Should we have seen Black Widow's tragic ending coming all along?
Did we all miss the clues that foreshadowed her doom?
Keep watching to find out!
Born in Soviet Russia in 1984, the young Natasha Romanoff — before she had that name — was
purchased by the state from her parents as an infant after it was determined that she
had great genetic potential to serve their needs.
Early training helped Natasha learn to obey her masters, and soon she would have her first mission.
Sent to the United States as a child, Natasha and fellow assassin-in-training Yelena Belova
would be raised by adoptive "parents," a pair of Russian assassins named Alexei and Melina.
This fake family unit would allow the four to pose as a normal American suburban household.
But when Alexei and Melina completed their mission to steal valuable U.S. intelligence,
they were discovered by SHIELD.
The two Russian agents scooped up Natasha and Yelena and, after a tense chase, flew
them out of the country, where they would be taken in by Alexei's superior: General
Dreykov, a ruthless Russian leader who oversaw the assassin training program known as the
Red Room.
Following their return to Russia, both Natasha and her "sister" Yelena were taken to be trained
as assassins in Dreykov's sinister Red Room program.
During her time in the Red Room, Natasha would become one of the best killers in the program,
with unmatched instincts and marksmanship skills.
She would also undergo rigorous psychological programming and conditioning that would essentially
make her a slave to Dreykov.
But her training in the Red Room was about more than just developing her skills.
Doctors within the Academy also gave Romanoff a hysterectomy, as they did to all their assassins.
The hope was that making the trainees unable to bear children would ensure the total absence
of familial connections.
"They have a graduation ceremony.
They sterilize you."
Romanoff spent years acting as one of Russia's best assassins, putting her on the radar of
American intelligence agencies.
Eventually she would be targeted by Nick Fury, director of SHIELD.
Agent Clint Barton — later known as the hero Hawkeye — would be assigned by Fury
to kill Natasha.
But over the course of his mission, Barton instead convinced Natasha that she should
defect to the United States and join SHIELD.
To earn the agency's trust, Natasha's first mission was to accompany Barton to Budapest
and kill her former teacher, Dreykov.
Romanoff hesitated at the prospect of bombing Dreykov with his young child in tow, but she
would ultimately give the order to detonate, apparently killing both Dreykov and Antonia
and officially earning Natasha a place as a SHIELD agent.
"Just like Budapest all over again!"
"You and I remember Budapest very differently."
Now in the employ of SHIELD, Romanoff quickly became one of their best agents and was sent
on a number of critical assignments.
During a 2009 extraction mission in Iran, the Winter Soldier — who was once Captain
America's friend Bucky Barnes — ambushed her and killed her target, a nuclear scientist,
by firing straight through Romanoff's stomach.
Though she learned little about the Winter Soldier, she knew enough to fear him.
One person she knew a lot about was the future Avenger called Iron Man.
After developing his first armored suits, Tony Stark came to the attention of SHIELD
and was identified by Fury as a candidate for the Avengers Initiative.
Sent undercover under the name "Natalie Rushman," Natasha became Stark's new assistant.
Assigned to keep tabs on the budding hero, Romanoff would eventually reveal her identity
as a SHIELD agent when Stark came into conflict with Ivan Vanko, and she aided him in stopping
the new armored villain.
However, the intelligence gathered by Romanoff on her mission led Fury to the conclusion
that Stark was not suitable for his planned super-team, deeming the billionaire volatile,
self-obsessed, and a poor team player.
"Textbook narcissism?
Agreed."
In 2012, Nick Fury gathered the superheroes who would later be known as the Avengers.
Romanoff was sent to India, where she located Bruce Banner — a scientist with expertise
in gamma radiation, who also happened to be the human identity of the monster known as
The Hulk.
Convincing Banner to help SHIELD locate the Tesseract, Romanoff got Banner aboard Fury's
helicarrier, where the two of them joined up with Tony Stark, Thor, and Steve Rogers,
aka Captain America.
After capturing Loki in Germany, however, the team began to fracture.
Natasha was able to trick Loki into revealing his plans to set off Banner's transformation
into the Hulk, but was unable to prevent it — following an argument with Fury and the
other heroes, Banner did transform, and the Hulk smashed his way through even the mighty Thor.
But when Loki used the Tesseract to bring an invading alien army to Earth, the team
began to gel, and Natasha joined them in the fight against the invading Chitauri warriors.
After saving the day, Romanoff and the newly-formed Avengers went their separate ways, but they
were now the world's mightiest team of superheroes.
Two years after the Battle of New York, when Georges Batroc led a group of terrorists in
an attack on the SHIELD carrier Lemurian Star, Romanoff retrieved classified files while
Steve Rogers took out the enemy soldiers.
From that intel, Romanoff, Fury, and Rogers uncovered evidence that SHIELD was being secretly
run by the remnants of the terrorist organization known as HYDRA, and planned on deploying three
new helicarriers that would allow them to take over the planet.
Romanoff was faced with a fateful decision: If she exposed SHIELD (and HYDRA) to the public,
she'd also be exposing her own past.
