Echo has arrived and despite its smaller scale, it couldn’t help but shakeup its own small corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at least a little bit. Marvel’s first Spotlight series released all five episodes on Tuesday night, but it isn’t until the final moments of the series the show makes its own ripples. In usual Marvel fashion, the reveal came during a brief mid-credits scene.
Here’s everything you need to know about Echo’s mid-credits scene, and how it connects to the rest of the MCU — at least for the heroes who hang out on the streets of New York City.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Echo.]
While Daredevil shows up early in Echo, unsurprisingly it’s Kingpin who has the biggest impact at the end of the series. Echo’s one mid-credits scene opens on Wilson Fisk sitting in his private plane while the news plays in the background. New York City is in the thick of a heated mayoral election season and no clear frontrunner has emerged. In fact, the pundits describe it as a downright fight, and joke that a bare-knuckle boxer would probably have the best shot.
In other words, the people are practically begging for Mayor Kingpin, and the big man has noticed. Far from the universe (or multiverse) conquering aspirations of many MCU villains, it seems like Kingpin is content to set his sights squarely on the Big Apple for now.
Wilson Fisk has been the mayor of New York City in comics before — and fairly recent ones at that. He cheated (voter fraud) his way into the office on a platform of outlawing superheroes in New York City — which, following that whole Evil Captain America Tries to Take Over the United States thing, wasn’t as unpopular a position as you’d think. And he succeeded: Superheroes are still technically outlawed in the NYC of Marvel Comics today, although Daredevil, Spider-Man and the like are still fightin’ the corrupt and malicious, even as the next mayor, Luke Cage, tries to get the law repealed.
Whether or not the MCU follows that exact template (Fisk outlawing costumed vigilantes, attempting to rub shoulders with truly powerful shadow billionaires, and his inevitable fall) Fisk’s mayoral seat could be a plot point for a whole host of future projects. The MCU has quite a few characters in New York right now, and most of them are young and street level and therefore very likely to be impacted by Kingpin.
For one thing, Peter Parker is back to being the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man after everyone forgot his identity in No Way Home. On top of that there’s Kate Bishop’s Hawkeye, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova whenever she’s in town, Daredevil and whoever his show introduces (whenever it actually gets released), as well as Kamala Khan, though she might have graduated to strictly intergalactic conflicts after The Marvels.
Now, if all of this makes it sound like Kingpin is the perfect big bad for all these heroes to team up against, that’s apparently exactly right. Echo producer Brad Winderbaum told Screen Rant’s Joe Deckelmeier that he hit the nail on the head when he called Kingpin the “Thanos of the street-level corner of the MCU.”
So while Echo may not have any connections to the next Avengers movie, the series did have quite a big impact on what’s coming next for Marvel’s smaller-time heroes. And we can expect to see Wilson Fisk next in Daredevil: Born Again, though with the show reportedly receiving a considerable overhaul in preparation for a return to shooting this spring, it’s unclear when exactly that will be.