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• Leviathan Projects
• Soviet Armed Forces Projects

The Red Room , also known as the Black Widow Program , was a secret Soviet - Russian training program that involved taking young women and turning them into elite spies and assassins known as Black Widows . Initially using psychological conditioning to make the Widows obedient, by the 2000s the program had shifted to using mind control. The program was terminated in 2016 when former Widows Natasha Romanoff , Melina Vostokoff and Yelena Belova destroyed the Red Room Academy and killed its leader, Dreykov .

• 1.1.1 Training Young Girls
• 1.1.2 Graduation Ceremony
• 1.2.1 Dottie Underwood's Training
• 1.2.2 Johann Fennhoff's Revenge Plot
• 1.3.1 Natasha Romanoff's Selection
• 1.3.2 Relocation
• 1.3.3 Chase for the Red Dust
• 1.3.4 Termination of the Red Room
• 1.4.1 Enthralling HYDRA Stomper
• 3 References
• 4 External Links

History [ ]

Curriculum [ ], training young girls [ ].

The Red Room's Black Widows were all handpicked by the leaders of the program based on their genetic potential as infants; some of these girls were orphaned or abandoned, while others were literally taken from their families by the Red Room, either through bargaining or force. [1] The girls chosen for the Red Room are put through strenuous daily training, including hand-to-hand combat training, acrobatics, weapons training, and tactical skills. Occasionally, two girls are chosen to violently spar against each other; weakness is not tolerated and the loser is killed by their opponent.

The girls are forced to watch video projections such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , however, the videos are full of subliminal messages including "Instill," "Fear," and "Pain," slowly brainwashing the girls. During sleep, all "students" have both their hands handcuffed to the bed frame to prevent attempts of escaping. [2]

The girls' training also includes intense ballet dance lessons, where their instructor ordered them to repeat their routine over and over again, so they can become unbreakable. Many times, when the girls are trained in the use of firearms, they would use actual people as shooting targets for practice. [3] The training is so brutal that approximately one in twenty of the girls in each generation ended up surviving to become fully-fledged Black Widows, due in part to Dreykov 's insistence that the program eliminate defects. [1]

Graduation Ceremony [ ]

Red Room doctors prepare for their ceremony

The "Graduation Ceremony", which takes place after the agents have successfully passed a series of physical and mental tests, involves the young women receiving involuntary hysterectomies. Removing their ability to bear children (and, by extension, eliminating their menstrual cycles) makes the Red Room graduates more loyal and better killers; they never have to experience such weakness as worrying more about a family than their mission. [3]

Training Spies [ ]

Dottie underwood's training [ ].

Dottie Underwood sharing food with Anya

In 1937 , the girl who would assume the identity of Dottie Underwood was one of the many girls that lived and were trained as elite spies and assassins in the Red Room Academy.

Dottie Underwood is forced to murder Anya

Every morning, one of her instructors entered the room and opened the handcuffs that tied each girl to her bed. One of those mornings, Underwood shared a piece of bread she managed to hide with one of her friends, Anya , whom she later had to fight with as part of their training under the watch of her instructor. Though it looked like an even match at first, Underwood managed to overpower Anya and grabbed her by the neck. With a gesture, her instructor ordered Underwood to kill her friend, and she subsequently broke her neck. [2]

Johann Fennhoff's Revenge Plot [ ]

Dottie Underwood seduces Howard Stark

By 1944 , having completed her training with the Red Room and become a highly skilled assassin, Dottie Underwood had begun working for the organization known as Leviathan . Through her work with Leviathan, Underwood came into contact with Johann Fennhoff , who used her as his personal assassin, during his revenge mission against Howard Stark . Underwood was sent to the United States of America , where she spied on Stark, [4] and Peggy Carter , whom she moved next door to.

Dottie Underwood murdering Otto Mink

Underwood would use her skills as a Red Room assassin, to ensure that Fennhoff's plan continued without issue, assassinating Ray Krzeminski and Jerome Zandow , before Zandow could reveal any information that Leet Brannis had told him about Fennhoff and the Red Room. [5] When Underwood had later encountered Otto Mink attempting to break into Carter's room, she used her Red Room training to break Mink's neck, killing him before stealing his Automatic Pistol . [6] With her skills as a spy, Underwood broke into Carter's room herself, in order to learn what the SSR had done with Stark's stolen weapons.

The Red Room is found by Peggy Carter

However, the SSR were able to learn of the connection between the theft of Stark's weapons and Russia , as they sent Carter and Jack Thompson on a mission to break into the Red Room Academy and learn more. As Carter and Thompson joined forces with the Howling Commandos , they infiltrated the academy, discovering their classrooms, which involved footage of American programming, intended to brainwash their young, female assassins. During their search of the Academy, Dum Dum Dugan encountered Eva crying in the corner, as he attempted to comfort her. However, Eva revealed herself to be an assassin, as she killed Junior Juniper and escaped.

Eva prepares to murder Dum Dum Dugan

With the Red Room's guards now quickly closing in on their location, Carter and the Howling Commandos had then prepared to escape from the academy, encountering Fennhoff and Nikola along the way, whom they freed, unaware that Fennhoff was behind the entire conspiracy. While they battled the Red Room's guards, Eva once again managed to sneak up on them, shooting Mike Li in the back of the head, before once again escaping. [2] Once the group had returned to America, with Fennhoff, Carter had become convinced that Russia was training these young girls to become their assassins, causing Fennhoff to decide that she needed to be assassinated.

Dottie Underwood tries to kill Peggy Carter

Fennhoff was able to communicate these orders to Underwood, who had killed Seth Honicky to gain access to an office across from the SSR's office. Underwood managed to get the drop on Carter, who had been unaware of her true intentions, as Underwood used the Sweet Dreams Lipstick to knock her unconscious, before attempting to cut her throat, only for Thompson and Daniel Sousa to interrupt and arrest Carter, failing to suspect Underwood's true intent, while Carter watched on as Underwood disappeared into the crowd, with no one expecting Underwood to be involved with any of this. [7]

Dottie Underwood spies on Johann Fennhoff

Underwood would continue getting her orders from Fennhoff, until the SSR realized what was happened, and sent agents to arrest her. Underwood was able to subdue Sousa, before escaping down the stairs, killing Corcoran on the way out. Underwood would then collect Fennhoff, once he had made his escape, as the pair continued their mission, leaving the Midnight Oil in a public theatre, to test its effectiveness. [8] Underwood would also capture Officer Pike along the way to escape, whom they later used to gain access to Stark, with Underwood being annoyed that Stark had forgotten about her seduction of him.

Dottie Underwood is beaten by Peggy Carter

Underwood and Fennhoff attempted to mind control Stark and force him to drop Midnight Oil on New York City , causing a massacre. However, they were eventually found by Carter, who attempted to arrest them both, only for Underwood to disarm Carter, allowing Fennhoff to run, with Underwood commenting that she intended to take on Carter's identity soon. Despite Underwood's training, Underwood was defeated by Carter and kicked out of a window, although she survived the fall and escaped, while Fennhoff was arrested, and Stark was convinced to return, having not dropped the Midnight Oil. [4]

Next Generation [ ]

Natasha romanoff's selection [ ].

Natasha Romanoff is selected by Dreykov

Decades later, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the Red Room became a remnant of it. Natasha Romanoff was raised and trained in the Black Widow Program, after being recruited to the KGB . There, she endured both an education and indoctrination into the world of spycraft and soon became regarded as one of the best students of the program.

Natasha Romanoff just before her procedure

When the time came for her to go through the graduation ceremony, Romanoff pretended to fail in her physical exams, but Madame B. realized that she was faking, so she made her go through the graduation ceremony anyway. [3]

Relocation [ ]

After surviving an assassination attempt by Natasha Romanoff and S.H.I.E.L.D. , Dreykov , whom the world believed to be dead, relocated the Red Room Academy into the high-tech aerial facility in the skies over Russia . Held aloft by multiple large turbine engines, it contained a multitude of rooms, including a laboratory, a training room, a section for holding captives, as well as Dreykov 's office. The facility could support at least three heavy transport aircraft on a landing platform and maintain a stable position at high altitude. In order to maintain its secrecy, Dreykov had every one of his Black Widows sedated on entry and exit so that they would be unaware of the Red Room's location. [1]

Chase for the Red Dust [ ]

To be added [1]

Termination of the Red Room [ ]

This incarnation of the Red Room was destroyed by ex-Widows Natasha Romanoff , Yelena Belova , and Melina Vostokoff , as well as Dreykov's former partner, Alexei Shostakov , in 2016 . [1]

Alternate Universes [ ]

Enthralling hydra stomper [ ].

To be added

• In the comics, the USSR had a "Black Widow Ops" in which young female orphans are brainwashed and trained in combat and espionage at the covert "Red Room" facility. Natasha Romanoff was one of these women.
• Agent Carter showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas stated in an interview that the Russian Assassin Program is the precursor to the Black Widow Program. [9]

References [ ]

• ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Black Widow
• ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Agent Carter: 1.05: The Iron Ceiling
• ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Avengers: Age of Ultron
• ↑ 4.0 4.1 Agent Carter: 1.08: Valediction
• ↑ Agent Carter: 1.03: Time and Tide
• ↑ Agent Carter: 1.04: The Blitzkrieg Button
• ↑ Agent Carter: 1.06: A Sin to Err
• ↑ Agent Carter: 1.07: SNAFU
• ↑ Marvel's Agent Carter Exclusive: Showrunners Reveal Who Dottie Works For

External Links [ ]

• 1 Deadpool & Wolverine

All About the Red Room in Marvel’s ‘Black Widow’

Black Widow is coming to theaters and Disney+ on July 9, 2021. It has been delayed for over a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Marvel fans are ready to return to the MCU in a big way this summer.

Related: ‘Black Widow’ Coming to Disney+ AND Theaters Credit: Marvel Studios

Whether or not you are planning to see Black Widow in the theaters or in the comfort of your own home with the Premier Access cost of $29.99, you are in for a thrilling adventure following Natasha Romanoff AKA Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in her first solo outing directed by Shortland.

You will also meet a cast of characters from Natasha’s past including Alexei Shostakov/ Red Guardian (David Harbour), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz), and O-T Fagbenle’s mysterious character who may or may not be the villain Taskmaster.

Related: Jimmy Kimmel Blows Marvel Spoiler in Interview with ‘Black Widow’ Star Credit: Marvel Studios

Black Widow is a prequel to the events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). It takes place after Captain America: Civil War (2016) while the Russian spy is on the run from the Sokovia Accords . It is taking the Avenger back to her Russian root and while dealing with her trauma and experience with the Red Room Program .

So, you might want to know more about the Red Room before you sit down with your popcorn and watch Natasha finally take center stage.

Related: ‘Black Widow’ Gets Rating, Tells “Horrifying” Story Credit: Marvel Studios

Origins of the Red Room Academy

During the Cold War, the Russian organization known as Department X created a secret facility located in Moscow. This Red Room Academy kidnapped or recruited young girls to be brainwashed into becoming sleeper agents or deadly assassins known as Black Widows. The most famous graduate of this program is Natasha Romanoff but there have been many others.

What is the Black Widow Program?

The Black Widow Program began with 28 orphan girls. It was run by Professor Grigor Ivanovich Pchelintsov who had developed a method of imprinting false memories onto his subjects. This allowed the Black Widows to become undetectable while under deep cover.

The Back Widow Program was created after the success of the Red Room’s Winter Soldier Program. In Marvel Comics, Natasha and Bucky Barnes AKA the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) have a long romantic history that began in the Red Room.

Related: HUGE Loki Reveal Confirms His Gender Identity Credit: Marvel Studios

As the Black Widow , Natasha also suffered under the hands of Dr. Kudrin, who experimented on all of the subjects to give them superhero-like immune systems that kept them healthy and young for many decades.

In the MCU, during Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) Natasha revealed that as part of the Black Widow Program she was left unable to have children. Other versions of the graduation ceremony involved having young girls fight to the death against their friends.

Related: The Fight For the Ultimate Marvel Character Dominates TikTok Credit: Marvel Studios

What is the role of the Red Room Academy in the Black Widow Program?

It’s a common misconception to equate the Red Room with the Black Widow Program. While the Red Room ran the Black Widows, it also had other nefarious programs. This includes the Winter Soldier Program and the Wolf Spider Program, which is the male equivalent of the Black Widows.

It is possible that Alexei Shostakov’s Red Guardian will be retconned into another program developed under the Red Room Academy. In Marvel Comics, Alexei is not traditionally a graduate of the Red Room like Natasha, whom he married in the comics.

But as Black Widow will focus on the Red Room, his MCU origin will most likely be tied to it. The Winter Guard – Russia’s equivalent to the Avengers — is rumored to appear in the Marvel movie and could become yet another Red Room program.

Related: David Harbour Seemingly Leaks ‘Black Widow’ Surprise Reveal Credit: Marvel Comics

Where was the Red Room Academy first established and by whom?

In Marvel Comics the Red Room Academy was founded by Department X , a program within the KGB. One notable member of Department X is Vasily Karpov, Alexei’s adoptive father. It’s likely Department X and the Red Room Academy will be combined in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for simplicity’s sake.

At one point the Red Room was destroyed but reformed in America under the leadership of Alexander Cady, who cloned Natasha. In one Black Widow trailer, it is suggested that Taskmaster in control after a successful Red Room takeover in the MCU.

Related: ‘Loki’ Defies Expectations, Gives ‘Mad Men’, ‘Beetlejuice’ Vibes Credit: Marvel Studios

What Happens in the Red Room?

We do not much about the exact procedures in the Red Room. In Age of Ultron , Natasha has a flashback where she is dancing ballet. This is a reference to her origin in the comics Natalia Romanova, a ballerina who joined the KGB after her husband’s death. This origin has been completely retconned since.

