I think I’m once again caught up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Marvels was a lot of fun, but apparently didn’t do well at the box office. The poor showing is being blamed on the amount of homework you have to do before watching the movie. Monica Rambeau previously appeared in WandaVision, Nick Fury previously appeared in Secret Invasion, Kamala Khan previously appeared in Ms. Marvel, and, of course, the movie itself is a sequel to Captain Marvel.

I don’t think you have to watch all those shows before watching it, though. There’s no reference whatsoever to the events of Secret Invasion and the movie tells you all you need to know about the events of WandaVision and Ms. Marvel. Of course, WandaVision and Ms. Marvel are worth watching in their own right, but you don’t have to watch them first to enjoy this. Of course, you should watch Captain Marvel before watching The Marvels, but that’s it.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was a pretty good movie, although I don’t know how it got away with a PG-13 rating with all that violence. Someone’s head is cut off. Another guy’s face gets ripped off. Another poor guy has his face repeatedly slammed into the dirt while he’s being dragged across the ground. Countless henchmen are murdered by our heroes in a variety of gruesome ways. We’re even forced to watch cute talking animals get killed, so it’s not a movie to let your little kids watch. I guess the reason this movie isn’t R-rated is because there’s no blood when people’s heads are being cut off, but that’s a pretty arbitrary reason.

Something else that bugged me about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, is when Groot spares the life of Adam Warlock, saying, “I am Groot” which, being translated, means, “Everyone deserves a second chance.” Seriously? Groot certainty didn’t give a second chance to any of the countless henchmen he slaughtered. Why single out one of the main villains in the movie for a second chance when you didn’t offer one to anybody else? Adam gets a second chance while guards whose only crime was getting in the Guardians’ way deserve death? That’s some topsy-turvy morality.

Let’s move on from a movie which should have been R-rated to a TV show which shouldn’t have been. Echo was promoted as Disney Plus’s first TV-MA-rated title, but the violence was really PG-13 in my opinion. There weren’t any heads cut off or faces ripped off. When people got punched in the face, blood sprayed out, so I guess that’s why it’s rated TV-MA, but rating shows based on whether or not there’s blood is pretty arbitrary.

Echo is a direct sequel to Hawkeye, so that’s the only homework you need to do before watching it. Characters from Netflix’s Daredevil appear as well, but I wouldn’t say that’s required to enjoy this. (Although, I’ve got to say the single best Marvel show ever created was the third season of Daredevil. Season 2 was awful, so I stopped watching it at that point. I only watched season 3 recently as homework before watching Echo and was blown away by how amazing it was. If you only watch one Marvel show, it should be Daredevil, but skip the second season.)

Echo is typical for action movies in many ways. Maya is so good at punching and kicking that she can take out half a dozen armed guys no problem. This is the sort of boring action movie cliché that made me stop watching The Mandalorian. Although, I’ve got to admit, I love the action sequences in Daredevil. I guess I’m not against one-person-improbably-taking-out-a-group-of-better-armed-people scenes per se, but they have to be really well executed for me to like them.

Perhaps because of scenes like this, I found myself nitpicking the series. Maya Lopez is deaf, but there’s a scene of her falling asleep on her motorcycle and being awakened by a car horn. I know deaf people can feel the bass in music, but would a car horn really wake her up? Also, why would a semi driver honk at a motorcycle approaching it from behind? Did the driver sense that she was getting sleepy?

But this is just a nitpick. What I really didn’t like about Echo is it’s a show in which we’re supposed to root for a villain. Maya’s goal throughout the series is to become the new Kingpin, or Queenpin, if you will. She wants to be in charge of a criminal empire that routinely murders innocent people and the audience is supposed to be on her side because she’s the viewpoint character. Shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad pulled this off by having the villainous main characters go up against people who are even worse villains than they are, but Maya seems to be just as bad as the people she’s fighting.

We’re shown a flashback of her as a child injuring a bird. She tells her mom she found it that way, but her mom knows she’s lying, implying she’s done this sort of thing before. Another flashback of her childhood shows her helping Kingpin beat up a man for not knowing sign language. The show itself is telling us Maya’s a psychopath who enjoys hurting small animals and other people. She spent most of her life killing people for Kingpin. She turns against Kingpin for killing her father, not because she thinks anything else he’s done is wrong. In fact, she wants to be him. The members of her family are sympathetic characters and she does seem to be somewhat less of a villain by the end, but the show makes it hard to root for her.

Another aspect of the show that threw me off is her ill-defined superpower, especially because she didn’t have superpowers in the comics. Apparently, she gets superpowers simply due to being a female Choctaw. However, her female family members don’t get as much power as she does. Why do her ancestors decide to give Maya powers instead of giving the powers to her non-evil family members? The flashbacks we get of her ancestors don’t indicate they’re villains like Maya is, but maybe they are? Maybe they want to help her become the leader of a criminal organization for some reason? Also, why didn’t her ancestors use their powers to save her parent’s lives? They seem to give Maya and her family powers randomly, sometimes allowing bad things to happen and sometimes not.

Echo is an average Marvel show. I really wanted it to be amazing, which is probably why I ended up being so disappointed in it. I probably would have liked it better if I’d went in with lower expectations. Speaking of which, maybe the reason I liked the third season of Daredevil so much was because the second season caused me to lower my expectations. If the third season of Daredevil hadn’t been so good, I probably would have went into Echo with lower expectations and ended up liking it a lot more.