Black Widow could secretly be a Soviet super-soldier in the MCU. Natasha Romanoff is one of the most remarkable Avengers. On the face of it, she’s an ordinary human who somehow stands alongside gods and super-soldiers, and yet holds her own. Of course, the truth is that the MCU has never pretended that she’s just an ordinary human. She was introduced as one of SHIELD’s top assets, essentially Marvel’s premiere super-spy.

But could there be more to Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow than that? The Black Widow movie will introduce David Harbour as Red Guardian, Russia’s answer to Captain America, and in doing so it will subtly hint that the United States wasn’t the only country attempting to create super-soldiers after the Second World War. Olivier Richters, the world’s largest bodybuilder, has also been cast for an unknown role; there’s speculation that he could play Ursa Major, another of the Soviet super-soldiers.

Marvel Studios could potentially draw inspiration from Richard K. Morgan and Bill Sienkiewicz’s six-issue Black Widow miniseries, which released in 2004. There, Natasha Romanoff learned the truth behind the Red Room, and discovered that she had secretly conducted super-soldier experiments on all their agents. They used biochemicals to grant their Black Widows enhanced immune systems and healing factors. “Your wounds heal four, maybe five times as fast as a normal human’s would,” Lyudmila Kudrin, the manager of the Red Room explained to Natasha. “You hardly get sick, you don’t age as fast… Your hair doesn’t fall out, your skin can take wind and sun…” The Red Room didn’t want anyone to know what they’d done to their Black Widows in the event one was captured, though, so they used hypnotic conditioning and memory blocks to implant false memories. Crucially, these fake memories were of ballet classes; after all, the Black Widows’ handlers reasoned, what little girl doesn’t dream of being a ballet dancer?

It actually wouldn’t be too difficult to incorporate this into the MCU. To date, precious little is known of Black Widow’s MCU backstory; she trained under the Red Room, but just what was that like? So far, the only hints have been through memories and hallucinations in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and those scenes featured the ballet dances that were part of the conditioning in the comics. Meanwhile, according to the Black Widow 2004 series, these experiments meant it would be dangerous for a Black Widow to get pregnant. “Pregnancy is an illness,” Kudrin explained to Natasha. “A weakening. The fetus grossly distorts your body’s functions at a physical and a biochemical level.”

In the comics, the systems installed by the Red Room would treat pregnancy as an attack, and induce a miscarriage. But it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where the MCU’s version was a threat to the woman as well, leading the Red Room to remove a Black Widow’s womb as part of their experimentation. That would provide a story purpose for their disturbing “graduation ceremony” of sterilizing their agents, which was also disclosed in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Whatever the truth, it stands to reason that Black Widow will reveal it. After all, the Black Widow trailer makes it clear that Natasha Romanoff is going to be forced to go back to her beginnings, taking on the Red Room itself. That makes this a perfect opportunity to bring clarity - and perhaps reclassify Natasha Romanoff as a Soviet super-soldier in her own right

More: Black Widow Trailer Proves The Movie Is Years Too Late

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