Phase Five · Multiverse Saga
Echo
Maya Lopez returns to her hometown roots while being hunted by the Kingpin.
Availability changes by country and by week, so this searches JustWatch rather than guessing.
Can you skip Echo?
Yes, on a first watch. It is self-contained, and nothing in the main MCU story depends on it. Come back to it later if you want more. In chronological order, reaching it takes about 57h 44m of essential viewing across 33 titles. Show only the MCU essentials.
Skippable, and it was the first Marvel series released with an adult certificate, under a label the studio used once and then quietly dropped. Watch Hawkeye first; the protagonist and her relationship with Kingpin both come from it.
The best material is the quietest. Maya is Choctaw and deaf, and the series goes back to Oklahoma, uses sign language extensively without subtitling every exchange, and opens each episode with a sequence from Choctaw history connecting her to an ancestor. That framing is more interesting than anything in the plot.
The plot is a conventional crime story, five episodes long, about leaving a criminal organisation and being pursued by the man who ran it. Alaqua Cox is a non-professional performer in a lead role and is physically commanding; the series around her is paced oddly, with two episodes of setup and a resolution that arrives too fast.
Vincent D'Onofrio is the main draw, and the series does real work on Kingpin's self-image that Daredevil: Born Again proceeds from. Five episodes, under four hours.
MCU guides
Where it sits in the MCU order
- Release order
- #47 of 80
- Chronological order
- #48 of 80
- Released
- 9 January 2024
- In-universe era
- Incursions Begin
What to watch next
In release order
In chronological order