*Maya-related spoilers for Hawkeye and Echo.*
Echo is a pretty strong character study for a newer arrival in the MCU. While Maya is introduced on Hawkeye very much in the context of longstanding onscreen Marvel characters, serving as a bit of a bridge to join the film and Netflix TV wings of the franchise, Echo gives her more of her own space, and we dive deep into exploring who she is.
As a child, Maya was in a car accident that killed her mother and resulted in her leg being amputated. Her grandmother pushed her father away in her grief, and Maya and her dad wound up moving from Oklahoma to New York. Far away from the rest of her family and struggling in a mainstream school without access to an interpreter, Maya grew up with a lot of pain and anger. Her dad’s boss, none other than Wilson Fisk, looked at young Maya and saw something of himself in her.
When Maya’s dad is killed by Ronin during the Blip, Fisk takes her under his wing. She’s hurting and lashing out, getting herself into trouble, and Fisk offers her a place to channel those feelings into something productive, if not positive. He helps to train her, then gives her a position in his enterprise, where she eventually rises to a prominent role within the Track Suit Mafia. She’s a loyal fighter for Fisk and works hard to make him proud. But she doesn’t know that he’s the one who arranged for her dad to be killed.
Once she finds out, all bets are understandably off. Echo follows Maya after she’s shot Fisk in retaliation. She’s very much in burn-it-all down mode here, but perhaps due in part to Fisk’s training and tutelage, that destructive energy has a much sharper focus than it did after she lost her dad. Maya wants to blow up Fisk’s operation and take it over for herself, trading in Kingpin for an underworld queen.
At this point in her life, Maya pretty much feels like everyone in her life that she cared about either gave up on her (her grandma,) died (her parents,) or betrayed her (Fisk.) She is deeply guarded and focused almost entirely on her own goals, even as she’s super reckless and puts herself in really dangerous positions in aid of them. She’s too single-minded on her aims not to get herself in big trouble, but she’s scrappy and competent enough to (usually) find her way out of them. Maya is an incredible fighter—she gave Daredevil a run for his money on her first official job for Fisk!—and she has a determination that refuses to go down no matter how many hits she takes.
When her quest to wreck Fisk’s shit takes her back home to Tamaha, Maya is within a stone’s throw of her family for the first time in decades. And despite her lone-wolf attitude and initial desire to get in and out without anybody knowing she was there, she keeps finding herself having to turn to them for help. She seeks out her Uncle Henry, who has his own Fisk connections, to help put her plan into motion, and he later helps her get patched up when she’s hurt. Her cousin Biscuits unexpectedly shows up outside her old house—where she’s staying—and at first, Maya’s only request is for him not to tell anybody that she’s in town. But then he winds up serving as her getaway driver when she sabotages a train. When her prosthetic gets mangled, she approaches her Grandpa Skully about fixing it, and he even cobbles together a temporary one for her to use while he works on hers. And Maya is most determined not to let her cousin Bonnie know she’s back in town, but Bonnie finds out anyway and comes looking for her at a moment when Maya is being held captive by Fisk’s goons. They haven’t seen each other in years and both have a lot of feelings about that, but they’re able to table that long enough to coordinate wonderfully well and escape their captors.
I love that, at a time when Maya feels more alone than ever and is the most determined to look out for herself, her plans necessitate this return to Tamaha and keep throwing her back into contact with the family she hasn’t seen in so many years. I love watching her hard defenses start to come down little by little as she reckons with what family really means. I don’t know what other plans the MCU might have for her, but I’m really curious to see what she might be like in any future appearances, how the events of this show have changed her.
