How Marvel's Echo Sets Up Daredevil: Born Again
Here's how that Kingpin twist happened in the comics.
[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Echo episode 5, "Maya."] Wilson Fisk for mayor? In Marvel Studios fashion, Echo ends with a post-credits scene setting up what's to come in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After setting out to systematically dismantle her "uncle" Kingpin's (Vincent D'Onofrio) operations in the wake of the Hawkeye finale, aspiring "Queenpin" Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) returns to her hometown of Tamaha, Oklahoma. It's there that Maya — having connected with her Choctaw ancestors, who "echo" through her — calls upon an ancient power descendant from her ancestors Chafa, Lowak, Tuklo, and Taloa.
Her palms glowing orange with mystic power, Maya defeats the Kingpin's thugs and manifests her ancestors in the Echo finale. Maya then overpowers Fisk and, rather than kill him, saves him. Maya's healing powers penetrate Fisk's mind to mentally return him to his childhood bedroom, where he suffered abuse at the hands of his father, Bill Fisk (Richie Palmer, Sr.), as seen on Marvel's Daredevil. "Don't listen anymore," Maya tells Fisk as his father screams at his mother. "Let go of the pain. Let go of the anger."
A young Fisk murdered his father with a hammer — the same hammer he attempts to gift to his protégé Maya in Echo. But Maya rejects Fisk's violence and mystically heals him emotionally, telling him: "You are my uncle." He then escapes the Choctaw powwow before the police arrive.
Echo Post-Credits Scene, Explained
In the Echo post-credits scene, we see Fisk calling for a meeting with all the remaining heads of New York's crime families to "stabilize the situation before it spirals out of control." As he returns home to Hell's Kitchen by private plane, his television is tuned into a news broadcast covering New York's upcoming mayoral election.
"It turns out most voters want somebody who is a fighter," a reporter says, catching Fisk's attention. A second newscaster remarks that works against career politicians. "There are legitimate problems in the city right now. And the voters want somebody who understands the pain they're going through, who understands the frustration they're going through." According to the reporter, New Yorkers want "a bare-knuckle brawler" and "an outsider, somebody who is not afraid to take on the establishment." Fisk, still emotionally unnerved by Maya, watches intently. "That's what the poll is telling us. It could be anybody's race."
That includes Fisk, once a prominent New York businessman whose mob-backed companies help rebuild Hell's Kitchen after the neighborhood was caught in the crossfire during the Battle of New York in 2012 (in The Avengers). It was blind lawyer by day, costumed vigilante by night Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) who exposed Fisk's criminal dealings, leading to his eventual arrest.
Fisk will follow in his father's footsteps: Bill Fisk worked with the mob while campaigning for New York's 3rd District Council in the '70s, ultimately leading to his son's life of crime. When he returns in Daredevil: Born Again, the new series reviving Marvel's Daredevil, it will be as New York mayoral candidate Wilson Fisk.
Daredevil: Mayor Fisk
In the comics, the crime lord rigged the election to become Mayor Fisk during writer Charles Soule's run on Daredevil. (Fisk waited until the last possible day under the Board of Elections' rules to announce his candidacy and ran as an independent. "He said he was New York. He'd lived it poor, he'd lived it rich, he knew it uptown and down. Said he knew what we needed," Foggy Nelson tells Matt Murdock in Daredevil #595. "He made it a New York thing — like living in this city is all about working the system, knowing how to get things done. Bending the rules when you need to. Who better to do that than the Kingpin of Crime?")
As Murdock attempted to build a case against Fisk for electrion fraud, the corrupt mayor implemented an anti-vigilante law to outlaw street-level superheroes — like his longtime nemeses Daredevil and Spider-Man — a law he enforced with his Thunderbolt task force. The city's superheroes — including Daredevil, Elektra, Spider-Man, and Luke Cage and Jessica Jones — eventually unseated Mayor Fisk during the Devil's Reign storyline. Harlem hero Luke Cage replaced Fisk as mayor, but the Kingpin's anti-vigilante law remains in place even as New York is in the grip of a city-wide gang war waged by super-criminals.
All episodes of Marvel's Echo are now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
