Warning: SPOILERS for Marvel’s Echo.
After rumors of a troubled production and a now-debunked report that Marvel president Kevin Feige called the series “unreleasable”, Marvel’s Echo has landed as a fresh and exciting exploration of a different corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Released under the new Marvel Spotlight banner, Echo tells a story largely unbeholden to the broader MCU, even as it features the return of both Daredevil and Kingpin. After her strong debut in 2021’s Hawkeye series, Alaqua Cox continues to shine as Maya Lopez, more than earning a return to the MCU that will hopefully come sooner than later.
Echo reviews hail a return to the kind of grittier storytelling for which the (now-canon!) Marvel Netflix shows were known. To complement Echo’s tone on a musical level, the creators turned to Dave Porter, who is primarily known as the musical mind behind Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Blacklist. In Echo, Porter takes his wealth of expertise in shades-of-gray storytelling and blends it with authentic Choctaw Nation chants and music to craft a score worthy of both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its Choctaw characters.
Marvel’s Echo Ending Explained
Marvel’s Echo ends with an epic finale episode, featuring Maya Lopez as she finally chooses which legacy she truly belongs to in the MCU.
Screen Rant interviewed Dave Porter about his favorite Echo moments, capturing authenticity, and more.
Dave Porter On Echo
Screen Rant: I’m a big fan of the Marvel Netflix shows, and Echo feels closer to that grittier form of storytelling. I know the stuff that you’re known for doesn’t shy away from that; is that part of what made you feel comfortable jumping into a Marvel project?
Dave Porter: It did. Yeah. This is my first Marvel experience, as you know. I’ve heard that reference before to the Netflix series, which I actually haven’t seen; I can’t make that connection myself.
But I do think that there was a conscious effort to make this story more grounded. It’s less about big superhero powers as it is a more relatable, personable, individualized story that is her story. I think that certainly, just because of the nature of the show, it needed to have a little more weight and a little more gravity to it. It’s dark. She goes to bad places. She’s not a hero, by any stretch. You’d have to ask the Marvel people if that’s why they hired me—because of my past experiences with antiheroes—but it seemed to make sense.
For me creatively, I think the thing I would say is that to get inspired, I need a story and a lead character that has depth, evolves, and faces consequences and stakes. Those are the things that interest me personally, and those are the things that I think best suit the music that I make. It was really a nice marriage, I think.
You’ve built out musical worlds across multiple shows before. How is that different from jumping into Marvel, where people have written music for these characters before? How conscious did you feel like you needed to be of that?
Dave Porter: This is a question that I asked many, many times. I warned them very early on, the good folks at Marvel, that my Marvel knowledge would be limited. The wonder and the beauty of working at Marvel is they have an incredible staff there, so many knowledgeable producers that have been through the wars, have done all these shows and all these films, and they know that stuff like I know what I had for breakfast. Anything you need to know, they can help you with, and they’re there to help you with, which is amazing.
I was nervous about that, coming in. You’re absolutely right. I have worked on extended universes before, for sure, but I’d always been the one there from the beginning. This is an instant where I’m coming into something that I feared had a lot of connections to other things that I needed to understand.
But in truth—and again, maybe this was why they let me in the door—this show doesn’t need all of that. It was designed to not require a huge amount of knowledge from other shows, or other aspects of the universe, to understand or follow it. Of course, there are some fun tidbits for people who do know about the universe, but in general, it’s meant to stand on its own and be its own thing.
Can you talk about your conceptual approach to the score? How much did things like Maya’s deafness and the setting of Choctaw Nation play into what you wanted to do musically?
Dave Porter: A lot, for sure. What really struck me, as I was first getting my fingers into working on the show, were the big shifts, the big dichotomies. You’ve got Maya, her New York world, and her New York family, such that it is. It’s very dark and it’s very brutal. There’s not much hope in it.
Then you have her return to Oklahoma and her Choctaw family, both real and extended. The difference of that, the pace of that, is very different, of course. The vibe, the lighting, how they shot the whole thing, was very, very different. There’s warmth and there’s hope there, in her family, and in things that she had cast aside in order to create the New York Echo or Maya that we know.
