Are there still casual Marvel Studios fans? If you believe the doomsayers in the press (I’m one of them), the superhero movie boom has finally gone bust, and DC and Marvel will soon return to their former place as icons of a passionate subculture rather than an international monoculture. This is not necessarily a bad thing, even for fans of the genre (I’m one of those, too). Marvel’s miraculous 23-film Infinity Saga was built on perpetual, unsustainable growth in terms of its ensemble, its budgets, and the scale of its story. The subsequent, ongoing Multiverse Saga has attempted to expand the frame even further, and it’s become exhausting. Echo, the new Marvel miniseries that hit Disney and Hulu this week, is a salve against Marvel Fatigue, a mostly self-contained, mostly down-to-earth action-thriller about a compelling character you’ve likely never heard of and might never see again. While it’s no masterpiece, it’s tight, fun, approachable, and exactly the sort of television show Marvel should be making right now.

Light spoilers follow.

Echo spins out of 2021’s Hawkeye miniseries, which introduced Alaqua Cox as formidable martial artist/mob enforcer Maya Lopez. You don’t need to have seen Hawkeye to enjoy Echo, though it definitely helps. Echo’s first episode mixes freshly-shot backstory with scenes from Hawkeye in an effort to catch up........

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