Echo's Ending is Wild, Cathartic, and Unlike Anything Marvel Has Done Before
Men would rather run crime empires than go to therapy.
Marvel’s newest show, Echo, focuses on a returning hero and a fan-favorite villain: Maya Lopez and her adopted uncle, Kingpin. Their relationship is complicated, to say the least, and it leads to a train robbery, a skating rink fight, and the kidnapping of Maya’s grandmother and cousin.
But in its last moments, Echo attempts an ending that’s never been seen in Marvel TV. Instead of a physical resolution to the show’s conflict, there’s an emotional one. Here’s everything you need to know about the last moments of Echo, and how it sets Maya up as a hero going forward.
Spoilers for Echo ahead!
When Maya faces Kinpin again, she has access to her newfound powers. She summons the spirits of all her predecessors, and uses the powers her mother told her she inherited: strategy, cunning, ferocity, love. But just what does that mean? She’s able to give her family super strength, but there’s more going on than that.
Maya’s mom taught her that they “don’t harm living things,” so Echo decides not to shoot Kingpin like she did at the start of Echo. Instead, she summons the healing power we saw her mother use on a woodpecker in a flashback. But Maya’s interested in healing far more than Kingpin’s wounded eye.
Maya summons healing energy to defeat Kingpin.
Instead, she sends Kingpin into his past, when he was a terrified child with an abusive father. Kingpin brutally murdered his father to save his mother, a moment that set him on the path to becoming the feared mob boss he is now. But Maya sees what this means for Wilson Fisk, the man behind Kingpin.
“Don’t listen anymore,” Maya says. “Let go of the pain. Let go of the anger.” When the two return to reality, it’s clear something in Fisk has changed. His reaction, of course, is anger. “What did you just do? What did you do?” he screams, as his goons lead him to his car. Maya may not have cured decades of emotional pain with one touch, but whatever she did, it was enough to make Kingpin leave her alone.
Kingpin isn’t going away — the post-credits scene made it clear he’s going to make a play for political power — but Echo’s emotional manipulation made him face his greatest fear, and that was enough to defeat him without a single shot.
Maya has come a long way from snapping necks, and now she realizes her powers come from her past, not despite it. Kingpin has refused to learn the same lesson, which makes him perfectly poised to be the next supervillain of Marvel TV’s street-level universe.
