Hawkeye has just five days to go to save Christmas by the end of Episode 2, but with him and Kate tied up on merry-go-round seats, you might be wondering who is Maya, AKA Echo, the lady revealed right at the end of the episode. It’s been a twisting and turning plot so far and the latest addition to the cast came as a little surprise, as she’s not who you might have been expecting.
However, by the end of the episode it felt like expectations might still be close to the mark, because there was plenty of history for us to go on. However, the arrival of Episode 3 has thrown all of that out of the window and no amount of seemingly certain certainties can take that away. You never know for sure with Marvel, because they like to throw in curve balls here and there to keep us guessing, and that is definitely the case with Echo.
AdvertisementEpisode 2 just gave us a minor tease of the character as the head of the Tracksuit mafia, but her full origin story was revealed at the end of Episode 3. Now we know a lot more about her, here are the details you need to know about who she is and what she means for the future of Haweye and the wider MCU TV plans.
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Who is Echo, the lady in the leather jacket listening to music at the end of Episode 2
Echo first appears right at the end of the second episode and she’s clearly in charge of the Tracksuit Mafia. However, when we first saw the hand in front of the speaker, we were expecting it to be Yelena, Black Widow’s sort-of sister, so it was a surprise to see another lady in an epic jacket.
AdvertisementWith the initial “what the” out of the way, the expectation felt like a big hint at who she could well be. At the end of Black Widow during the end-credits scene, we saw Yelena (played brilliantly by Florence Pugh) talking to Valentina Fontaine about a new target for her. That target was none other than Clint Barton, who they both know to be Ronin, his dark alter-ego during his mid-Blip rampage of death and retribution against the international crime underworld.
If you’re not too sure why Yelena would take the target or why she might be emotionally invested in the hit, you can check out our post on that with the links at the bottom of the page. The general point is that from her point of view, he is somehow connected to Natasha’s death as the only other person present and his past as Ronin is clearly a part of the suspicion.
AdvertisementAdd to that the fact that the end-credits scene is set in or around the modern day and the job comes from Fontaine, who appears to be Yelena’s trusted handler, and you’ve got more than enough motivation for Yelena to take the job. The confusion comes at the end of Episode 2 when it appears she’s going to make her appearance and it turns out to be the lady in the leather jacket, who is revealed as Echo in Episode 3.
If you keep running with that, though, you might also remember that we also saw that Yelena was left in charge of the Black Widow program with lots of Widows under her wing at the end of the film. We don’t remember the faces of all of them, but it seemed likely that Echo could well have been one of those and she’s based in New York as Yelena’s west coast Widow.
However, Episode 3 confirmed that’s not the case and instead Echo is the niece of a criminal mastermind who she now reports to. Her father, who worked with her uncle as a distributor, was killed by Ronin as part of his rampage of destruction and there’s clearly an element of revenge to her efforts to track the person in the suit down and finish them off.
The fact that she’s overseeing the dim-witted Russian mob goons that make up the Tracksuit Mafia doesn’t appear to be related to Yelena, so Black Widow 2 has clearly got her own entrance to make in a separate capacity at a later date. If that isn’t enough mystery to the remaining three episodes of the Hawkeye TV show, we now have a new question to add into the mix… Who is Echo’s uncle?
Who plays Echo
Here’s where things get a bit more detailed. The actress that plays Echo, AKA Maya Lopez is called Alaqua Cox, who makes her acting debut in the role, and the character will also be getting a spin-off series of her own. Disney+ and Marvel had been giving very little away about the character’s backstory, but that has now been revealed a little with Episode 3.
The next episode should shed a little more light on the matter of her uncle, as well as how Yelena is going to be introduced to the story. It’s possible that Yelena won’t be that much of a feature here, which could hint at more of a presence for Florence Pugh on the big screen, which would work well, but the hit on Barton has still got to be addressed at some point.
It’s going to be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the end, but at the moment there’s more than enough intrigue in the first few episodes of Hawkeye to hint at it being a strong new addition to Disney+. The name Echo also hints at the possibility of additional powers for the character, so we’re going to be watching the rest of the debut season with even more anticipation.
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