In Agent Carter , Marvel Studios revealed that the Black Widow students would be chained to the bed each night to prevent them from escaping during their training. They also established that the Red Room used films of popular movies like the Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) to teach the girls to speak English. The film is edited to include the subliminal messages of “ Instill ,” “ Fear ,” and “ Pain .”

Related: Avengers Campus Welcomes Guests Into the Marvel Multiverse Credit: Marvel Studios

What is the Red Room designed for?

The overarching goal of the secret government project was to turn the origin 28 orphans into femme fetal assassins who could infiltrate any organization as sleeper agents and wait to be activated. After graduation, many Black Widows would go on to work for Leviathan, the Russian version of Hydra.

How does the Red Room Academy train participants?

Madame B was Natasha’s teacher while she was in the Red Room. The students are put through all sorts of training on a daily basis which included hand-to-hand combat, weapons, tactics, and acrobatics. In Age of Ultron , Natasha remembers telling Madame B “You’ll break them.” To which her teacher responds “Only the breakable ones. You are made of marble.”

Related: Worst Marvel Movie Ever Makes the Cut for Disney+ Credit: Marvel Studios

How does the Red Room Academy brainwash participants?

The brainwashing part of the program was led by Vasily Karpov and Grigor Pchelintsov, “psychotechnologist”. There was a “programmer” named Professor Radchenko who helped implant the Red Room’s students with false memories, designed to turn the girls into sleeper agents. They might not even know that they were assassins and spies.

This was later involved in cloning their best operatives like Natasha, who had defected to join the Avengers . These clones were blank slates that were more easily programmed with the brainwashing without having to overwrite any existing memories.

Related: Did Marvel Just Confirm They Will Kill Doctor Strange This Year? Credit: Marvel Studios

Notable residents of the Red Room

In Marvel Comics, if a character has ties to Russia it normally stands to reason that they have some connection to the Red Room. In the MCU, fans know that Natasha is a graduate and that she was trained by Madame B.

Some characters from Russia may or may not have volunteered for the program but others like the Winter Soldier were abducted and brainwashed. The Red Room even got their hands on She-Hulk at one point.

Related: Check Out These Marvel Films That Never Got Made

Who is Yelena Belova?

Credit: Marvel Studios

It is most likely that characters introduced in Black Widow like Yelena Belova, Melina Vostokoff, and Alexei Shostakov also came from the Red Room. And the Winter Guard, which David Harbour leaked, is from another Red Room Program as well.

Yelena’s history with the Red is very similar to Natasha’s. In Marvel Comics, Yelena believes that she is the rightful Black Widow and often goes up against Natasha. Natasha in turn thinks of Yelena as more like an annoying younger sister, calling her “little one.”

Related: Marvel’s Phase 4 Takes HUGE Step Forward

Who is Dottie Underwood?

Credit: Marvel Television Studios with ABC

The Disney-owned ABC series Agent Carter introduced another Black Widow named Dottie Underwood (Bridget Regan). Agent Carter may or may not be canon now that Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) went back to live out his life with Peggy Carter (Hailey Atwell) at the end of Avengers: Endgame .

However, Dottie Underwood expanded a lot on how the Red Room worked in the Marvel Universe that is worth catching up on before the Black Widow release . It is through her story that Marvel reveals how the young girls in the Red Room are forced to kill each other as we Dottie kill her friend Anya.

Dottie joined Leviathan and worked with Johann Fennhoff to infiltrate the Strategic Science Reserve (SSR) which was the early form of SHIELD.

Related: “Bucky Barnes Is Free” Says ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Writer Credit: Marvel Televsion Studios

Appearances of the Red Room in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

As of now, Marvel fans have not seen the modern version of the Red Room in the MCU. Marvel Studios has only revealed so much of the program. Its presence is felt in the Black Widow trailer as the Avenger goes back home to deal with something involving the Red Room.

So far, every detail about the Red Room in the Marvel Cinematic Universe comes in flashbacks like the moment that shakes Natasha to her core in Avengers: Age of Ultron .

Related: How Wanda Maximoff Can Retcon the MCU

How does the Red Room fit into the plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron ?

Wanda Maximoff Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and her twin brother Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) first meet the Avengers when they storm a Hydra facility run by Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker (Kai Wulff).

As part of the attack, Wanda mind controls Natasha and she had a flashback of her time in the Red Room. There are flashes of her dancing and using weapons. There are snippets of conversations between Natasha and Madame B. The memories leave Natasha, along with the rest of the Avengers who fell under the Scarlet Witch’s spell, unnerved.

Related: Could Zack Snyder Direct a Hulk Movie? Credit: Marvel

She later opens up to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) about her experience and the two have bonded. There is even subtext in the film where Natasha is a mother-like figure for the Hulk, so she tells Bruce:

“In the Red Room, where I was trained, where I was raised, um, they have a graduation ceremony. They sterilize you. It’s efficient. One less thing to worry about. The one thing that might matter more than a mission. It makes everything easier. Even killing.”

How does the Red Room fit into the plot of Agent Carter?

Related: Is There a Wild Connection Between Bucky Barnes and ‘WandaVision’?

There version of the Red Room from Agent Carter is set in the 1930s before Natasha is even born. Through Dottie Underwood’s flashbacks, more about the brainwashing process is revealed. Marvel shows Underwood and her class learning English by watching Disney movies.

Agent Carter also meets a young girl who has not graduated from the Red Room yet named Eva. While Carter and the Howling Commandos take pity on the young girl, she has already been trained to be a killer. Though a small child, Eva killed two Howling Commandos – Junior Juniper and Mike Li before escaping.

Related: Marvel Actor Criticized For Being “Too Ugly” to Play Shang-Chi

What upcoming Marvel movies is the Red Room expected to appear in?

Marvel Studios will expand the Red Room backstory in the upcoming Black Widow movie. Natasha and the other graduates will take on Taskmaster. Taskmaster may be another Red Room alumna but according to one trailer he controls the Red Room.

Everything about the first appearance of Taskmaster in the MCU has been kept top secret by Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios. It is not known who is playing the villain or what their goal is. It is unlikely he will be another one-and-done Marvel villain as he can currently be seen running around Avengers Campus.

So now you know everything about the Red Room in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, how it relates to Natasha Romanoff and other characters who will be introduced in Marvel’s Phase 4 . Hopefully, you are prepared to catch any Easter eggs in Black Widow .

Let us know in the comments below if you are ready to learn more about Marvel’s Red Room in Black Widow .

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Eight Fun Facts About Black Widows

The venomous spiders are nimble, secretive and dangerous

Theresa Machemer

Correspondent

According to a comic published in 2019 , Avengers founding member Natasha Romanoff earns the codename Black Widow because she works “like the deadliest of spiders, easily escaping notice until it is far too late.” Black widows have a notorious place in the popular imagination as frighteningly inconspicuous, highly venomous creatures that can kill a person with one bite. But the little arachnid’s reputation has been blown out of proportion. To help you better separate fact from fiction, here are eight amazing details about black widow spiders.

They are not the world’s deadliest spider

Contrary to the Marvel comic’s claim, black widows are far from the deadliest spider on Earth. But they do have a more intimidating name than the world’s actual most-venomous spiders, Australia’s funnel-web spiders . The Australian redback spider , a close relative of American black widows, is another contender because its venom is more potent and its bites are more common than funnel-webs.

Black widows are the most venomous spider in North America. Their venom is about 15 times stronger than rattlesnake venom, and uses a chemical called alpha-latrotoxin to overwhelm nerve cells and cause immense pain. When the alpha-latrotoxin reaches a person’s nerve cell, the nerve dumps all of its signaling chemicals at once, overwhelming its neighbors. In addition to pain, the a bite can cause swelling around the wound, severe cramping, sweating and chills.

But spiders are much smaller than snakes and don’t release much venom at once, so black widow bites only present high risk to young children and elderly people.

Antivenom exists for bite victims

Roughly 2,500 people go to poison control centers with black widow bites each year to shorten the symptoms with the help of antivenom . Antivenom isn’t prescribed in every case —usually just if the patient is at high risk, has trouble breathing, has high blood pressure or is pregnant.

Antivenom to black widow bites was first manufactured in the 1930s . To make the antivenom, pharmaceutical producers expose horses to small amounts of black widow venom. The horse’s immune system reacts by creating antibodies that target chemicals in the venom. Pharmaceutical producers draw blood with those antibodies and purify them to be used in victims. Those antibodies neutralize venom by flagging a person’s immune system to destroy the pain-inducing chemicals.

Not one, but many species exist

Three North American spider species go by the common name “black widow.” They are the western species, Latrodectus hesperus ; the northern species, Latrodectus variolus ; and the southern species, Latrodectus mactans . Female black widows can reach about one and a half inches long. They are shiny and black, with bright red hourglass-shaped markings on their abdomens. Males are half the size, lighter-colored and have red or pink spots.

As their names suggest, the southern black widow lives across the southern United States, the western along the west coast and in the desert, and the northern black widow can be found in the upper contiguous U.S. and southern Canada .

Black widows share their taxonomic genus with a wild array of 30 other spiders found around the world. The newest addition to the Latrodectus genus, the Phinda button spider , was discovered in 2019 in South Africa, and it lays bright purple eggs.

The young spiders are cannibals

Marvel’s “Black Widow” was trained to kill from a young age, and young black widow spiders have a penchant for violence, too. Research published in 2016 in the journal Animal Behavior showed that when black widow spiderlings hatch together at many different sizes, the largest among them quickly consume their smallest siblings. In trials when the spiderlings hatched at about the same size, they didn’t jump to cannibalism right away.

"The last thing a mother wants is out of her 300 babies, to have one giant one and 299 dead ones," said spider expert Jonathan Pruitt of the University of California at Santa Barbara to the Washington Post ’s Joshua Rapp Learn in 2016. "It really suggests that females have been able to provision their eggs very precisely… so their development is in lockstep."

Sexual cannibalism is surprisingly rare

Black widows earned their name because scientists witnessed the females eat their mates after copulation. But research has shown that in a related species, redback spiders, females only cannibalize their mates about two percent of the time, so experts suspect that American black widows have similar rates of cannibalism in the wild.

The widows’ cannibalistic behavior was first observed in the lab, where males had nowhere to run away from their larger, hungrier counterparts. But in the spiders’ natural habitats, males have the opportunity to make an escape.

Male black widows also have strategies to avoid riskier sexual encounters in the first place; for instance, research suggests they can tell whether or not a female is hungry by her pheromones, so they can avoid potential mates who seem a bit peckish.

And some related species take an aggressive approach. Brown widow and redback spiders sometimes use a process called “ traumatic insemination .” If a male happens upon a juvenile female that has developed only its internal plumbing, the male can pierce a hole in the female’s shell with its fangs and mate. The practice didn’t seem to cause permanent harm to the female spiders, and it gave the males a chance to pass on their genes without getting eaten, and search for another mate down the line.

Tiny slits are used for “Spidey” senses

All of the spiders in the Latrodectus genus have a few things in common: curved feet covered in bristles, earning them the name comb-footed spiders, and messy, irregular nests of silk called tangle webs. Western black widows take two different strategies to build their webs depending on how well-fed they are: starving spiders build more sticky threads, which snag prey, and healthy spiders invest more time in supporting threads, which may stop them from overeating.

The spiders rely on strands of silk in their tangle webs as extensions of their own senses. Thousands of organs called slit sensilla, which look like cracks in the exoskeleton and are especially common on their leg joints, feel vibrations in the silk. By changing its posture, a spider changes the shape of the slit sensilla, so a black widow can tune its senses to certain frequencies of vibrations coming down its web.

Coloring sends a message

The red hourglass on a female black widow’s abdomen sends a clear message: Danger . But humans aren’t the only ones on the lookout for a black widow’s signals. The insects hunted by black widows want to avoid falling into their jaws. Birds and wasps, which generally avoid red critters since it’s a common sign of venom, prey on spiders. (The black widow’s venom doesn’t pack a punch when it’s the one getting eaten.) So as the black widows evolved, they needed to strike a balance between hiding from prey and warning predators off.

Colorado College spider researcher Nicholas Brandley conducted experiments with 3D-printed widows showed that bright red spots protected the fake spiders from bird attacks, he told Smithsonian magazine in 2016. Unadorned plastic spiders were attacked three times more often than the red-spotted ones. In another experiment, a live black widow with many red spots tended to build its web higher up in terrariums than its less-colorful counterpart. The extra spots may give it more protection from predators up high and lurking below.

Climate change is expanding their range

Black widows are most common in the warm environments of the southern and southwestern United States. While they tend to disappear when winter weather arrives, they don’t actually get killed when the temperature starts to drop. Instead, black widows find a protected area and go into a dormant state called overwintering . In spring, they emerge, and the tricky business of mating begins.

Black widows are rare at the northernmost stretches of their range, but climate change may soon change that. Northern black widows today live about 31 miles further into Canada than they did in the 1960s.

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Theresa Machemer | READ MORE

Theresa Machemer is a freelance writer based in Washington DC. Her work has also appeared in National Geographic and SciShow. Website: tkmach.com

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Sorry, Prey. Black Widows Have Surprisingly Good Memory

Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his PhD in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets, or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. “The big question that motivated the work was just wanting to know what is going on inside the minds of animals,” he says.

Biologists already know spider brains aren’t like human brains. Their sensory world is geared for life in webs and dark corners. “Humans are very visual animals,” says Sergi. “These web-building spiders have almost no vision. They have eyes, but they're mostly good for sensing light and motion.” Instead, he says, a black widow’s perception comes mainly from vibrations, kind of like hearing. “Their legs are sort of like ears that pick up the vibrations through the web.”

