‘Echo’ just answered a burning question we’ve been wondering since ‘Avengers: Endgame’

Marvel Studios made a lot of the fact that Echo, its latest series to drop on Disney Plus, is the first to be released under the brand-new Marvel Spotlight banner — we’re still not entirely sure what that means but basically it’s to be applied to those projects that are standalone and don’t require a doctorate in MCU-ology to understand.

At least, that’s what we’ve been told. In actual fact, Echo is arguably more dependent on Marvel’s history than most — it’s both a follow-up to Hawkeye and Daredevil, for one, with your enjoyment of the show surely damaged if you really have no idea who that guy with the horns is or the identity of the big dude who looks like a non-purple Thanos. What’s more, Echo even goes so far as to finally provide an answer to something we’ve been wondering ever since Avengers: Endgame.

Five years later, Marvel has finally revealed Daredevil’s fate

Now that we’ve seen Echo, we can understand why the promos were so focused on Kingpin’s inclusion over Matt Murdock’s, as the Man Without Fear only has 98 seconds of screen time in the entire five-part series. Still, at least we got Charlie Cox back in the red suit for the first time since 2018 and this all-too-brief return did solve a mystery that’s been bugging us since the Netflix series ended.

Daredevil’s Echo cameo occurs in a flashback sequence. Following her father’s death at the hands of Ronin (aka Clint Barton), Maya Lopez is taken further under the wing of her “uncle” Wilson Fisk and quickly rises up the ranks of his criminal empire. In one scene, she even gets to battle the hero of Hell’s Kitchen and Kingpin is impressed with how well she handles herself.

So, here’s the subtly important thing about this sequence: seeing as Hawkeye only operated as Ronin during The Blip, this flashback must take place sometime between 2018 and 2023. Therefore, Daredevil’s cameo seemingly confirms at last that Matt Murdock was not snapped away by Thanos. From the looks of it, Daredevil and Kingpin’s eternal enmity continued like nothing had changed throughout those five years, even though the world was missing half its population.

Neither Spider-Man: No Way Home nor She-Hulk: Attorney at Law touched on what Matt had been up to since DD season 3, so it’s taken us this long to find out. Hopefully Daredevil: Born Again will further flesh out the superhero lawyer’s recent past.