Character Highlight: Maya Lopez (Echo)

*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.

Character Highlight: Rose Tico (Star Wars)

Just a head’s up: I’ll be featuring Star Wars Wednesdays less often for a while. I’m continuing my (very) slow trek through The Clone Wars, but I keep picking it up and putting in down—and there’s just so much of it! And at the moment, there isn’t a ton for me to talk about until after the Acolyte is out. So if I go three or four weeks at a time without writing about Star Wars, that’s why.

In the meantime, let’s look at Rose. As a new appreciation has grown for the prequels, for many fans, the sequel trilogy has taken their place as the Star Wars thing that let a lot of fans down. Now, there are definitely well-deserved criticisms of the sequels, and there’s also toxic bullshit that’s been super gross to encounter. The toxic faction of the fandom latched onto Rose as their main symbol of “ruined woke Star Wars,” harassing Kelly Marie Tran off of social media and just being an overall scum pit. Her severely reduced role in The Rise of Skywalker is seen by many as J.J. Abrams acquiescing to this loud, bigoted minority of fans.

Personally, I recognize a lot of faults with the sequels but still enjoy them. On the whole, I’d describe them as movies with a talented cast of interesting characters in stories that don’t always show off their potential. That’s very true for Rose, who I like a lot. We meet her as a mechanic in the Resistance. She’s wholly committed to the cause and willing to help in any way she can, even as she’s grieving her sister Paige, a pilot who was just killed in a bombing campaign.

Rose values dedication and bravery. Perhaps she’s so hardcore for the Resistance in part because she just lost Paige; she needs her sister’s death to stand for something, and so she stands even more staunchly against the First Order. She’s thrilled and a little starstruck to meet Finn, because she expects this bona fide hero of the Resistance to be stalwart and unwavering. She doesn’t know that he’s not fully committed to the Resistance yet, that he got into all of this because of Rey and she’s still his top priority. So when she catches him trying to leave the fleet, she’s crushed—she only sees someone who’s running from the fight, not someone who’s running toward a person he really cares about. Just like that, her admiration is replaced by disappointment.

But that doesn’t mean that Rose writes Finn off entirely. She’s much saltier and more skeptical of him when he comes to (she may have incapacitated him to keep him from bolting,) but their story doesn’t end there. Rose believes in the power of change in the galaxy, that small actions still matter and people should never stop trying to make things better. That includes change within people as well, and as Poe sends Finn and Rose on a secret mission to Canto Bight, she endeavors to help Finn recognize why it’s so necessary to fight against the injustices of the galaxy.

She’s disgusted by the opulence of the hypocritical wealthy on Canto Bight, and she frees exploited animals just because she can. As a mechanic, she hasn’t been on a mission like this before, but until recently, that was true of Finn as well. Heroes can come from anywhere, and Rose certainly has heart enough for it. When The Last Jedi comes to a head in the battle on Crait, she’s right there in the thick of things.

It's there that she delivers one of the film’s best-known lines: “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.” That’s a sentiment I can definitely get behind, and I really appreciate Rose for giving voice to it. I don’t take it to mean that violence or sacrifice is never necessary—after all, Andor is my favorite Star Wars. Rather, I interpret it as being more about where one’s motivation comes from. Were the people of Ferrix fighting because they just wanted to kill ISB, or were they fighting to defend their homes and neighbors? It’s the reason people take up arms. Hate isn’t a strong enough reason to carry the day, but love is.

Character Highlight: Ruescott Melshi (Star Wars)

*Melshi-related spoilers for Rogue One and Andor.*

I’ll admit it—when Melshi first popped up in the Narkina 5 arc on Andor, I didn’t recognize him. I’m not up on a lot of Star Wars Glup Shittos, so I didn’t realize how neat his inclusion was until “Narkina 5” aired and I saw people getting excited about it online. But after season 1, I have a greater appreciation for Melshi and hope we see him pop up at some point in season 2!

We’ll start with the first time we see Melshi, not his first chronological appearance in the universe of Star Wars. By the time of Rogue One, he’s working with the Rebel Alliance as one of the Pathfinders, a Special Forces unit. He’s the one who goes with K-2SO to break Jyn out of her prison transport to bring her to the Rebel base, and he’s among those who join the Rogue One crew on their fateful mission to Scarif. Though he’s a very minor character in the film, he too gives his life to help steal the Death Star plans.

But like Cassian, Melshi doesn’t start out as a dyed-in-the-wool Rebel. When he appears in Andor, he’s one of the prisoners on Narkina 5. The show doesn’t tell us anything about his life before prison, and we don’t know the details of his sentence, but no matter why he’s there or how long he’s been imprisoned, he’s not harboring any hope. On Cassian’s first day, Melshi gets in his face to tell him not to bother looking at the counter that tracks his sentence—the number doesn’t matter, because none of them are ever getting out. That might seem like a nihilistic way to greet the new guy, but that attitude doesn’t come out of nowhere. After the Aldhani heist, the Empire’s retaliatory legislation included doubling the length of everyone’s prison sentence, and it will soon be revealed that even if an inmate is “released,” they’re actually just shuffled around and transferred to a different prison.

Because Melshi seems so defeated in his first appearance on Andor, it’s even more important that we see him take on a key role in the prison break. This shift doesn’t occur as part of an onscreen journey, like it does for Kino, but it’s still significant to see. Once the men of 5-2-D overpower the guards, Melshi is one of the inmates who arm themselves and spread the word to other rooms, fighting any guards who try to stop them. The man who used to think they were all going to die on Narkina 5 becomes the man who urges his fellow inmates to fight and seize their freedom.

Once they escape, Melshi and Cassian part ways. Despite his newfound sense of purpose, hopelessness can still creep in for Melshi, and he worries that they’re the only two who managed to survive. But he remains proactive, deciding that they need to tell people what happened on Narkina 5 and they’ll have a better chance of getting the word out if they split up. We know that Melshi and Cassian will eventually find their way to one another again, but will we see when that happens? Time and season 2 will tell!