And in terms of cognition, biologists know that these spiders remember when they’ve caught prey. Some scientists, including Sergi, believe that they even form mental representations of their webs. Yet not much is known about how detailed their memories are, or how past events affect their future decisions. So Sergi and his adviser, spider cognition expert Rafa Rodríguez, decided to put black widow memory to the test. As you might guess, Sergi would offer spiders dead crickets and then steal them back.

The result, they wrote in the journal Ethology , shows that black widows have better memories than previously known. When their prey is spirited away, the spiders search for it repeatedly in the right place. In some cases, they appear to recall the prey’s size—searching more for the biggest stolen snacks. “They're not just reacting to a particular stimulus using set patterns of behavior,” says Sergi. “They have the capacity to make decisions.”

This work serves as a reminder that complex cognitive computations are widespread in the animal kingdom—that internal navigation systems turn up in both big and minuscule brains, including ones that depend on vastly different sensory inputs. “It shows that arthropods are capable of encoding complex memories that people oftentimes associate with vertebrates,” says Andrew Gordus, a behavioral neuroscientist with Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the work. “Invertebrates are a lot more sophisticated than we give them credit for.”

Sergi’s results add to mounting evidence that insects and spiders form—and act on—detailed memories, similarly to the way humans do, but with very different machinery. We orient ourselves with “place cells” in the hippocampus, which arthropods lack. Yet, Gordus says, “they have brain regions that evolved to perform the same function.”

Your central nervous system contains a spinal cord and a 3-pound brain. Spiders have two clusters of neurons called ganglia: one above the esophagus, one below it. This brain’s critical input comes from thousands of sensors along the spider’s exoskeleton called slit sensilla. Each looks like a tiny crack, which deforms as vibrations sweep through the spider’s body. (Some evidence suggests that widows can tune into different frequencies by adjusting their posture .) Spiders are so well-wired to sense vibrations that there is even a debate about whether the spider web is part of its brain .

Compared with humanity’s giant lump of gray matter, this might seem like a radically different computer for processing memories. But to Sergi, what an animal’s brain looks like matters less than the behaviors it produces. For example, birds, as a biological class, have a common brain structure. Yet some excel at cognitive tasks that others don’t. Crows count and use zero . Cockatoos solve logic puzzles . Blue jays hide food in the summer and fall, then remember where to find it in the winter. Even among mammals, another class with similarities in brain structure, some animals are better than others at locating stashed food. Squirrels, of course, are great at it. “They have a standard mammal brain, but they're way better than even humans at remembering where they've stuck things,” says Sergi. “But you wouldn't necessarily pick up on that from just looking at the brain anatomy or watching what they do in an MRI.”

Some spider experts think that arthropods have been underestimated thanks to bias towards big-brained animals. “My background and psychology had initially made me think that only animals with big brains could do anything of interest,” says Fiona Cross, a spider cognition expert from University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who was not involved in the research. “For the longest time, the very suggestion that you could consider spider cognition would just be seen as a joke.”

Yet last year, Sergi published evidence that black widows are capable of path integration , which means that a roaming individual can remember the distance and direction to their retreat, a corner of the web where they rest and eat. He found that they can move around the web without retracing their steps, and even take shortcuts. This time, based on Rodríguez’s previous evidence from banana spiders, Sergi wanted to see if his black widows could search the web for stolen prey—a sign that they can change their behavior when prompted by a memory, rather than just in immediate reaction to an event.

His team’s experiment began with empty plastic boxes, each about a foot wide and deep and 4 inches tall. Sergi would let a black widow build its web inside for one week—“probably a little overkill, but also to make sure that they're hungry and motivated to attack crickets,” he says. In arachnology parlance, each web has two main sections: an upper sheet, which looks like dense net of silk, and a forest of “gumfooted” lines that connect the sheet to a base, like a windowsill or a branch. Gumfooted lines nab crawly creatures like beetles or caterpillars, and sheets catch creatures flying by.

Once the web was ready, Sergi would place a dead cricket into either the sheet or gumfooted lines. Black widows sense that they’ve snagged a meal based on motion and tension in their lines. They approach and touch the prey, then quickly flick out sticky silk and begin wrapping it to immobilize it. Under normal circumstances, the spiders would lug their prey back on a line of silk to their retreat. (“Think of a rock climber's chalk bag, suspended from their waist by a short cord,” Sergi says.) After that, the widows feast: “They’ll suck the juices out of the exoskeleton, then they'll chuck the exoskeleton back out.”

But this time, Sergi stole the feast before they got the chance. He’d snip that line of silk with scissors and yank the cricket back with forceps.

As the black widows went in search of their purloined prey, Sergi’s team would count how many bouts of searching each spider performed. “Each new bout of searching is a decision by the spider to continue searching,” he says.

From these observations, the team made two conclusions: The spiders searched the part of the web where the cricket had been—the sheet or the lines—which indicated a memory of prey location. And when Sergi stole prey from the gumfooted lines, the spiders made more searches for prey that was especially large relative to themselves. To Sergi, it’s an indicator that the spiders are more responsive to this land-dwelling prey, which is often a more reliable meal.

Gordus says the evidence is clear that black widows are searching in an intentional way. "Oftentimes, people think of invertebrates as being very reflexive organisms, that their output is a function of input, whereas we have more complex memories,” he says. But, he continues, it turns out that arthropods “are also capable of performing pretty sophisticated cognitive calculations. Which, if you think about it, isn't too surprising—they navigate the environment, they can find out where they are in space and time. It's a very valuable ability to evolve."

In future work, we may ultimately learn something cool by testing how long the spiders can retain this memory of prey, says Cross. “We need to have an understanding of what brains are capable of doing,” she says. “The spiders that I work with have brains that would fit on a pinhead. And yet, we see this remarkable behavior—that just utterly intrigues me.”

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Long before Natasha Romanov joined the Avengers as Black Widow, she was one of the best spies and assassins in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Next year, Black Widow will give audiences a closer look at the life of Scarlett Johansson's Avenger, including her time training at the Red Room, which forged her into one of the deadliest people in the MCU.

While the Red Room is surrounded by the mystery that envelopes any good spy organization, there's still a good amount of information about the Red Room that we already know. While the MCU's glimpses of Widow's training have been reserved and scattered, comics have explored her past and her time at the Red Room for decades. Now, we're digging into everything we know about the Red Room, both in comics and in the MCU.

RELATED: Yes, Black Widow’s New Movie Costume Comes From the Comics

WHAT IS THE RED ROOM?

While the Red Room has been part of Black Widow's history for years, it wasn't really deeply explored until Black Widow started starring in her own series in the late '90s and '00s. In short, Department X's Red Room Academy was the culmination of the Soviet Union's attempts to produce the world's greatest spies during the Cold War era. The Red Room specialized in taking young girls from birth and precisely and perfectly honing their minds and bodies for the tasks of espionage and assassination, regardless of the ethics that went into producing such high caliber soldiers.

Part of the Red Room's process in the comics involves biochemical conditioning and experimentation that made all trainees immune to the effects of aging and disease while boosting their physical abilities and immune systems. A byproduct of the process was that all trainees were rendered infertile. Besides Romanov, the Marvel Universe's Red Room also saw Yelena Belova, the second Black Widow, and Nadia Pym, the current Wasp, train there, and Bucky Barnes was also an instructor there while he was the brainwashed Winter Soldier.

RELATED: Black Widow: When the Movie Takes Place in the MCU Timeline

THE RED ROOM IN THE MCU

Most of what we know about the Red Room in the MCU comes from the flashbacks briefly seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron . During an intimate conversation with Bruce Banner, Natasha reveals that part of the Red Room's "graduation ceremony" involves a surgery that rendered its subject incapable of conceiving a child. Natasha's flashbacks hinted at her attempts to intentionally fail her training prior to the "ceremony," but she ultimately completed training at the Russian training base.

In other flashes to the MCU's Red Room, Natasha trains in ambidextrous target practice using a handgun and a target with a bullseye. As part of her training, that bullseye was replaced with a man wearing a bag over his head. Although Natasha initially hesitates to execute the man, she eventually takes her shot nevertheless.

Age of Ultron 's flashbacks are not the only insight into the MCU Red Room's amoral training, either. Agent Carter featured another product of Soviet spy training, Dottie Underwood. The series' showrunners confirmed that the Russian Assassin Program was a precursor to the same Black Widow Program that Natasha ultimately underwent.  As a child she was forced to spar with her fellow trainees to the death, murdering those she thought of sisters at the behest of her masters. Hardened by her training, the villainous spy use several aliases and resort to any means necessary to complete her missions.

RELATED: Black Widow: Who's Who in the Teaser Trailer

In Natahsa's case, the training could be as transformative mentally as it was physically, involving repeated viewings of  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves intercut with subliminal messages to instill fear and pain. Black Widow also recalls torturous ballet lessons the girls were forced to endure. While that could've been used as a stamina and agility building exercise, those may be false memories that cover harsher forms of training, if the example set by comics to to be believed.

While ballet was an integral part of Natasha's background for years in the comics, she eventually uncovered that much of her history as a ballerina was actually just another layer to her brainwashing. The same biochemical conditioning that honed her body to perfect made her nauseated to think of the contradictions between training as a ballerina and training as an assassin. With that in mind, Natasha's own memories of her time in the Red Room can't really be trusted at all.

Regardless of what we already know about the Red Room,  Black Widow will doubtlessly delve into what exactly happens at the Red Room. Alongside several clips of the Red Room, the trailer shows a reunion between Natasha and other likely Red Room graduates including Yelena, Melina Vostoff and the Red Guardian, a Russian super-soldier. While the MCU's Red Room is still shrouded in mystery, it won't be too long before its secrets are revealed.

Directed by Cate Shortland, Black Widow stars Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Florence Pugh stars as Yelena, David Harbour as Alexei aka the Red Guardian and Rachel Weisz as Melina. The film opens May 1, 2020.

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Black Widow Timeline Explained

Marvel’s Black Widow plays with the MCU timeline and finally gives Natasha the closure she always deserved.

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This article contains Black Widow spoilers. Read our spoiler-free review here .

Who is Natasha Romanoff? It’s a question Marvel Studios coyly teased for years and then… failed to answer as a full decade and the entire “Infinity Saga” passed us by. Yes, the long overdue Black Widow movie is finally reaching theaters this weekend, but Nat was killed off years ago in the sacred timeline of Marvel Cinematic Universe canon.

Nevertheless, we are happy that the character and Scarlett Johansson received some much deserved closure, and in a film which fills in many of the blindspots in the Black Widow mythos, not least of which includes what she got up to between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War .

With her narrative being seemingly closed for good, it’s time to unpack the oft-obscured life story of Natasha and consider whether she at last balanced out all that red in her ledger.

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• The child who would become Natasha Romanoff is born in Stalingrad to a mother who is forced to give her over to the Soviet government. Despite the mother’s best efforts, she is unable to free Nat from the system. ( Fury’s Big Week , Black Widow )
• After years of indoctrination and training in the Widow program, which is run out of Soviet Col. Dreykov’s Red Room, eight-year-old Natasha is selected alongside three-year-old Yelena to be part of KGB agents Alexei Shostakov (the Red Guardian) and Melina Vostokoff’s cover story. The quartet of sleeper agents move to Ohio, posing as an all-American family while gathering American state secrets. ( Black Widow )
• Alexi and Melina succeed in obtaining critical information and escape U.S. soil. Eleven-year-old Natasha and six-year-old Yelena, who’ve become increasingly Americanized and attached to the family identities they assumed, are traumatized. ( Black Widow )
• Natasha completes her Widow training and graduates from the Red Room, which includes a “ceremony” where she is asked to execute a man bound to a chair. She is then sterilized on an operating table. Dreykov believes robbing “widows” of the chance to have children makes them more ruthless killers. ( Avengers: Age of Ultron )

2002 – 2007

• Natasha is involved in multiple mysterious and apparently bloody Widow operations, which include incidents of murder in São Paulo and a separate “hospital fire” atrocity she is still haunted by. ( The Avengers )

2007 – 2008

• Clint Barton recruits Natasha into the West’s international SHIELD organization. Part of her defection comes at the price of assassinating Dreykov in Budapest. However, it is merely Dreykov’s young daughter Antonia who feels the fire of Nat’s explosives. ( The Avengers , Black Widow )

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• Natasha has her first run in with the Winter Soldier when she attempts to extract a defecting nuclear engineer out of Iran. A brainwashed Bucky Barnes steals her prize by running her car off a cliff in Ukraine and then shooting a bullet through Nat’s stomach and into her asset—killing him instantly. ( Captain America: The Winter Soldier )
• Around this time, Natasha becomes an unofficial member of Clint Barton’s secret family, who live on an idyllic farmhouse. She’s known there as Auntie Nat. ( Avengers: Age of Ultron )
• Natasha infiltrates Stark Industries under the alias of Natalie Rushman, working as a legal assistant who moonlights as a model in order to catch Tony Stark’s lascivious eye. ( Iron Man 2 )
• Natalie becomes Tony’s assistant but is actually spying on him for SHIELD, which has come to realize Tony’s arc reactor—which saved his life in Afghanistan—is now poisoning him. Nat eventually reveals she’s a SHIELD agent and helps prevent an assassination attempt on Stark’s life by rival forces. ( Iron Man 2 )

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Florence Pugh’s Best Roles: What to Watch After Black Widow

