Yahoo News Echo EPs Break Down That [Spoiler] Cameo — Plus, Grade the Premiere!
(The following contains MAJOR spoilers from Episode 1 of Disney+’s Echo. Proceed accordingly.)
Few can say they’ve gone the distance with the Devil, and Echo’s Maya Lopez (played by Alaqua Cox) is one of them.
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In the Disney+ show’s first episode — all five episodes were released Tuesday on both Disney+ and Hulu — the former Hawkeye antagonist found herself going toe-to-toe with Daredevil (Charlie Cox).
During a sequence set in the past, Maya was carrying out plans to eliminate associates who were closing in on her adoptive father Wilson Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) territory when Daredevil dropped in. She held her own against the famed hero in their one-on-one fight, which was filmed in one long, uninterrupted take and culminated with Daredevil toppling a shelf on her before disappearing.
Maya’s strong standing against Daredevil not only impressed Kingpin, but also signaled her transition from teenager to full-blown villain. It was after that moment that she became the ruthless killer we’d eventually meet at the end of Hawkeye’s second episode.
“What I loved about it was that Maya Lopez entered that scene as a teenage girl, and she left that scene as a cold-blooded killer,” director and executive producer Sydney Freeland tells TVLine. “Internally, we started referring to that scene as the “birth of a villain” scene. I wanted the audience to be able to see that transformation happen in real time, and that’s what lends itself to us shooting as a oner.”
Richie Palmer, who also executive-produces the show, notes that Daredevil’s brief cameo was “all in service of Maya’s story.”
“He was there in a way like he was in the comics when Maya was first introduced,” Palmer adds. “Maya showing that she can go the distance with Daredevil really shows Kingpin, ‘Oh, there’s something to this kid that I haven’t seen before.'”
Maya made her official debut in the Marvel comic Daredevil (1998) #9, where she met and fell in love with Matt Murdock not knowing he was Daredevil, who Kingpin told her had killed her father. Murdock later revealed his secret identity to Maya while they fought as Daredevil and Echo, respectively.
But don’t expect a romance between both characters in Echo. Instead, Maya is focused on her family as well as Kingpin, who orchestrated her father William’s (Zahn McClarnon) murder at Ronin’s (Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton/Hawkeye) hand. In Hawkeye’s Season 1 finale, Maya learned of Kingpin’s role in her father’s death and shot him at point-blank range in an alley. However, as we saw at the end of Echo‘s series premiere, he survived the attempted murder but appeared badly wounded in a hospital bed.
Meanwhile, Cox will next reprise his Daredevil/Matt Murdock role in the upcoming series Daredevil: Reborn alongside Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin.
The actor most recently appeared as Murdock in the 2022 Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, where he befriended Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), and in the 2021 film Spider-Man: No Way Home, where he offered Peter Parker (Tom Holland) legal advice after the teen hero’s identity was exposed to the world.
What did you think of Echo’s first episode? Grade the premiere below, and then share your thoughts in the comments.
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