Those were things that really stuck out to me. I think there are a lot of ways in which the score does some big shifts to show the chasm between those two worlds. Of course, the backbone of the whole five episodes is the colliding of those two worlds. “How can they mesh?” and “How is that conflict going to affect all these various characters?” There’s a lot of that to it, I think, conceptually.
Then, as you mentioned, the Choctaw Nation is an enormous part of her. She draws power from her heritage and from the lineage of powerful women behind her. We tap into one of those in every episode. That was an ideal place to really get into some historical Choctaw flavors of music, which I was able to incorporate into the score through the help of an amazing group of artists and musicians that we had connections to, thanks to Marvel and our liaison from the Choctaw Nation.
I love the “Echo” theme on Spotify. I know there are a lot of people credited on that. How did that collaboration work? Who started the musical idea, and how did that happen?
Dave Porter: I think, like all good musical ideas, it took a lot of left turns and went a lot of places that no one expected. One of the great things about working on this project was that I had a lot more time, at least initially, than I normally do for a TV show. I knew I was going to be working on this for a while. I had a lot of time to do a lot of research.
That was one of the things that really attracted me to the show: [getting] to learn a lot more about indigenous Native American music, its history, its purpose, the ways in which it’s constructed, and why. So, I did a lot of that. One of the early things that I did is I flew to Dallas, met with a lot of these amazing musicians, and recorded a lot of these instruments so that I could use them later in the production.
Also, one of the things that I wanted to [incorporate], and was really struck by, was a traditional style of chant that the Choctaw have in their history. I had this wonderful ability to meet a group of folks there from the Choctaw Nation who perform these chants. They date back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, from the point where they were forced to relocate to Oklahoma from the Southeast, which is where the Choctaw Nation originally is from, historically.
Just to get a flavor of that, they very kindly allowed me to record some of those traditional chants, and I had that in my mind. Then, sort of off the cusp while we were in the studio, I had this sense that this stuff is so beautiful and so powerful, but so sacred to them and so historical, that we shouldn’t use it. But I wanted to use it.
So, together, we came up with this idea to create a new chant based on those historical ones but that, in a soft sell way, told our story of Maya. It’s essentially a chant that is about the power of women and how they’ve carried the seeds of life and pride and power and prosperity through their forced march from their historical lands to Oklahoma and kept the nation alive.
I had very little to do with it, to be honest. I was there to help and guide them a little bit. They created this beautiful new piece which will appear on the forthcoming soundtrack on its own, but as you heard in the big “Echo” theme, I’ve incorporated it into our much larger Marvel-style opening cue as well.
With the actual chant that you decided not to use, was it just like, “I don’t want to put this in a fictional world, because it’s so-”
Dave Porter: Exactly. Because of the power that music and TV have together, whenever you marry the two, it can be a very powerful thing, but it also changes people’s perspectives of both things forever. It just didn’t seem right. They may not have even minded, to be honest. I don’t know. We didn’t even talk about it, but I just didn’t feel comfortable with it.
One of the people I got to work with—a wonderful guy named Seth Fairchild at the Choctaw Nation—told me that there’s an importance to culturally historical stuff, but that culture also has to live, breathe, adapt, and stay relevant. That really struck me. It seemed like a more effective way, and a more direct way, that I could incorporate the power of that historical chanting idea, but have it tailored for us and keep it fresh and new. It’s something new for them too. It’s something new that they can now use, if they want to, wherever they want, which is pretty cool.
I love this show, but I remember reading a while ago that there were a lot of changes with season length, reshoots, et cetera. How different is the final product from what you worked on? Are we missing a lot?
Dave Porter: I don’t think so, but I’m maybe not the right person to ask that question; typically, composers get brought on closer to the end of a project. There probably were many iterations in advance of what I ever saw, but I don’t know much about them. That’s totally standard, by the way. That’s totally normal; it’s just part of the process of figuring out a show sometimes.