• Nat abandons her infiltration of the Russian underworld to recruit Bruce Banner to SHIELD after Loki arrives on Earth, brainwashing Clint Barton and planning world domination. She later successfully interrogates and manipulates the supposed God of Mischief. ( The Avengers )
• Natasha becomes one of the founding members of the Avengers after saving the world from an alien invasion alongside Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk in the Battle of New York. ( The Avengers )
• Still working for SHIELD, Natasha infiltrates a pirate-commandeered SHIELD vessel to protect/steal precious SHIELD secrets while Captain America naively thinks they’re there to save hostages. ( Captain America: The Winter Soldier )
• Black Widow goes rogue alongside Cap after an assassination attempt on her mentor, Col. Nick Fury. Fury of course survived and forms an underground operation with Nat and Rogers to root out HYDRA sleeper cells who’ve slowly taken over SHIELD leadership during the past 70 years. ( Captain America: The Winter Soldier )
• After saving the world from HYDRA’s latest attempt at world domination, Natasha publicly reprimands the American government at a baffling Capitol Hill hearing where she is being questioned by Pentagon brass. ( Captain America: The Winter Soldier )
• … MEANWHILE the Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton from circa 2023—nearly a decade older and sadder—time travel to 2014 in order to undo the damage Thanos caused when he snapped half of life in the universe out of existence with the Infinity Stones. They journey to the planet Vormir where they’re told one will have to die in order to obtain the Soul Stone. Black Widow and Hawkeye fight over who will have the right to sacrifice themselves for the other—Natasha wins and falls to her death, thus ending her tragic timeline in the past. ( Avengers: Endgame )
• Black Widow becomes a full-time Avenger, joining the team as they dismantle the last HYDRA base in Sokovia. They regain Loki’s powerful scepter with an infinity stone inside. ( Avengers: Age of Ultron )
• Black Widow strikes up an intimate and unrequited connection with Bruce Banner. She is the only Avenger able to talk the Hulk down from his rages. The pair consider running off together, but their burgeoning romance is thwarted by the arrival of Ultron—an artificial intelligence that wants to… destroy the world. ( Avengers: Age of Ultron )
• Nat and the Avengers prevent Ultron from killing all organic life on Earth—which involved lifting Sokovia’s capital city into the sky and then dropping it like an asteroid—but in the carnage, Banner/Hulk chooses not to pursue a relationship with Nat, disappearing to parts unknown as she accepts her role as a leader of the growing Avengers roster. ( Avengers: Age of Ultron )
• Black Widow is part of an Avengers operation in Lagos, Nigeria, which goes horribly wrong when in an attempt to stop terrorist Brock Rumlow from stealing a biological weapon, an entire office floor of civilians is killed. ( Captain America: Civil War )
• Shortly after the Lagos incident, the Sokovia Accords are signed by the UN, requiring Avengers and other superpowered individuals to register themselves under the jurisdiction of the UN Security Council. Natasha at first accepts this as a reasonable path forward. She changes her mind when pro-Accords Avenger Tony Stark comes to blows with the resident skeptic, Steve Rogers, in Berlin. Romanoff helps Rogers escape and then also goes to ground. ( Captain America: Civil War )
• As a rogue agent, Natasha is invited back to Budapest and reunites with her faux-little sister Yelena, who reveals Dreykov is still alive and now is literally controlling the minds of the other young women he’s trained to be widows via mind-altering drugs. ( Black Widow )
• Nat and Yelena decide to track Dreykov down and kill him for real, and do so by freeing their “father” Alexi from Siberia and reconnecting with their “mother” Melina, who is still loyal to the Widow program. Melina nonetheless takes her girls to the Red Room, the hidden air fortress where they were trained as children. Yelena kills Dreykov and Natasha frees all the women under Dreykov’s control, including his daughter who did not actually die in Budapest. ( Black Widow )
• Natasha reconnects with Steve Rogers and helps him free Wanda Maximoff, Scott Lang, Sam Wilson, and Clint Barton from the government’s “the Raft” prison vessel. ( Captain America: Civil War , Black Widow )

Black Widow Ending Explained

Marvel’s Black Widow: MCU Easter Eggs and References Guide

• As Thanos’ alien forces invade Earth, Rogers, Romanoff, and other renegade Avengers come out of hiding to save the universe. Natasha is reunited with Banner, and all of them converge in an epic battle against the armies of Thanos in Wakanda. ( Avengers: Infinity War )
• After the Avengers fail to stop Thanos from collecting all the Infinity Stones, Nat watches many of her friends turn to dust, along with half the living creatures in existence. ( Avengers: Infinity War )
• Black Widow and the Avengers track Thanos down to an uninhabited planet, only to discover he’s destroyed the Infinity Stones they planned to use to resurrect the universe. Thor decapitates Thanos in a pyrrhic attempt at revenge. ( Avengers: Endgame )
• Natasha has become the top leader of the Avengers, organizing their superheroism throughout the cosmos via intergalactic Zoom sessions with Captain Marvel, Rocket, and others. Yet she and Rogers quietly cling to the hope of reversing Thanos’ victory. ( Avengers: Endgame )
• When Scott Lang returns from the Quantum Realm, revealing he’s inadvertently discovered time travel, Nat and Steve get the original Avengers lineup back together to travel into the past in order to steal the Infinity Stones. Return to the 2014 section to find out how that ended for Black Widow… ( Avengers: Endgame )
• After Natasha traveled to her destiny in the past, Yelena visits her grave in Ohio… and is recruited for a new kind of team. ( Black Widow )

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

The Enduring Legacy of Black Widow

The cast and creative team of marvel studios’ 'black widow' reflect on natasha romanoff’s past and the destruction of the red room.

[ Editor’s Note : The following article contains spoilers for Marvel Studios’ Black Widow .]

Natasha Romanoff made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut over a decade ago with Marvel Studios’ Iron Man 2 . Across eight films, including this summer’s blockbuster feature Marvel Studios’ Black Widow , now streaming on Disney+ for all subscribers , the Avengers ’ most deadly spy is ready to tackle the red in her ledger head on.

[ RELATED:  Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff Journey From 'Iron Man 2' to 'Black Widow' ]

The Beginning

In Black Widow , directed by Cate Shortland , audiences discover Natasha’s story outside of her time with S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers . You don’t know everything about the illusive spy until now.

Speaking to Marvel.com, Shortland revealed she wanted fans to feel for Natasha Romanoff, whose story they followed over the years, but hadn’t understood why she is the way she is—why she always chose to be alone. “ Black Widow is going to make the audience feel more and realize they were watching someone who they’d watch for years, for 10 years, and they hadn’t known that this is what she’s carrying,” said Shortland. “They hadn’t known that she had her sister ripped away from her, that that’s why she finds it so hard to trust, and that’s why she finds it so hard to accept love.”

To understand her future and the choices Natasha made in Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame , the creative team of Black Widow understood they had to go back to her past. Screenwriter Eric Pearson highlighted the discussions he had with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, co-producer Brian Chapek, Shortland, and Academy Award-nominated actress Scarlett Johansson , who reprised her role as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow. “If you look at Natasha as the character we’ve known in different movies of different tones, there’s always been this allusion to her dark past, and I didn’t want that to be sugarcoated or anything,” explained Pearson, “I wanted for us to understand just how far she’s come to build herself up into being the hero who saved half the universe.”

On getting to peel back the layers of Natasha across the eight MCU films, Johansson shared with Marvel.com, “We were lucky because we were informed by this last 10 years of Natasha's time in the MCU,” before continuing, “When you think about the circumstances that brought her to the Red Room, you had to honor all of that stuff. You had to reflect on the subjugation of women. You had to reflect on her victimization. You had to reflect on all of that stuff. Because they're all the parts that make up her. It's all the stuff she's running from.”

The Red in Natasha’s Ledger

When Natasha is pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down in Black Widow , she must deal with the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger—her other found family.

At the start of Black Widow , a young Natasha resides with her spy family—father Alexei , mother Melina , and sister Yelena —in Ohio. Upon completion of Alexei and Melina’s mission for the Red Room, the family leaves America and are separated, with Natasha forced into the Red Room Widow training program. Reflecting on what younger sister Yelena represents to Natasha, Johansson proclaimed, “Yelena is just the embodiment of everything she wants to turn away from; Yelena’s in her face about all of that stuff. She’s another generation—it’s refreshing, but also terrifying, because Yelena is like, ‘Look at what we experienced.’ And it’s not at all what Natasha wants to look back on. She just wants to look ahead. Not only is it inconvenient for her in every way, but it’s so painful.”

Natasha’s road to becoming a hero within S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers is tied to a choice she would prefer to never address again. To prove her loyalty to S.H.I.E.L.D. and defection from the Red Room, Natasha and Clint Barton detonate a bomb in General Dreykov’s office. To ensure Dreykov’s physical presence in the office, Natasha had Clint detonate the bomb when she sees Dreykov greet his young daughter Antonia—sacrificing an innocent child to take down Dreykov and her subsequent freedom. 

The adult Natasha contrasts with the young Natasha we meet earlier in the film who would do anything to protect Yelena . “Natasha wants to protect Yelena—that means so much that she’s trying to do better for the little girls behind her,” stated Pearson. “The idea that she would intentionally harm a little girl in order for the greater good seems like a tough thing for her to put to bed in her mind.”

The Horrors of the Red Room

Over the course of the film, what strengthens the sisters’ bond to one another is the deep desire to take down General Dreykov, who survives Natasha’s assassination attempt in Budapest, and the infamous Red Room, and end the cycle of trafficking and subjugation of young women. However, the journey down that road isn’t a smooth one—not just for Natasha, but Alexei and Melina as well. 

Yelena forces her family, who she regarded as her real family, to acknowledge the inhumanity she was subjected to and how they all played a role in it. While Natasha had the help of S.H.I.E.L.D. and her best friend Clint to defect from the Red Room, Widows entering the training program after Natasha had their free will removed as Dreykov controlled his elite army of Widows via mind control, which Melina perfected for Dreykov. Yelena was only able to escape after being saved by an older and former Widow.

Speaking to Marvel.com, Florence Pugh , who portrays Yelena, shared, “I don’t think Alexei and Melina spent much time thinking about their actions towards Natasha and Yelena until we show up and we tell them to look at what we’ve become.”

“Yelena is ruthless; she keeps making them see,” continued Pugh. “Something that I really appreciate was even though they weren’t a real family, and even though they weren’t my real parents, their way of trying to make things better, their way of trying to show that they understand now, and even if they didn’t understand back then, what they’re going to do now is help these girls.”

The Black Widow Legacy

With the help of Yelena, Melina, and Alexei, Natasha is finally able to take down Dreykov and the Red Room for good. Before the literal and figurative fall of the Red Room, Natasha learns that Dreykov’s daughter Antonia also just barely survived Natasha’s assassination attempt with her father. The callous Dreykov ruthlessly subjected his injured and now disfigured daughter into the Red Room training program. Discovering her ability to perfectly mimic any formidable opponent, Dreykov implanted a chip into the back of Antonia’s neck in order to fully control her mind and body, and has her do his bidding as Taskmaster —his perfect assassin who would not betray him as Natasha did. 

As the Red Room began to fall from the sky, Natasha releases Taskmaster from her cell because she couldn’t allow her to die in the Red Room. Determined to enact her revenge, Taskmaster fights Natasha mid-air following the destruction of the Red Room. Still overcome with guilt for her Budapest mission and unwilling to kill Taskmaster, Natasha manages to release the Red Room mind control on her with an antidote. With full control of her mind again, Antonia asks Natasha if Dreykov was finally gone, to which Natasha confirms yes.

Reunited with her family on the ground, Natasha tells Yelena, Melina, and Alexei to leave with the other surviving Widows freed from their mind control as she deals with the arrival of General Ross. This was their opportunity to save all the young girls stationed around the world who were still under Dreykov’s mind control. The Widows take Antonia into their care as well. 

During a Black Widow Twitter Watch Party back in July, Feige revealed , “I think that Yelena like all of us will carry the memory of Natasha throughout our lives, but she’ll be doing it in her own way as her own character.”

Like Natasha, Scarlett Johansson gets to bid farewell on her own terms. Johansson shared with Marvel.com, “Making this film has been an incredible highlight of my career. I never could have imagined playing a character like this. I can’t think of many other ways you do it. Every year and a half, every two years, I’d come back to this character with my own life experience and have been able to pull away the layers more and more. That process has taken over a decade of time. It’s just remarkable to be able to get to know somebody that well.”

As for seeing Pugh’s future in the MCU, Johansson stated, “There’s not another person that I could envision as a better addition to the Marvel Universe than Florence. She’s an incredible actor. She’s an amazing athlete. And she has amazing screen presence. I feel very, very confident in her ability to take her character and run with it, and develop it as far as she wants to take it. She’s just a pleasure to be around and also a pleasure to watch. I’m excited to see what she does with it. I feel just as excited as everybody else to see where it goes.”

In response to Johansson’s praise, Pugh shared, “Aww, what am I supposed to say after that? That was really lovely. In terms of receiving this next chapter, Scarlett was as generous and as graceful as she was just then saying all that to me.”

“Before I started working with her, when I came to work on set, this is a big deal. She’s held a massive character for the past 10 years, and it came to an end,” continued Pugh. “And then I step into her film, and I was always, always, always, so grateful for the love and the support that she gave me from the beginning. I remember when we went to San Diego Comic-Con and it was so terrifying and alien to me. I’d never been to anything like this before. When we watched our trailer on-screen, Scarlett went and grabbed my hand. I remember, in that moment, being really appreciative in being welcomed on this journey with someone like her. And then just to hear all that as well, that was exactly how she was throughout the process.”

Witness Natasha and Yelena in action. Black Widow is now streaming for all subscribers on Disney+ !

Want more Black Widow? Follow  @TheBlackWidow  on Twitter,  @Black.Widow  on Instagram, and  Black Widow  on Facebook for the latest on Black Widow as it develops.

Sign up for Disney+ and start streaming now ! And be sure to follow Disney+ on  Facebook ,  Twitter , and  Instagram  for more.

