Loki, we thank you for your service in saving the MCU multiverse and becoming god of everything, but is there any chance you could use your powers to make the Marvel timeline a little easier to understand?
Now that we’re over 30 movies and 10 TV shows (well, 16, following the Defenders Saga becoming official canon) deep into the MCU, working out how it all fits together into one continuity is becoming more and more of a challenge. Honestly, things have never really been simple since Avengers: Endgame jumped five forward five years, with the real world still playing catch-up to the Marvel universe.
And yet, because MCU fans are gluttons for punishment, those tuning into Echo on Disney Plus may still wish to get to the bottom of exactly when the Alaqua Cox vehicle — Marvel Studios’ first TV-MA series — is set in the timeline. So let’s give it our best shot.
Echo is a dizzying journey through the complicated Marvel timeline
On the one hand, Echo‘s time frame is actually pretty simple to determine. We know that Hawkeye takes place in December 2024 (although it aired in December 2021) and a caption in Echo tells us the show picks up Maya’s arc “5 months later.” So, using our Tony Stark-sized brains, we can deduce that the bulk of the series is set in May 2025.
The flashbacks that are interspersed throughout the narrative are much harder to pinpoint, however. The first half-hour of the series premiere, for example, recaps Maya’s entire life up until now. This tells us that her mother died and she moved from Oklahoma to New York with her father in 2007. Archival footage from Hawkeye then reminds us her dad was killed by Ronin. Clint Barton only went by his assassinating alter ego during The Blip, so this event has to have to taken place between 2018 and 2023.
At some indeterminate point after this, Kingpin allowed Maya to rise up through the ranks of the Tracksuit Mafia and she soon tussled with Daredevil in a fight. This presumably occurred during The Blip too, so this seemingly confirms that Matt Murdock was not among those snapped away by Thanos. If so, this finally answers a question we’ve been wondering ever since Daredevil was cancelled by Netflix.
There are some discrepancies in the timeline, though. Maya left her hometown of Tamaha, Oklahoma in 2007, but her family remarks that she hasn’t been back in 20 years — though this is possibly just a rounded-up figure. What’s more, flashbacks that flesh out young Maya’s bond with Wilson Fisk must take place in the late 2000s, even though Fisk is shown wearing a white suit — something he didn’t start doing until he met his wife, Vanessa, in 2015.
Just like the rest of the MCU, then, Echo‘s place in the timeline makes sense at first glance but when you take a closer look it starts to get messier than one of the show’s brutal, blood-soaked fight scenes.