While we already know that Alaqua Cox is playing Echo in Hawkeye and then, in the future, her own Disney+ show, we got our first glimpse of Echo in the Hawkeye episode titled “Hide and Seek.” Decked out in leather and looking like someone who would gladly kick Clint Barton’s ass without any regrets, Cox’s first moment as Echo was enough to get us invested in her future in the MCU.

**Slight spoilers for the first two episodes of Hawkeye follow!**

So who exactly is Echo/Maya Lopez as a character, and what can we expect to see from her in the future of her own show and Hawkeye? Let’s talk a bit about her as a character and where she could end up!

Who is Echo?

Echo was created David Mack and Joe Quesada in 1999 and is one of the few deaf superhero characters that we have. She is a Native American woman with extensive martial arts training and has an iconic white handprint as part of her Echo uniform. In the comics, Clint Barton is also deaf, and Hawkeye has added hearing damage to the MCU canon of the character, so I feel as if that will play a part in the relationship between the two of them, but Echo also has a superpower known as “photographic reflexes.”

Like Taskmaster, she can mimic the fighting styles of those she’s fighting against, which is going to be incredible, given the characters joining the show (like Kate Bishop and Yelena Belova). But Maya is also the adoptive daughter of Wilson Fisk in the comics (something that ties back to a rumor about Hawkeye that would be incredible to see) and is initially seen as a villain, but quickly turns heroic when she realizes Fisk’s manipulation.

So, maybe we’ll see Maya’s connection to Kingpin in Hawkeye and her breaking away from him in time for her heroism in her own show?

All this to say that Echo is an extremely fascinating character that I’m excited to see grow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel’s Phase 4 is so fun because we get to explore characters we probably wouldn’t have seen before, like Echo, and the future of her role in Clint Barton and Kate Bishop’s story is exciting. I do hope that she gets to meet Yelena, too, and all three badasses get to work together in some way or another.

I cannot wait to see more of Echo in Hawkeye. We just got a brief introduction to her as the Track Suit guys brought Clint to see her, and that last moment of the second episode, when she was feeling the vibrations from the speakers and turned to see one of the men telling her about Clint, was enough to get me excited for her future in the MCU! This is an Echo/Maya Lopez stan account.

(image: Marvel Entertainment)

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