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Black widow: 10 questions about the red room, answered.

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Though the Red Room has been a staple in Marvel comics for over two decades, fans haven't been able to see much of it in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - until now. The training facility is a big part of Black Widow's background in the comics , so it makes sense that fans would get their best look at it in the character's solo movie.

RELATED: The 10 Best Quotes From Black Widow

The Red Room is a training facility in Marvel's version of Russia that aims to turn young girls into world-class spies and assassins. Combat training, fight skills, weapons usage, and espionage are all part of the curriculum - whether the girls want to be there or not. Even with what appears in Black Widow , there's still a lot more about the program for fans to learn.

When Did The Red Room First Appear In Comics

Natasha Romanoff made her comic book debut in 1964, but the Red Room didn't debut with her. Instead, it would take decades before her background was retconned to include the Red Room.

In 1998, Marvel's Shadows And Light included multiple stories about different characters. One of those was Black Widow: Freefall . In it, Black Widow's history was expanded upon to reveal her being raised in the Red Room program. It took nearly 35 years before readers were treated to details about her background as a spy.

What Was The Cover Story For Red Room Agents

It couldn't exactly be common knowledge that a training facility full of young women was turning out spies. Instead, the plan for the Red Room was to implant false memories in all of their spies, making them believe they were all professional ballerinas.

This particular retcon was an easy one for Black Widow since the earlier storyline for Natasha involved her (as a ballerina) married to a Soviet hero. This idea is even referenced in the MCU, with Natasha being shown in ballet lessons in the fantastic Avengers: Age Of Ultron flashbacks .

Who Else Is A Red Room Graduate

Though Natasha might be the most famous to come out of the Red Room, she's hardly the only character affiliated with it. Yelena Belova, the comic book Black Widow to follow in her footsteps, is also a product of the Red Room.

The Red Widow, Ava Orlova, also came out of the Red Room at a very young age. Natasha actually rescued her from criminals when she was only nine. Other young women in the program in the comics include characters like Ying Liu and Ninotchka. Though he didn't graduate from the program, the Winter Soldier did teach combat skills in the Red Room as well.

Which Superhero Had A Child Raised In The Red Room

While many of the women raised in the Red Room know nothing about their birth families, that isn't true for one of them. Nadia, raised in the Red Room from infancy, saw her true parentage revealed to her by instructors when they realized that she was a quick study in scientific subjects.

RELATED: 10 MCU Characters Besides Black Widow Who Deserve A Prequel

Her father was Ant-Man Hank Pym, and her mother was his wife Maria Trovaya. Eventually, Nadia learned as much as she could about the heroes in her family and found a way to break out of the Red Room. While she was only called Nadia in the facility, she legally changed her name to Nadia Van Dyne when she began living with her stepmother Janet.

Is The Black Widow Movie The Red Room's First On-Screen Appearance

Other than flashbacks in Age Of Ultron , Black Widow marks the first time the Red Room is seen properly in the movie arm of the MCU. It has, however, already appeared in the TV arm of the MCU.

In Agent Carter , the series explored the early stages of what would become the Red Room through a character using the name Dottie Underwood. Dottie became obsessed with Peggy Carter while working for an organization called Leviathan. Flashbacks to her childhood showed her training in a Russian facility full of little girls, though it was never officially called the Red Room on screen.

What's Different About The Agent Carter Version Of The Red Room

Setting aside the obvious difference of how much technology changes in more than five decades, there is one big difference in the Red Room of Agent Carter's day. While it's clear that the leaders of the modern Red Room have no problem of killing agents that are no longer useful to them or are a threat, the training process itself appears to be different.

In Agent Carter , when the young girls are sparring and learning new fighting skills, they don't advance simply by beating one another. The little girl who grows up to be Dottie actually snaps the neck of a friend when she's instructed to in order to win her match. That likely doesn't happen in the modern-day, as some women, like Melina Vostokoff, go through the Red Room training multiple times.

What Animated Movie Is Used To Train The Early Widows

The proto-Widows in the 1940s-set  Agent Carter  are shown learning English (and getting a dose off subliminal messages) from an animated movie. That movie happens to be Disney's Snow White And The Seven Dwarves .

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Not only is it era-appropriate since the movie was released in 1938, but it's also a nice bit of corporate synergy since Marvel now falls under the Disney umbrella. It's also echoed in 2021's Black Widow as the opening credits also depict images from animated movies amongst the montage of young girls being forcibly taken for the Black Widow program.

How Has The Red Room Been Used In Marvel Animated Projects

Instead of paying a visit to the Red Room, Marvel's animated series likes to make the term an Easter egg of sorts for fans.

In Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes , Black Widow uses the term as a password for her computer. In Avengers Assembled , it's a codeword that actually activates programming in Black Widow's brain to knock her out. It's a clever way to include her history in the animated series without having to delve too much into the Red Room itself.

Are All The Widows Actually Russian

While the Black Widow program is initially created as a secret arm of the KGB in Marvel comics, not every person in the Red Room program is Russian. That's especially true in the MCU's version of it.

Though the Red Room itself is in Russia and all of the operatives appear to speak the language, the girls that grow up in the facility come from all over the world. That's reflected in the opening credits, as the girls are brought to Russia in shipping containers, and in the casting  as well. According to director Cate Shortland, the casting department for the movie sought out actresses from all over the globe to play the Widows. The actresses cast included those of French, South African, Chinese, Korean, and British backgrounds.

What's Another Name For The Red Room

In the MCU, the training facility is only known as the Red Room so far. In the comics, however, there was another name given to it - after Natasha already believed the Red Room had been destroyed.

In the third volume of the Black Widow solo series, Natasha discovered that young women were still be taken, trained, and used by what seemed like a new group. It was called 2R, which was really just an updated form of Red Room with many of the same techniques and goals as when she went through the program years earlier.

NEXT: 10 Questions About Black Widow's Taskmaster, Answered

• Black Widow

'We could not have made this movie 10 years ago': How 'Black Widow' got real about trauma and abuse

There’s plenty of derring-do, superhero suits, explosions and huge mechanical contraptions falling from the sky in “ Black Widow .” However, the newest Marvel movie breaks from its pack right from the start, with the harrowing images of young girls being taken away from their loved ones and subjected to frightening situations of human trafficking.

Watching the first 20 minutes of the movie, “I cried twice because it looked so real and so damaging,” says star Florence Pugh . “I never would have assumed that a film like this would be dealing with such deep and painful story lines, especially the abuse of the women and especially the capturing of young girls.”

The opening of “Black Widow” – which is already a box-office smash after its debut weekend – takes longtime Avenger Natasha Romanoff ( Scarlett Johansson ) and her little sister Yelena Belova (Pugh) back to their childhoods in America as part of a family of Russian secret agents. Pre-teen Natasha and 6-year-old Yelena are violently and suddenly removed from a cozy suburban lifestyle and taken to the Red Room, an organization that experiments on young girls and brainwashes them into assassins.

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The two women reunite as adults for action-packed exploits and dysfunctional family drama yet also discuss their estrangement, past sins and shared trauma. And while fans have wanted a solo “Black Widow” movie for much of the decade Johansson spent as the main female face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe , she feels it comes at just the right time.

“We could not have made this movie 10 years ago,” says the "Avengers" star, who's also an executive producer on "Black Widow." “We really were able to make something that I feel reflects what's happening and it's been very rewarding."

The goal was to “have the Marvel universe intersect with reality,” says Cate Shortland, the first woman to be a solo director for a Marvel film. “So we talked about trafficking. We talk about women's reproductive rights in the film because they're things we care about. And instead of it being about victimization, the characters make jokes about it because it's happened to them. I hope that that lifts people up. The trauma the characters have been through, they're trying to come up and answer it, not let it put them down.”

Review: 'Black Widow' finally does justice to Scarlett Johansson's secret agent Avenger

Natasha’s childhood hardships have been mentioned in past films, most infamously in one scene in writer/director Joss Whedon’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in 2015. During an intimate moment, Natasha has a conversation with Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), aka the Hulk, about having a romantic relationship. Bruce argues that he can’t have a normal life and kids since he's also a rage monster, while Natasha counters that she also is unable to have children because of the Red Room’s sterilization methods.

“It makes everything easier, even killing,” Natasha tells Bruce. “Do you think you’re still the only monster on the team?”

The scene landed with a thud and caught a ton of flak after the film’s release. But a memorable “Black Widow” sequence references the same subject – and goes down a lot more successfully – when the sisters bust their father figure Alexei (David Harbour) out of a Russian prison and Yelena smacks him in the face on their chopper ride out.

“Why the aggression? Is it your time of the month?” he says, leading to Yelena pointing out that she doesn’t get her period because she doesn’t have a uterus. “Yeah, that’s what happens when the Red Room gives you an involuntary hysterectomy. They kind of just go in and they rip out all of your reproductive organs,” she deadpans, leaving Alexei flabbergasted and wanting out of the conversation.

The dialogue was “the actresses and myself" countering screenwriter Eric Pearson after he inserted that unwanted period joke, Shortland explains. “And we said, ‘OK, you're going to write that, buddy? We're going to unleash Florence Pugh on you.’ ”

'Black Widow: The best order for viewing all 24 Marvel movies

Disney overall was supportive about “Black Widow” tackling issues other Marvel movies haven’t. Shortland recalls that when they screened the film for then-CEO Bob Iger very early on, “he said, ‘Can you please push it further, because it's really important that we talk about it.' "

Johansson agrees that “it’s very brave in a lot of ways that Marvel let us go there. They have a huge parent company (in Disney) and you don't know what kind of pushback you're going to get. We're talking about issues that are provocative and people are going to have feelings about them and it's to a wide audience.

“They understand the importance of their massive reach and that you can actually try to provoke some sort of collective consciousness about these very serious subjects.”

Black Widow: Rachel Weisz Teases Pig Experiments In Marvel Movie

Several months ago, it was revealed that Rachel Weisz's character in Black Widow , Melina Vostokoff, was one of the leading scientists for the Red Room . By the time the story begins, she has distanced herself from the organization, but Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff finds her again. It was further stated that Vostokoff would have to decide where her loyalties truly lie.

Promotion for Black Widow is in full swing, with interviews and promotional videos leading up to its release. However, despite earlier leaks and character descriptions, not much of Vostokoff has actually been shown in trailers.

So, in a recent interview, Weisz was asked to talk more about her character, which surprisingly involved pigs.

RACHEL WEISZ' MELINA EXPERIMENTS ON PIGS

Appearing on  Jimmy Kimmel Live , actress Rachel Weisz was asked whether she was given a list of topics off-limits to discuss regarding Black Widow , which she confirmed exists, but that she "lost it:"

"Yes, there is a list. I lost it. One thing I do remember is do not say—I mean, I know the big spoilers, which I'm obviously not gonna say, but my character's second name is like [motions locking lips and throwing away key]."

When asked about what else Weisz could say about the character she's playing, Melina Vostokoff, Weisz described her not only as a spy but a scientist, too. Vostokoff runs a  "pig farm"  that she uses for various experiments:

"She's a highly skilled spy and scientist. She runs a pig farm and that's in fact where the family meet me, at my scientific lab where I also keep pigs, which I experiment on."

The segment ends with Weisz, again, mentioning not talking about Melina's "second name."

A DIFFERENT SHADE OF SUPER SOLDIER

Pigs are commonly used in animal testing when it comes to biomedical research, but what Melina Vostokoff would be trying to accomplish is the question. It could be likely that Vostokoff is attempting to recreate a variation of the Super Soldier Serum that was given to Steve Rogers using pigs as test subjects.

Some merchandise and even one special look from over a year ago have shown Romanoff in possession of red vials, which begs another question of whether Melina Vostokoff is even on their side and not still working for the Red Room.

It could have something to do with the "second name" that Weisz hinted at in her interview with Kimmel. Maybe Vostokoff could end up being Taskmaster all along with O.T Fagbenle being a red herring for audiences.

The vials themselves could be the same Red Room variant of Super Soldier Serum used on Romanoff as an infant in the comics. On the other hand, it could be that Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova will take this serum, which could be shown on full display in her follow-up appearance in Hawkeye .

Black Widow is currently scheduled to release in theaters and on Disney+ on July 9, 2021 .

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Best And Worst Things About Black Widow

After multiple postponements, "Black Widow" is finally here! Giving Natasha Romanoff the solo film that's long overdue (but nonetheless welcome), the film sets up a future MCU star with Yelena Belova, introduces some other characters that may have a future, and works to fill some much needed gaps in the corners and crevices of Natasha's story. 

The film boasts several excellent performances, a lot of smart dialogue, some incredible action set pieces, and an interesting spy backstory wrapped in MCU lore. It's a fun film, but like all movies, it has its strengths and weaknesses. So which parts of "Black Widow" will blow you away, and which ones will leave you feeling less than impressed? Well, whether you need to wipe that red from your ledger or you're just curious about the 24th feature in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, read on for our spoiler-filled discussion of the best and worst things about "Black Widow."

Best: Black Widow has the perfect needle drop

For a time, Yelena Belova and Natasha Romanoff were raised in the United States by Alexei Shostakov ( aka the "Red Guardian" ) and Melina Vostokoff, the latter pair pretending to be good American parents while secretly working for Russia. The film's introduction sees the group suddenly pack and flee following the completion of a mission and the inevitability of U.S. capture. During the drive to their escape plane, there's a needle drop of Don McLean's "American Pie," and it's absolutely perfect.

This moment is the one that seals the young girls' fates. They'd been living undercover as two ordinary American kids in an American family, and now, they're going back to Russia. What waits for them there? The infamous Red Room and a long stint of torture, training, and mind control instead of a childhood. And that makes the lyric "bye-bye Miss American Pie" perfect because it reflects the collapse of the girls' happy lives and imagined futures as "normal American girls." Additionally, the song's iconic "this will be the day that I die" is sadly poignant as this is the moment where the part of the girls — the pre-trauma, hopeful child part — does indeed die. It's sad, but the song encapsulates it perfectly.

