Marvel's Echo Ending Explained: Echoes Of The Past Kick Off Marvel's Future
The following contains spoilers for Marvel's "Echo."
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has made interesting detours in its television output, with several shows on Disney+ that serve as side-stories to the greater overarching MCU "phases." Now they've started releasing stories under the "Marvel Spotlight" banner, which allows for much more adult content than the family-friendly MCU fare people have grown accustomed to, and the first mini-series under the banner is "Echo." "Echo" follows the story of Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), an Indigenous woman who was taken in by Wilson Fisk, aka The Kingpin (Vincent D'Onofrio) after the death of her father. In the comics, she eventually becomes a superhero through a very long, painful journey that sees her go from one of Kingpin's goons to helping out the New Avengers, even teaming up with Moon Knight and Daredevil along the way. Created by Joe Quesada and David Mack, she's one of Marvel's more complicated characters, and now she has a mini-series of her very own.
For MCU fans who don't know (or particularly care) about Echo, her series serves as the lead-in to the upcoming "Daredevil: Born Again" series that will not only see D'Onofrio reprise the role of Kingpin, but will also bring back Charlie Cox as the titular Man Without Fear, reprising his role from the Netflix Marvel shows. However, it's honestly unfortunate that Marvel dumped the whole thing at once in January, with little fanfare, because "Echo" is pretty darn great.
What you need to remember about the plot of Echo
"Echo" follows Maya after the events of "Hawkeye," in which she found out that Fisk killed her father and lied about it — so she shot him in the face. She heads back to her hometown in Oklahoma, reuniting with family and friends that she hasn't seen in two decades. We learn that her mother was killed in the same car accident that took her leg, and that her grandmother Chula (Tantoo Cardinal) blamed Maya's father for her death. This caused a rift in the family that led Maya to a life of crime under Fisk, and when she returns home it's only to work on setting up her status as a "queenpin," using what resources she has in Oklahoma to blow up Kingpin's weapons warehouse back in New York. That all changes when someone calls in the bounty that's on Maya's head and brings a world of violence down upon the people she loves.
It turns out that the bullet Maya put in Fisk didn't kill him, and he shows up to offer her a truce as long as she's willing to come back to New York with him. He wants to set her up with the empire she desires, but she will have to do it on his terms. She refuses, leaving him waiting for her on the airport tarmac in his private jet all alone, and sets the course for the miniseries' explosive climax.
What happened at the end of Echo?
Maya ends up discovering a costume created for her by her grandmother and grandfather-figure (Graham Greene), left for her in her grandmother's workshop. She also encounters the spirit of her mother, who shares with her the story of their ancestors, which has been shown in bits and pieces throughout the series in the opening of each episode. Maya is the latest in the family to inherit extraordinary powers, passed down from the first Choctaw woman all the way to Maya's mother and then, in turn, Maya. She dons her new armor and goes to rescue her grandmother and cousin Bonnie (Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs) from Fisk and his men, while her cousin Biscuits (Cody Lightning) and uncle Henry (Chaske Spencer) stop his henchmen from attacking the Choctaw Pow-Wow.
After being disarmed by Kingpin's men, things are looking bleak for Maya. Then she summons her powers through her ancestry and uses them to kick some serious butt, even transferring that ability to her grandmother and cousin. When the butt-kicking is all said and done, Maya uses her healing powers on Kingpin's mind, trying to help him heal himself from the pain of killing his father as a child. She cannot convince him not to choose violence, but clearly "breaks" something within him, as he takes his men and goes running back to New York. The final scene shows Maya reuniting with her whole family for a cookout, seemingly staying home in Oklahoma for the indefinite future.
Echoes of the past
One of the biggest changes to Echo from her comic book version lies in her powers. In the comics, she has similar powers to the character Taskmaster, with a perfect photographic memory that allows her to copy anyone doing anything. In "Echo," she's given the ability to channel the powers of her ancestors, as she is an echo of them throughout time. The change is a brilliant one that puts Echo more firmly into her Indigenous roots, courtesy of a cast and crew of Indigenous writers, actors, and more that helped make "Echo" feel appropriately authentic to their experiences. In the big climax, she tells Fisk that she's not his echo, but theirs, and she's reclaiming her identity from him in a really powerful way. She has been his weapon for far too long. In fact, instead of killing him, she tries to heal him using her newfound powers, because she and Kingpin only ever had a shared language of violence. By trying to heal him, she offers him a new language, but he refuses.
Maya, for her part, has healed. There are still old wounds within her, left by the deaths of her parents and the horrors she inflicted upon others in Kingpin's name, but she has her remaining family to help her with those. She seems to have patched things up with her grandmother and Bonnie (though it all happens a little too quickly and magically), and looks forward to a happy future. Except ...
Maya and Kingpin still echo one another
Maya may think she's completely done with Kingpin, having chosen her family and her heritage and sending him running with his tail between his legs, but it's unlikely that she's totally free of him. After all, she's chosen both her mother and father's family, and her father had serious ties to crime. Even if those ties only extended to Kingpin, there are likely to be other criminals out there with Maya's family on their minds. She and Kingpin have been echoes of one another for many years because they were both so driven by revenge, but now they are both driven by a desire to make change without direct violence.
In the mid-credits sequence, Fisk seems to have the realization that he should run for mayor of New York City, a truly terrifying proposition. That alone could be enough to bring Maya back to New York to finally take up the mantle of Echo and do some vigilante heroism, or she could realize that she just isn't cut out for life in semi-rural Oklahoma. Either way, this hopefully isn't the last we've seen of Maya Lopez, because there's a lot more they can do with her in the MCU, especially in upcoming Marvel Spotlight shows.
What does this mean for the future of the franchise?
While it is possible that this is the last we'll see of Maya, she could potentially have a role to play in the upcoming "Daredevil: Born Again" series. In the comics, she squared off against Daredevil a couple of times while under Kingpin's thrall, and she's depicted fighting him once in "Echo," so the folks at Marvel Studios could be setting up a romance between the two, much like the one they had in the comics. Quite a bit of the romance from the 2003 "Daredevil" movie with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner was actually lifted from the story of Daredevil and Echo, so there's some seriously fun stuff to work with. (That amazing playground fight between Daredevil and Elektra? Almost panel-for-panel ripped from Daredevil and Echo's fight in the comics.) Having Echo as a part of the MCU's more mature fare is a win for diversity and great comic book storytelling, so hopefully we get to see Alaqua Cox team up with Charlie Cox for the Echo/Daredevil team-up fans deserve.
There are also plenty of other great moments in Echo's comics history to pull from, including a team-up with the dissociative superhero Moon Knight (Oscar Isaac) and even a stint dealing with the X-Men after she becomes the Phoenix. Here's hoping that Marvel's January dump of "Echo" doesn't mean they don't see a future for the character, because there's a whole world of stories left to tell.