My bosses on Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad would always say, “You make a show three times. You make it in the writer’s room one way. Then, you shoot it, and some things have to change because of whatever resources, changes, or happy accidents; so, you make it again while you’re shooting it. You make it a third time in post-production.” That’s the nature of TV.
But I don’t think it changed [much]. Certainly, the number of episodes was never drastically different than from the point I started working on it. Things moved around, of course, in terms of how they plated it. There was certainly a discussion about, as we discussed, [how] we wanted the show to be standalone for anyone to be able to watch, so of course there was discussion about how much backstory we have to give in the beginning. So, there wre a lot of those kinds of questions, but it was surprisingly fluid.
You did so many cool things in the show. There’s the Daredevil fight; there’s the opening of episode three which is almost a silent film. What was the most unique thing that you felt like you got to do on the show?
Dave Porter: If I were to pick two—because I can’t pick one—[one would be] the one you named, which I’m glad you brought up. The start of episode three was super fun. That caricature of an old Western talkie movie was great; great in that the music gets to play center stage, of course, which every composer loves. There’s no dialogue; it’s all text on the screen. It’s all meant to look like an old film before there was dialogue on a film and the music was meant to be played live alongside a reel of film just rolling on its own, with no audio. So, yeah, I had a ton of fun with that.
Then I’d say the other would be the stickball scene. The modern day equivalent would be lacrosse, although stickball is far, far more serious and more violent in its origins. That was a ton of fun to do, for sure.
Aa composer, you never want to step on dialogue too much, but there were all these scenes where the dialogue was [performed in] ASL. It was cool to see the music working with that maybe differently than it would on another show.
Dave Porter: I’m glad you asked about that, because one of the trickiest challenges of working on this show was the fact that, as a composer, it is beaten into your head from the day you start to steer clear of the dialogue. But, of course, in this show, there are huge, very important, and dramatic scenes between characters who don’t actually speak out loud, leaving all of this space to fill.
I think the natural inclination that I found was to try to fill that space. Actually, while ultimately I think I did end up doing more music in those scenes than I would have if they were orally speaking, I ended up dialing it back and back and back and back. What you find is that the performances are there and the story is there already. You don’t need to make up for it for those of us who can hear.
So, while I enjoyed the sonic space that was there—there’s a frequency range right in the middle, where the human voice is, that you’d want to avoid if there was a lot of speaking. To have that back was nice—I ended up, I think, staying relatively as spare as I would’ve normally. [That] was an interesting realization. It was a really neat experience, that part of it.
Finally, there’s a crazy post-credits scene that sets up more stories for Kingpin. What are the odds that you will do more writing for him, Echo, or any of these other characters?
Dave Porter: [Laughs] Look, I super enjoyed my experience over there. 15 years of working on the Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad universe came to an end for me last year. So did over a decade, and over 200 episodes, of working on the James Spader show, The Blacklist, so I had a big transitional year last year.
I was really looking to try something new and challenge myself with something new. This thing, which I never would’ve expected, showed up. First of all, I’m so glad they asked me, and I’m so glad that I said yes, because I had a great experience doing it. Moving forward, I’d be happy to do it again, for sure.
Especially working with… Having Kingpin on my screen any day, every day would be a treat. It’s super fun to work on anything that he’s in. He is just so fantastic. So, I hope so, but [there are] certainly no plans at the moment.
About Echo
The origin story of Echo revisits Maya Lopez, whose ruthless behavior in New York City catches up with her in her hometown. She must face her past, reconnect with her Native American roots and embrace the meaning of family and community if she ever hopes to move forward.
Check out our other Echo interviews here:
- Brad Winderbaum
- Vincent D’Onofrio
- Alaqua Cox
- Sydney Freeland
- Chaske Spencer & Devery Jacobs
- Richie Palmer
Marvel’s Echo
Alaqua Cox returns as the anti-hero Maya Lopez in Marvel’s Echo, one of the street-level MCU’s Disney+ series that take place during the Multiverse Saga. After her confrontation with Clint Barton and Kate Bishop in Phase 4’s Hawkeye, the titular Echo returns to her hometown and reconnects with her Native American heritage.
