences that have been affecting her of late. Therein comes the idea of generations echoing (hey! that’s like the name of the show!) off one another. We see it manifested in the women of Maya’s Chocktaw ancestry finding special strength in one another across time and space. We see it manifested in Maya reminding Chula so much of Maya’s mother. And we see it in Chula herself having the same sort of mystical experience in childbirth.

Here's where I’ll admit that I have major problems with the whole “I rejected Western medicine and just went into the woods so magic could help me with my serious medical condition instead” idea the show represents here. But taking it as a heightened reflection of strength and connection to a culture and community, I can’t deny the power of the imagery, or the meaning that comes from Chula bringing someone into this world who seemed to lift everyone around her, or the tragedy of ultimately losing her.

That’s what makes their confrontation the right kind of unsatisfying, in the way that tough conversations with family members reckoning through unresolvable issues should be. I wouldn’t necessarily call her sympathetic, but Chula is comprehensible in her fierce anger at Maya’s father for his “business” getting Maya’s mother killed, and she’s understandable in the pain she feels at seeing Maya and witnessing that reflection of a lost child.

But Maya is just as sympathetic in asking Chula, “How could you? Where were you when I needed you?” Maya did nothing wrong. And while Fisk takes the lion’s share of the blame in the way he indoctrinated Maya over the years, Chula bears some blame for severing her ties with a granddaughter who needed her, for not being a counterweight Maya could rely on at the expense of the poison Kingpin was dripping in the young girl’s ear, of expelling a small child who’d done nothing wrong along with the father Chula blamed for everything. The ways that Chula failed Maya still echo as much as the guidance she offers now.

That’s the kind of thing I love in my television shows. It’s the most interesting part of Echo -- the substance behind the high-octane battles that will no doubt be in heavy rotation in the season finale. And it gives the show it’s high water mark as Echo rolls into its final frame.