Worst: Mason is who exactly?

Now, this is a character who has a slightly larger role in the comics than in the MCU, but "Black Widow" suddenly introduces Mason to us out of seemingly nowhere. (Did you know his name? Exactly.) He's presumably Black Widow's guy for all sorts of needs when she's off the Avengers payroll and on the lam. The film also implies that he's a private contractor and indicates some sexual tension during his few scenes in the film.

Actor O.T. Fagbenle does an admirable job in what's a simple role, but here's the thing ... the dialogue is intended to suggest a romantically infused (if unmet) and complicated relationship, but it just underscores the fact that  we've never seen this character until now . At no point has this guy been in an MCU film before, so pretending that there's a relevant backstory in a "Black Widow" film shot after the titular character's death and the MCU has moved on just underscores how little the film was planned for, unlike the rest of the MCU's elaborate intricate plans.

Best: All things Florence Pugh

Natasha Romanoff is an iconic, central MCU character who was certainly underscored by Scarlett Johansson's considerable talent and charisma . Those are big shoes to fill, and in setting up Natasha's replacement, Marvel had to cast an actress who could bring something new while meeting the de facto requirements of being a believable badass. Enter Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova, equally skilled as Romanoff but with less "red on my ledger" feelings of moral debt and more comedic irony.

She isn't a "better character" than Johansson's continually excellent Romanoff — she's a relevantly different character with different traits, similar aptitudes, and a ton of talent behind it all. Without trying to replace or replicate Johansson's legacy, Pugh adeptly carves out her own distinct one, and frankly, we need more of it. She's charming and irreverent, skilled and ruthless, and she doesn't have baggage over her assassin history because she knows it wasn't under her control. The bottom line is that every scene she's in is a blast because Pugh's a ton of fun, and she has an unsurprisingly large amount of charisma to bring to the role.

Worst: Uh ... what about those Russian prisoners?

When the "Sisters Widow" reunite and break their adoptive "father," Alexei Shostakov, out of a Russian prison, the explosive chaos causes an avalanche that buries the prison in snow. Now, what we know about Red Guardian is that he was an extremely loyal servant who completed his Ohio assignment and, by his account, was promptly imprisoned once home. He's unsure why. But his loyalty was absolute, and he was successful, so being imprisoned most likely was an effort to "bury" him and silence his legacy in what was done with the information he stole (which fueled the advances in the Black Widow program).

In other words, he was most likely imprisoned for political reasons, so that's a facility where political prisoners go ... possibly pro-democracy demonstrators or perhaps insiders who rejected the Black Widow program or similarly terrible experiments. That's a prison full of folks who are meant to be silenced forever. When Alexei's escape triggers a massive avalanche and buries the prison, he's understandably thrilled, but that avalanche buries all those prisoners — good, bad, or otherwise. They're all likely dead now, and he's glad for it, but political prisoners don't deserve a snowy execution where the "heroes" don't seem to care, so the scene has terrible implications.

Best: Taskmaster is a great character

Of the film's villains, the most anticipated baddie is the fan-favorite Taskmaster . In the comics, Taskmaster is a criminal's criminal, with the agility to simply observe heroes and mimic their fighting styles with full accuracy and little training. While Taskmaster doesn't have super powers per se, the villain can impressively replicate a hero's fighting style and "moves" better than the heroes do themselves. And the character goes on to train numerous other baddies and henchmen in the Marvel universe. 

However, things are a bit different in the film, as Taskmaster is revealed to be the maimed daughter of the villainous Dreykov ... and just as much of a victim as Natasha and Yelena. Her backstory adds a level of tragedy and gravitas to it all, while the fight choreography (mimicking Captain America's shield combat, Hawkeye's archery, Natasha's fighting style, etc.) is all exceptional and visually exciting. And her story shines new light on Black Widow's past as an assassin and goes a long way in explaining the guilt our hero has felt over the course of the MCU timeline. 

Worst: Pig torture

When Natasha's "family" reunites, Melina introduces what appears to be a "pet pig" (also named Alexei). He's well-trained, smart, and adorable. To establish and demonstrate the extent of successful mind control, Melina takes out a tablet with the pig's attributes and vitals and dials its biological breathing down to zero. In other words, she's forcing the pig's body to physically choke itself, and she tortures it against the family's protests for a long, long time — almost to the pig's death.

Yes, it's a persuasive demonstration of the terrors and extent of the Red Room's mind control abilities . It also establishes the culpability and potential villainy of Melina, who's pivotal to the program. At the same time, she implies she's done those exact tests on pigs before. So basically, the film suggests a lifetime of torture for a poor creature, demonstrates its near-death experience, and doesn't address it again. It's needless cruelty because the rest of the story cements the evil of the mind control, so all we get out of that implied animal cruelty is a little unnecessary exposition. What gives?

Best: Natasha is a 'poser'

Despite the overall positive reception of Natasha Romanoff, one particularly odd aspect of her otherwise excellent fighting style was her commitment to a combat "pose," especially on landing — legs posed, arm out, face up ... you know what we're talking about. It's something her character routinely did mid-combat, and while she was awesome in every villainous altercation, the landing pose often looked a little ... forced. It's a fighting style seemingly designed for movie posters, not for combat.

As a consequence, it was pretty hilarious and refreshing when Yelena continually asked Natasha what, exactly, was up with her repeated poses. Yelena charmingly called her a 'poser,' and in this case, it was precisely true! This interrogation was humorous and swift, and Yelena continued to criticize Natasha's pose and methods in the way that only sisters do. It's also an interesting but complex introduction to Yelena — we can expect that she'll be her own person and that the era of the "Widow pose" is potentially over.

Worst: The unbelievable 'hero turn' for the parents

When the fake "family" reunites, Natasha and Yelena hear Melina's seemingly proud expression of having stolen the research to "unlock free will." It's a scary and dangerous admission — one that holds an almost apocalyptic level of potential. On top of that, she expresses pride over how tough the girls were and shows no apparent regrets about sending them to a lifetime of torture and mind control (a program Melina was pivotal in). Melina is a dedicated soldier of "the cause" (Alexei notes that she was Dreykov's architect of the chemical subjugation program), and her support of it runs deep. Even Alexei himself is proud of the girls and how many people they've killed over the years.

But as the film goes along, the parents suddenly betray the organization they've been giving their entire lives to and sacrificed children to. It happens a bit quickly, especially since Alexei is deluded and seems to think his duty to Russia makes up for handing Natasha and Yelena over to the Red Room, and Melina explicitly defends her treacherous parenting by noting, "We had our orders, and we played our parts to perfection." Even if it was a rationalization, she'd spent a lifetime doing terrible things on behalf of the Red Room. So, their sudden hero turn (especially for Melina) is pretty sudden and unbelievable.

Best: Red Guardian is a charmer

One of the big standouts in "Black Widow" is David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian. Red Guardian was a Russian super soldier (basically their equivalent of Captain America) who had a red, Soviet-style costume and reflected Soviet values in the same way Steve Rogers (and now Sam Wilson) reflected ideal U.S. values. For his efforts, Red Guardian was imprisoned, creating an interesting break from ideology that takes the character in fun directions.

The best thing about Red Guardian, however, is that the just-out-of-prison character is both complicated and charming. Despite his strength and long history of heroics (well, as he sees them, anyway), Alexei is often played for comic relief as a man who's a little out of touch, a little dorky, and who truly thought of Yelena and Natasha as his family despite giving them to the Red Room. While Alexei's choices were less than commendable, Harbour's complex and charming performance is a welcome element in every scene he's in, and both his jealousy over Captain America's fame and that ferocious "dad energy" are a riot. We're hoping he'll hopefully find some way to return to the MCU.

Worst: Unbelievable forgiveness

One of the worst things about "Black Widow" is the abrupt "hero turn" for the parents, which makes little sense in the context of the film. The weirdest part of it all is that, despite her pain, Yelena accepts Melina as her real mother while Natasha trusts her enough to participate in a dangerous ruse towards the end of the film. The problem is that neither actually had enough reason to trust her (or Alexei). Both parents seemed fine to betray their adopted children into a lifetime of torturous servitude, and at this point, they haven't expressed regret. Instead, they give the impression that they were dedicated to the cause and did what had to be done. 

Suddenly caring about, say, torturing children is a strong about-face for them, so for savvy characters like Natasha and Yelena, they have no real basis to believe them. Frankly, it isn't comprehensible given how Melina was fine with the chemical subjugation, and even performing actions that are good for the heroes in this instance shouldn't bring the parents unearned forgiveness. It's also difficult to pin down why the hero turn occurred. For example, learning about the indoctrination of Yelena shouldn't have changed Melina's mind given she certainly knew about that as its chief architect and has already called the Red Room before they arrive at her home. Any redemption should've been grossly challenged but was absolutely unacknowledged.

Best: Black Widow's action scenes

The MCU has given us some extraordinary action scenes , complete with impressive stunts and incredible fight choreography. And that's especially true for "Black Widow," a film with fight scenes that feel (for the most part) more grounded in the real world than, say, "Doctor Strange" or "Guardians of the Galaxy." Black Widow and her sister escaping via motorcycle from assassins? Stellar. Natasha versus a small army of Widows? Great.

The film may not have the unbelievable oddities of "Thor: Ragnarok" and the like, but it doesn't disappoint in the combat and stunt department. Even the first fight between Yelena and Natasha sees the two having a truly fierce, Jason Bourne-style battle, showing they're both deadly and equally matched. It's a great way to quickly establish what to expect from Yelena, and it's part of the narrative that's told with action rather than words — a great strength of the film throughout.

Worst: The no-consequence main antagonist

While Taskmaster is a great secondary antagonist and physical challenge, the real string-puller is the mysterious Dreykov. He's responsible for the chemical subjugation of the Widows and behind a nefarious master plan. Much of the film is spent with the sisters looking for Dreykov and for the location of the torturous Red Room that so destroyed so many childhoods. It's certainly fine to have a mysterious puppet master that the protagonists have to uncover, but unfortunately, he shows up in the film so late and appears so relatively little that he isn't as impactful as he could be. When the mysterious Dreykov is finally on screen he's ... fine. And most of his scenes take place in what looks like a high-tech meeting room. Ultimately, he's not that memorable as an antagonist.

It would be better if the character's nefarious plot had been a presence before this (he was mentioned in "The Avengers, " but the world-manipulating plan wasn't) or if we knew there would be greater consequences for the character and his evil machinations. But the unfortunate thing about a prequel like "Black Widow" is that we're pretty sure what happens with Dreykov and his plans in the future of the MCU ... they don't change the world the way he intends. At the end of the day, the big villain just isn't that memorable, and we know his plans aren't the threat he describes them to be, a fact that really takes the teeth out of his role.

Best: The post-credits teaser

At the end of "Black Widow," the heroes go their respective ways, and in the post-credits sequence, the film picks up back in the proper Marvel timeline. After all, the bulk of the movie takes place before "Infinity War," but after the credits roll, we see a post-"Endgame" Yelena visiting Black Widow's grave. And it's here that she's approached by a mysterious character — the Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine, who first appeared in "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier." Val has a job for Yelena ... one that involves hunting down Hawkeye.

Not only does the post-credits scene feature a fun MCU cameo, it's also a great way to introduce Yelena to the wider MCU world. Plus, it efficiently establishes her as coming into contact with the Avengers — something that needs to happen given the film is setting up Yelena's role as the next Black Widow. And, of course, by setting up her eventual showdown with Clint Barton, the post-credit scene is teasing a true conflict for our MCU heroes, one that will be even trickier to navigate without Natasha, Steve Rogers, and Tony Stark around. In other words, this is one of the MCU's very best post-credit moments .

Worst: Black Widow has some pacing issues

While "Black Widow" has a lot of interesting fight scenes and engaging chase sequences, the pacing of the overall story is a little strange. Natasha and Yelena want to stop Dreykov and his Red Room so they reunite with their former parents because they don't know where either of those things are. But so much time is spent establishing all these elements that the actual plot doesn't really start until about 40 minutes into the film. That isn't to say there's a shortage of action, but it feels odd upon reflection. Of course, once the movie actually takes off, it's a pretty swift and engaging journey, but it takes a while to get there. 

Another consequence of the first leg of the story being Natasha's pursuit of information (combined with Yelena's introduction) is that through these moments, Natasha is a fairly reactive character. So much of this stretch of the runtime amounts to Natasha meeting someone, them leading her to the next step, and repeat. As a result, it feels like our protagonist is passive in her own solo outing. It's certainly fine to spend time introducing us to new characters and have a character's pursuit of information be the first part of their journey, but the filmmakers could've structured that journey a bit better and showcased Natasha more pointedly.

The World Shifts When a Black Widow Squats

By changing its posture on its web, the arachnid can tune vibration in its legs to different frequencies.

A spider’s web is more than a trap or a home. It is also an extension of the spider’s senses . By paying attention to vibrations traveling through the silken threads, the arachnid can learn about its surroundings. Certain vibrations might mean ensnared prey. A different frequency might reveal a nearby mate. And since spiders extrude their webs from their bodies, they can also change the stiffness, tension, and other properties of the silk to bring certain details into focus.

A spider, in other words, can actively tune its web to channel specific kinds of vibrations, just as a musician might tune an instrument.

But as Natasha Mhatre from the University of Western Ontario has found, a spider can also tune itself . Simply by changing its stance, the infamous black widow can make its sense organs more receptive to particular frequencies of vibration. It’s like a postural squint, which allows the spider to focus its attention on certain sources of information.

