Hi Hawkeye!
*Warning: Spoilers for Echo episode 1 ahead.*
As Maya Lopez’s journey in the MCU continues with Echo, we were reacquainted with a very familiar face in episode 1 – Clint Barton/Hawkeye, played by Jeremy Renner.
It’s not exactly a new appearance from the Avenger – episode 1 revisits a scene from Hawkeye in which Clint reveals to Maya that Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), who she considered family, was behind the death of her father, sparking her quest for vengeance.
As episode 1 deals with Maya’s back story, it shows that conversation again, with Clint saying: “You and I, we’re the same. When you’re filled with rage, it makes you blind. You can be used. You can be manipulated.
“Your boss wanted your father dead. Yes, your boss.”
While Maya goes on to shoot Kingpin in the head, as we saw in the final episode of Hawkeye, he survives, with episode 1 of Echo ending with the crime boss taking a deep breath as he recovers in hospital.
Echo fills in some of the gaps of Maya’s back story before going on to show how her reckless behaviour catches up with her.
Chatting to RadioTimes.com about the series, director Sydney Freeland stressed the importance of Maya staying a villain.
She explained: “The question was just how gritty can we go? How grounded can we be? And one of the most interesting things about Hawkeye was the fact that Maya Lopez was a villain, and that’s what really attracted me to the project.
“In conversations with Marvel, as we were talking about the character, the response was, like, ‘Let’s lean into that, let’s see how far we can go down that rabbit hole.’
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“Really, as we come into the series, Maya Lopez is a villain. But the goal is not to turn her into Captain America. No, no, no. That, to me, is actually kind of boring.
“It’s exploring those nuances and those dynamics and also the other thing that was exciting to explore was, how does a Deaf indigenous girl from Oklahoma become a top lieutenant in Kingpin’s army, and potentially even become a successor?