When Mhatre started studying black widows, as part of Andrew Mason’s team at the University of Toronto, she initially focused on how vibrations move through the silk. But she soon realized that “there was another problem, which was staring us in the face and which no one had considered.” Which is: How do those vibrations move through the spider itself?

Read: What it feels like to get bitten by a black widow spider

Together with Senthurran Sivalinghem, Mhatre allowed captive black widows to build webs on square arenas, with a pillar in each corner. These webs aren’t the elegant, vertical, circular constructions that most people might picture. Instead, they’re a chaotic mess of strands, surrounding and supporting a loose, horizontal mesh, almost like an acrobat’s safety net, from which the spider hangs upside down.

When the webs were finished, the team placed a tiny magnet on them. By holding a powerful electromagnet nearby, they could move each web and then, by bathing the animal in lasers and analyzing the reflected beams, measure how the vibrations affected different parts of the suspended spider. Through the process, the widows were remarkably chill. Despite their infamous venom, “they’re very docile,” Mhatre says.

As with most spiders, the black widow’s entire body acts as a sensor. It’s dotted with thousands of organs called slit sensilla, which appear as tiny cracks in the exoskeleton. As vibrations pass through the animal, the cracks narrow and widen, and those minuscule movements are picked up by sensitive cells inside the slits. These slits are everywhere, but they’re especially concentrated in the joints of the legs.

Scientists have been studying slit sensilla for decades, and most experiments have shown that they respond to a wide range of frequencies, without much in the way of tuning. But that’s only true if you study the sensilla in isolation, as most researchers have. Mhatre showed that in an actual spider, hanging from its web, different joints are indeed tuned to different frequencies. “While the sensors themselves aren’t particularly tuned, the body gives the joints tuning,” she says.

When the spider changes its posture, it also retunes its joints. Typically, it sits in a neutral stance with its body horizontal and its legs outstretched. But it can also “crouch” by drawing all its legs in. In this pose, almost all of its joints become more sensitive to higher frequencies. By taking up a kind of predatory power-pose, the widow alters its senses.

“Hearing organs, in animals that use vibrations, are usually thought of as passive devices,” says Damian Elias from the University of California at Berkeley, who studies spider communication. That’s especially true for the slit sensilla, “as they’re just strain gauges sitting on joints, without any obvious way to modulate their sensitivity.” But Mhatre’s study shows that there is a way—and a very simple one.

She suspects that the crouched posture allows the widow to pay closer attention to higher frequencies, such as those produced by small prey insects. Alternatively, it could be trying to ignore low frequencies, such as those produced by wind. Both explanations make sense, since widows usually crouch when they’re hungry or when their webs have been significantly disturbed. In this position, they could better detect the movements of meals. And if a spider needs to get back in touch with low-frequency vibrations, all she has to do is extend a leg.

Read: Tiny jumping spiders can see the moon

The widow’s abilities are part of a concept called “ embodied cognition ,” which argues that a creature’s ability to sense and think involves its entire body, not just its brain and sense organs. Octopus arms, for example, can grab and manipulate food without ever calling on the central brain. Female crickets can start turning toward the sound of a male using only the ears and neurons in their legs , well before their central nervous system even has a chance to process the noise. In the case of the black widow, the information provided by the sense organs in the legs depends on the position of the entire animal.

Earlier, I described this as a postural squint. That’s close, but the analogy isn’t quite right, since squinting helps us focus on particular parts of space. Here, the spider is focusing on different parts of information space. It’s as if a human could focus on red colors by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog (or downward spider).

The ability to sense vibrations that move through solid surfaces, as distinct from sounds that travel through air, is “an often overlooked aspect of animal communication,” says Beth Mortimer from the University of Oxford, who studies it in creatures from elephants to spiders. It’s likely, then, that the widow’s ability to control perception through posture “almost certainly [exists in] other spiders and web types, too, and other arthropods, including insects, that detect vibrations along surfaces through their legs.” Scientists just need to tune in.

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(ISNS) -- Scientists have discovered that male black widow spiders, famous for ending up as their mates' post-coital supper, are not as clueless as you might think. In a series of careful experiments, a team of researchers from Arizona State University West in Glendale has teased out evidence that black widow males do their best to avoid getting eaten by choosing mates who have recently fed.

The work also details something else very rare in the animal kingdom: a sexual power struggle in which males have the upper hand.

"Most of the time people focus on females" when it comes to the power of selecting mates, said spider researcher Eileen Hebets at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. That power is critical to adaptation and evolution, and ultimately shapes the species. "It's much less common to think of males as a potential source of selection," she said.

It's only in extreme situations -- where mating brings the risk of death, for example -- that male selection appears and can be studied.

In the case of the North American black widow, Latrodectus hesperus, the Arizona experiments reveal that male black widows can detect telltale chemical signals on the webs of females. They can smell which females are well-fed and which are hungry, which leads to a simple choice: Which one is less likely to eat them? This ability to sense well-fed females also has another advantage: by choosing plump females, males are also choosing mates that are likely to produce large numbers of eggs.

"It's a double whammy," said Chad Johnson, the lead investigator on the study, which was published in the August issue of the journal Animal Behaviour .

In most animal species, females dictate the course of reproduction, said Johnson. They work hard to produce and safeguard a few eggs, while males generate lots of sperm at little personal cost. That difference in "investment" usually leads males to be promiscuous while females are choosy. But in species like the black widow, the danger of mating is so great for the males that they have to be the choosy ones.

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To check this idea, the Arizona team put their laboratory-raised black widows through four experiments. First, they tested whether males were more likely to engage in courting behavior on the webs of well-fed females more than on the webs of hungry females -- even in the absence of the females themselves. The lab spiders did exactly that.

In their second experiment, the researchers put the females back into the mix. Again, the males greatly preferred the plump females.

Next, the team pulled a confusing switcheroo on the males by putting well-fed females on the webs of starved females and starved females on the webs of well-fed females. For the most part, the males' behavior reflected this confusion by showing no significant preference for the well-fed females that were placed on the wrong webs.

Finally, the researchers rolled up onto sticks webs from females that were either well-fed or starving and presented them to males to find out if it was a chemical or structural difference in the web that was cluing in the males. Once again, the males preferred the webs of well-fed females, supporting the idea that the clue is some unknown chemical in the webs that the males can smell.

"He's not at all complicit in his own demise," said Johnson of the black widow males. "He's making the best of a bad situation."

Despite their efforts, though, male black widows frequently don't survive mating. Although the rates of survival were not the focus of this study, in some other widow species the risk of getting eaten is much greater.

"There is almost a continuum with spiders of varying degrees of risk," said Hebets. This is exactly what makes them so fascinating to study, she added.

There are even some species where males can get eaten before mating. "That’s obviously an even more extreme freak show," said Johnson.

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

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“there’s not much theaters can do”: disney’s ‘black widow’ tries day-and-date as studios experiment.

All sides are resigned to the fact that every Hollywood major is trying different release models as long as the pandemic keeps up.

By Pamela McClintock

Pamela McClintock

Senior Film Writer

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On March 23, Hollywood studio executives woke up to headlines that mega-U.K. exhibitor Cineworld, owner of Regal Cinemas in the U.S., will start to open select Regal locations beginning in early April.

Regal, the country’s second-largest chain behind AMC Theatres with 536 theaters in the U.S., had been closed for six months. More good news arrived with word that Los Angeles may be among a handful of counties where newly opened cinemas can increase capacity from 25 percent to 50 percent in the coming days. (L.A. is the country’s largest moviegoing market and key to studios getting back on track.)

By noon, however, clouds of doubt rolled in when Disney announced it is delaying Marvel Studios’  Black Widow once again, along with five other films. Black Widow moves from May 7 to July 8; to boot, the superhero spinoff will be made available to Disney+ subscribers for a Premier Access charge of $30. And while Memorial Day tentpole Cruella is keeping its May 28 theatrical release date, it will also debut simultaneously on Premier Access.

Publicly, there was no uproar among theater owners, nor a dour reaction from Wall Street. All sides are resigned to the fact that every Hollywood studio is going to experiment with different release models as long as the pandemic continues. And although the landscape may be improving in the U.S., where movie theaters have at last reopened in Los Angeles and New York City, Europe remains in a crisis. It’s also possible that major entertainment conglomerates are being advised on the long-range implications of the pandemic and need to “hedge their bets,” as one film financier tells The Hollywood Reporter .

“ Black Widow is an expensive movie. It’s not surprising they are pushing back the date,” says Wall Street analyst Eric Handler of MKM Partners. “Disney isn’t comfortable releasing a $200 million-plus movie when there is so much uncertainty.”

Handler and others believe foremost that Disney is using the pandemic era to test the appetite for premium video-on-demand. Black Widow and Cruella provide unique opportunities. “This year is all about experimentation,” he says. “Disney isn’t abandoning exhibitors.”

Disney likewise offered Mulan and Raya and the Last Dragon to Disney+ subscribers for $30, but Black Widow is the first superhero pic to try its luck on premium video-on-demand in those countries where the streaming service is available.

Analysts believe theater chains can’t afford to pass up playing  Cruella or Black Widow . Nevertheless, exhibitors like Cinemark and Harkins, both based in the U.S., are currently refusing to play Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon because the chains wanted better terms than usual since Raya is also playing on Disney+.

According to several sources, Warner Bros. is offering more generous terms to theater circuits  — or notably more than 55 percent of each ticket sold — that are playing its 2021 slate in exchange for a day-and-date release on HBO Max. Disney, however, hasn’t done the same to date.

Disney delayed a total of six films this week; four are staying on this year’s calendar, while two are moving to 2022, including Death on the Nile , which stars embattled actor Armie Hammer.

Disney’s Black Widow change prompted speculation as to the fate of other high-profile early summer tentpoles. Paramount’s A Quiet Place Part II  is set to open Memorial Day weekend on May 28, and Universal will unveil F9, the next installment in the Fast & Furious franchise, on June 25. Sources tell THR that there are no plans as of now to move either film or to engineer a dual home-big screen release.

In pre-pandemic times, theater owners had the clout to stop even the biggest Hollywood studio from sending a movie early to the home before three or so months. That all changed when the novel coronavirus virus struck in early 2020, forcing theater closures across the globe.

A year ago, when the marquee was going dark, exhibitors were outraged when Universal announced in spring 2020 that it was sending Trolls World Tour to premium video-on-demand for $20. By mid-summer, outrage turned into acquiescence when Universal struck a landmark deal with AMC to create a new premium VOD window beginning as early as 17 days after a title first hits the big screen. That model was followed by a deal with Cinemark to create a 31-day window for titles meeting a certain threshold on opening weekend.

Tensions flared up again when WarnerMedia, home of HBO Max, announced with no warning that Warner Bros.’ entire 2021 film slate would debut day-and-date in cinemas and on the streaming service. Directors and stars were furious, prompting Warners brass to say the edict would end after 2021. This week, the company confirmed this promise when saying it has agreed to provide Regal with a 45-day exclusive theatrical window for its marquee titles in the U.S. and 31 days in the U.K. Paramount has indicated it believes in a 45-day window for its movies.

While there hasn’t been the same blistering anger expressed over Disney’s  Black Widow or Cruella decision, insiders say many theater owners weren’t exactly happy. Nevertheless, they comprehend that every studio is pursuing a different model, particularly during the great streaming arms race. “There’s not much theaters can do,” says Handler.

“Everyone has made their big moves. Businesses will look at what works, and then there will be more right-sizing,” says one studio veteran. Adds another studio distributor, “There will no longer be a cookie-cutter approach and every film will be treated differently.”

In his note to investors, Wall Street analyst Eric Wold of B. Riley Securities said Disney’s day-and-date test of Black Widow , a well-known IP, will provide the entertainment Goliath with “valuable movie-demand data for both sides of the table that would influence future decisions.”

Another source speculates that Disney wants to hedge its bets in case Europe remains locked down, while the U.S. imposes new restrictions; Disney is experimenting with day-and-date economics; Disney expects reoccurring shut downs for years, until most of the globe has been vaccinated.

“The pandemic is still causing massive exhibition issues,”  the source adds. “We will not see a picture be released on 35,000-plus screens anytime soon.”

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The Lessons We Can Learn from Black Widow

We’re currently living in a world of uncertainty . And during uncertain times, we realize how much we rely on the small things in life that bring us joy. That’s why, while it might seem selfish to be sad about the delay of a film release–or a canceled convention, or a postponed trip–we feel more upset than usual that something is “taken away” from us. Even if we know that not having it right now is the right and responsible thing. These small comforts of pop culture and escapes from daily life are what get us through, even if we don’t realize it in the moment.

Earlier this week, Black Widow was the latest casualty of the Coronavirus . Although the decision to postpone the film’s release wasn’t surprising given the amount of cancellations and delays across the industry, it was hard for fans to accept. After years of waiting for this movie, we wouldn’t be sitting in a movie theater on May 1st after all. We wouldn’t get to follow press tours or see photos from a big premiere, and with no rescheduled date, we wouldn’t even be able to set our sights on something to look forward to.

As both a writer covering this movie professionally and an individual who has a very personal connection to Natasha Romanoff, the sadness I felt at the announcement of the delay hit hard. But at the same time, it also reminded me of why I love this character so much. Black Widow has always been there for me and has always been an important beacon in my life. And now more than ever, I’m able to appreciate how she helps me through tough times.

When Natasha was introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Iron Man 2 , the world saw a kick-ass spy with a sharp sense of sarcasm and wit. They saw a classic comic character brought to life at a time when we had no idea that one day, there would be 23 movies and dozens of heroes ranging from popular mainstays to niche characters. But under the guise of Natalie Rushman, of the Black Widow, I saw me—rather, I saw a person I felt I could be. Someone who possessed strength (mentally, not just physically), someone who was confident in her abilities and in her own skin despite what she had to overcome in her past. I was thrilled to see the character expanded in Avengers two years later; I had followed her history and knew her stories, but the movies allowed me to fall in love with Natasha further when embodied by a real human. Someone who could bring her desires, feelings, and emotions off the pages of a comic book.

Over the course of a decade, Natasha Romanoff grew from an insulated spy to someone who realized she deserved love–love from herself and from the people she allowed herself to get close to. During that time, my personal feelings for the character evolved in the same way. She taught me the power of trust in Captain America: The Winter Soldier , she taught me the power of friendship in Avengers: Age of Ultron , she taught me how to follow my own heart and intuition in Captain America: Civil War , and she taught me how to believe in the greater good in Avengers: Infinity War .

Last year, in Avengers: Endgame , we watched a lonely Natasha Romanoff cut a peanut butter sandwich in half while trying to keep some sense of normalcy in a world that had pretty much lost all hope. A scene that was once emotional to watch now feels eerily familiar. Granted, half of the universe hasn’t been snapped away. But between the mandatory self-quarantines, the shuttering of bars and restaurants, and quiet streets and sidewalks, it sure feels like we’re living in a post-Thanos world. Our friends exist, but we can’t go out and see them because we’ve been advised against traveling and working. Our coffee shops and stores are still there, but most are working with reduced hours or have removed their furniture in an attempt to encourage us to not be outside our homes. Italy has reported that the Venice canals are cleaner, China has reported significant decreases in carbon dioxide…do we even have to bring up Cap’s comment about the pod of whales he saw in the Hudson? It all hits too close to home.

I’ve always been a person who has found comfort in identifying with certain characters in works of fiction. But Black Widow was the first time a character didn’t just inspire me to work harder in school or learn something new. She jump-started a change in my wellbeing. She made me want to be a kinder person, not just to others but to myself, and she actively played a role in bettering me as I moved through the ups and downs of mental health, bouts of unemployment, professional work struggles, and personal setbacks. Superhero films have always existed in a world of suspended disbelief when it comes to powers and plots, but the stories and emotions in the films that we use as escapism are very real. It’s why we feel for Tony when his father doesn’t treat him well, for T’Challa when he suddenly loses his father, and for Natasha when she sits alone trying to keep herself optimistic in the hope that by being responsible, by taking action, by doing what others don’t want to do, she can get through a bleak new normal. She relies on what she’s learned from others to move forward because she recognizes the power of leaning on your experiences and friends.

It’s upsetting that we have to wait a little longer to see Natasha’s solo story . But that’s okay. Because just like the dependable Avenger who cares about the people she loves, she’ll still be there for us—and for me—when this is all over. Just like she did for her Avengers family, she’ll stand by and protect the people she cares about. The ones she wouldn’t want to endanger at her own expense. She’ll do her best to make the world better, even if no one realizes she’s doing it. Natasha Romanoff has always been a source of strength and knowing that she’s been through this kind of hardship is a comforting thought that makes every day feel a little easier to manage.

Featured Image: Marvel

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'electrified sheep' and other odd experiments.

Electrified Sheep

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The history of science is not limited to scientists in white coats working quietly with beakers and burners. Sometimes, in the name of knowledge, things can get downright weird.

In his new book, "Electrified Sheep," Alex Boese explores the unexpected side of science, filled with bizarre experiments and intrepid scientists.

Certain experiments served a purpose, like the zapping of animals, which helped scientists learn to harness the power of electricity.

Other experiments seem spectacularly useless, like the professor in 1933 who had a black widow spider bite him, confirming what scientists already knew — black widow spider venom really hurts.

"When we think of science, often we think of it as being very rational," Boese tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, "(but) often scientists are blundering around in the dark ... So often, maybe out of desperation, they resort to doing these extreme things that really look kind of crazy."

It might have looked crazy, but there was a scientific reason Benjamin Franklin had his mouth pressed against a hen's beak.

In the 18th century, when scientists first began to understand the power of electricity, they had no way to measure electrical force. There were, after all, no hardware stores selling voltmeters. But there were birds.

"So what they did," Boese tells Raz, "is they would zap these poor birds and see what effect it had on the birds. They could say, well you know, this amount of power was enough to kill a sparrow but it wasn't enough to kill a hen or a turkey ... And Ben Franklin was involved in research like this."

Benjamin Franklin once gave mouth-to-mouth (or, mouth-to-beak?) to a hen after electrically shocking it. According to science historian Alex Boese, it was the first known resuscitation of an electric shock victim using the mouth-to-mouth method. AP hide caption

Benjamin Franklin once gave mouth-to-mouth (or, mouth-to-beak?) to a hen after electrically shocking it. According to science historian Alex Boese, it was the first known resuscitation of an electric shock victim using the mouth-to-mouth method.

Interview Highlights

On Benjamin Franklin's bird encounter

"He was zapping away hens and turkeys. And one poor hen, he got the idea, 'Well, I just zapped it and it's here unconscious on the floor, let me try to give it mouth-to-beak resuscitation and see if it comes back to life.' And sure enough it did. So Ben Franklin has a kind of odd honor of being the first person to use artificial respiration to revive an electric shock victim."

On Evan O'Neill Kane's self-appendectomy

"Evan O'Neill Kane was a very prominent surgeon. And he found that his own appendix was inflamed; it needed to be removed ... (he) suddenly sat up in the operating room and said, 'Hang on everybody — stop — I'm going to do it myself' ... And he injected some cocaine into the lining of his stomach muscles and began to slice away. And the experiment — well, the operation — was successful, except for at one point all his guts popped out of his stomach. But he said he just composed himself and stuffed them all back in."

On Allan Walker Blair's spider bite

"He was under no illusions that the black widow spider venom is the deadliest, or at least the most painful, venom that you can possibly be stung with ... He left the fangs of the spider in his hand for 10 seconds. Sure enough, you know, three days of nightmarish pain in a hospital. The doctor who attended him said he had never seen that level of pain manifested in any patient for any reason whatsoever ... You have to wonder what was the point of this, since doctors already knew what the black widow venom did to people."

On whether these experiments benefited science:

"Absolutely, because if you think about it, science at its core nature is somewhat about doing things that normal people would think are crazy. For instance, the first people back in the 15th century who started doing human anatomy and cutting up bodies, at the time people though this was absolutely, not only insane, but wicked and sacrilegious. And yet they kind of went ahead and did it anyway ... So there's this kind of tension in science that yes, you have to kind of be willing to do what others are not willing to do. And if you don't do that, then science can't advance."

Seek & Destroy: Black Widow Spiders Are Being Actively Hunted by Brown Widows

New study shows brown widow spiders actively seek and kill nearby black widows.

Black widow spiders have earned a fearsome reputation for their venomous bite. But in parts of the southern United States these spiders have much to fear themselves—from spider relatives who really don’t like their company.

In the past couple decades, researchers have noticed black widow spiders commonly being displaced by the brown widow, a fellow species in the same genus, Latrodectus . But new research suggests this isn’t a just simple case of one species winning the competition for food or habitat. Instead, a study shows brown widow spiders have a striking propensity to seek out and kill nearby black widows.

In experiments pairing brown widow spiders in container habitats with related cobweb spider species, the brown widows were 6.6 times more likely to kill southern black widows than other related species. The findings of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida (USF), are reported in an article to be published today (March 13, 2023) in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America .

“We have established brown widow behavior as being highly aggressive towards the southern black widows, yet much more tolerant of other spiders within the same family,” says Louis Coticchio, who led the study as part of his undergraduate research at USF.

Brown widow spiders ( Latrodectus geometricus ) are believed to be native to Africa but have been introduced on all continents but Antarctica. Black widow spiders are native to North America and comprise two closely related species, the western black widow ( Latrodectus hesperus ) and the southern black widow ( Latrodectus mactans ).

What Drives Brown Widow Spiders’ Displacement of Black Widows?

Coticchio spent the first part of his career as a zookeeper specializing in venomous animals in California and returned to Florida to earn a degree in biology, channeling a passion for spiders into his research projects. In collecting wild spiders in Florida, he says he noticed brown widows displacing black widows but not other related species. This got him wondering.

“I had a sneaking suspicion that Florida in particular provided plenty of food and habitat for both the brown and black widow, and that there was possibly some other area such as behavioral differences that were playing a role,” he says. “My observations in the field showed that brown widows appeared to be much more tolerant of other species outside of their genus, and so if resources were the main factor, then we should have seen the same behavior with other spiders competing for the same resources, but that did not seem to be that case.”

Coticchio partnered with advisor Deby Cassill, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at USF. Along with spider expert Richard Vetter of the University of California, Riverside, they devised a three-part study to explore the potential drivers of brown widows displacing black widows.

One element of their study applied mathematical modeling to the risk factors to survival that brown and black widow spiders face, which showed both species are far more likely to die by predation than by starvation. In other words, “competition for scarce resources is not a significant cause of mortality among spiderlings for either species,” the researchers say.

They also compared rates of growth and fertility between brown and black widows, finding that sub-adult brown widow females were 9.5 percent larger than black widows, and adult female brown widows reached reproductive maturity 16 percent sooner. While adult male brown widows were 25 percent smaller than adult male black widows, they reached reproductive maturity 21 percent sooner. Meanwhile, brown widow females were about twice as fertile as black widows, with brown widows often producing multiple egg sacs at a time versus black widows producing just one.

Placing brown widows in proximity with black widows and other spider species, however, showed the clearest results. Sub-adult brown widow females simply cohabitated with red house spider ( Nesticodes rufipes ) females in 50 percent of pairings and were killed and consumed by the red house spiders in 40 percent. Brown widows cohabitated with triangulate cobweb spiders ( Steatoda triangulosa ) in 80 percent of pairings and were killed in just 10 percent. But when sub-adult brown and black widow females were paired, the brown widows killed and consumed the black widows in 80 percent of pairings. In pairings of adults, black widows were killed in 40 percent of trials, while they defensively killed brown widows in 30 percent of trials and cohabitated in the remaining 30 percent.

Throughout the experiments, brown widow spiders regularly ventured into black widow webs, the researchers say. Red house spiders and triangulate cobweb spiders also showed such “bold” behavior, but black widows were never observed as aggressors.

Surprising Behavior and New Questions Raised

“We didn’t expect to find such a dramatic and consistent difference in the personalities of the brown widow and the black widow,” Cassill says. “Brown widows are boldly aggressive and will immediately investigate a neighbor and attack if there is no resistance from the neighbor. For two bold spiders, the initial attack is often resolved by both individuals going to separate corners and eventually being OK with having a nearby neighbor. The black widows are extremely shy, counterattacking only to defend themselves against an aggressive spider.”

The characterization of brown widow spiders as “aggressive,” however, is a relative term, reflecting their stance toward black widow spiders, but not toward humans. While widow spiders are “synanthropic” (i.e., commonly found around human-made structures, such as barns, garages, and sheds), they “are very shy when harassed by humans or larger animals that are not considered prey,” Coticchio says. “They will run or roll up into a ball and play dead when being attacked or harassed by most other animals outside of their prey range.” Brown widow venom causes less severe reactions to humans than black widows, and bites to people are very rare.

Brown widow spiders’ evident aggression toward black widows raises many questions, perhaps first and foremost: Why? What drives such behavior toward a closely related species? The researchers note that invasive species typically outcompete natives through advantages in factors such as fertility, growth, dispersal, or defenses against predators. Direct predation by an invasive species on its native relative, across the animal kingdom, is rare.

“One question I would love to answer is how brown widows interact with other species of spiders, more specifically black widows in Africa, where brown widows are believed to have originated,” Coticchio says. “I would love to see if their behavior and displacement of black widows is something that they have adapted here in North America, or if this behavior is something they exhibit naturally even in areas where they have coevolved with black widows for much longer periods of time.”

Reference: “Predation by the Introduced Brown Widow Spider (Araneae: Theridiidae) May Explain Local Extinctions of Native Black Widows in Urban Habitats” by Louis A Coticchio, Richard Vetter and Deby L Cassill, 13 March 2023, Annals of the Entomological Society of America . DOI: 10.1093/aesa/saad003

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I haven’t done any research on this question except having done some when I had a bit of an infestation at my home in Florida. My note is that male black widows are brown and smaller than females. Would it be possible that the brown widows are confusing the blacks or vice versa and maybe the black’s guard is down thinking a mate is approaching? Some kind of mistaken identity?

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Black Widow

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• In the comics, Black Widow is the product of a Soviet   Super Soldier experiment.
• Black Widow is the only character to have been a main female lead role that was not a love interest.

References [ ]

• ↑ In The Avengers Prelude: Fury's Big Week , Samuel Sterns identifies Stalingrad as Black Widow's birth place from a hint of accent in her voice.
• ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 The Avengers
• ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• ↑ Translates from Latin to:" The appearances of things are deceptive and the hope of men is deceived. "
• ↑ Iron Man 2: Black Widow: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• ↑ Iron Man 2
• ↑ 7.0 7.1 The Avengers Prelude: Fury's Big Week
• ↑ The Avengers: Black Widow Strikes , Volume 1
• ↑ The Avengers: Black Widow Strikes , Volume 2
• ↑ The Avengers: Black Widow Strikes , Volume 3
• ↑ The Avengers Post-credits Scene
• ↑ Iron Man 3 Prelude
• ↑ Captain America: The Winter Soldier Infinite Comic
• ↑ Captain America: Homecoming
• ↑ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: 1.19: The Only Light in the Darkness

External Links [ ]

• File:Marvel-favicon.PNG Black Widow on the Marvel Wiki
• File:WP favicon.PNG Black Widow on Wikipedia

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