Between her loyalty to Fury and her friendship with Steve Rogers, however, it wasn't a hard choice.
Alongside Rogers and new hero Sam Wilson, she helped defeat HYDRA and take down SHIELD
for good.
As a member of the Avengers, Natasha Romanoff went on a number of missions with her new
team and grew closer to her teammate, Bruce Banner.
Natasha was the one person capable of calming the Hulk when they needed him to revert to
his human form, and their relationship slowly began to blossom into a tentative romance.
Romanoff would later be captured by Ultron, but still proved instrumental in his downfall.
After defeating Ultron and his robot army, Romanoff attempted to talk down the Hulk over
the phone while he sat at the controls of a Quinjet, but he ignored her pleas to return
and flew away to parts unknown.
After Ultron's defeat, Romanoff found herself an elder statesman on a new team of Avengers
that now included Wanda Maximoff, the android Vision, and Sam Wilson, the Falcon.
Romanoff became a leader on the team alongside Rogers, but her position next to Captain America
wouldn't last long.
Following a mission to Lagos that resulted in the deaths of civilians, the Avengers found
themselves at odds with the Sokovia Accords, a United Nations resolution that would see
them become an officially sanctioned arm of the world's governments.
Romanoff advocated going along with the order, but Rogers, Wilson, Maximoff, and Clint Barton
split with the team and went on the run.
With a battle of heroes on the horizon, it was Romanoff who recruited the Wakandan prince
T'Challa, the Black Panther, to join them in stopping Rogers' team.
But in a confrontation in Germany between the two factions, Romanoff was once again
forced to choose between her loyalty to Rogers and Barton, and the orders of her superiors.
Forced to fight Barton hand-to-hand, she was stopped by Wanda Maximoff, but ultimately
prevented Black Panther from capturing Rogers and allowed him to escape.
When all was said and done, Romanoff left Stark's team and struck out on her own, in
defiance of the law.
Romanoff and her fellow fugitive Avengers soon found themselves being hunted by an obsessed
Thaddeus Ross, the Secretary of Defense.
Alone and in hiding, Natasha sought the help of old friends around the globe, including
former SHIELD agent Rick Mason, now operating as an independent contractor.
But when she received a mysterious package and became the target of a shadowy assassin
called the Taskmaster, she began a new mission to track down her adopted Soviet sister, Yelena Belova.
When they met in Budapest, they realized that the Red Room was not destroyed after all,
and that Dreykov had escaped Romanoff's assassination attempt back when she first joined SHIELD.
The two sisters reunited with their "parents," Alexei and Melina.
The former false family worked together to stop Dreykov and take down the Red Room
once and for all.
To do that, however, they'd have to get past the Taskmaster (who turned out to be none
other than Dreykov's daughter) as well as a new group of deadly Black Widow agents whom
they also hoped to free from Dreykov's mind control.
The plan succeeded — the Red Room was destroyed, and Dreykov was killed by Belova — but it
also put Romanoff back on Ross' radar.
He arrested her, but she escaped his custody with ease and went on a mission to spring
the others from jail.
"It's funny, my whole life I didn't think I had any family.
Turns out I got two."
Still a fugitive from the government and still being hounded by Ross at the start of "Avengers:
Infinity War," Romanoff joined Rogers and Wilson as an underground team of heroes.
But in 2018, the interstellar tyrant Thanos sent his Black Order to Earth to steal the
Mind Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones Thanos required to wipe out half of all existing
life forms, and which happened to reside in Vision's head.
With fellow heroes Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange unexpectedly off-planet, Romanoff
and her team stepped forward to help defend their planet once again.
Reunited with Bruce Banner, Natasha began assembling forces and making plans to prevent
Thanos from retrieving the Mind Stone.
Assisted by T'Challa and his army of Wakandan warriors, Romanoff would hide Vision in Wakanda
in a last ditch effort to defeat the overpowered Titan.
Several Avengers helped Natasha and her forces in their valiant defense of Vision, but in
the end, Thanos simply proved too much for them.
He took the Mind Stone, and with a snap of his fingers, eliminated half of all life in
the universe.
Retreating to the Avengers Compound back in upstate New York, Romanoff, Rogers, and the
other heroes who survived "the Snap" licked their wounds.
Even taking their revenge on Thanos didn't help matters — the Infinity Stones had already
been destroyed, and the damage was done.
Natasha took on a leadership position in the Avengers, coordinating global recovery efforts
and assisting cosmic heroes like Rocket Raccoon and Captain Marvel.
But five years after the Snap, the pressures of leadership and the trauma of loss were
clearly starting to take their toll.
So when Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, returned from the quantum realm with a plan to change
history, Natasha gladly suited up as the Black Widow once again to save the world.
Of course, to do so, she had to first travel to Japan to recruit her old friend Clint Barton,
who had lost his entire family to the Snap and who had become a violent anti-hero called Ronin.
Once they were back together, however, Romanoff and the rest of the original Avengers — alongside
Rocket and Thanos' estranged daughter Nebula — embarked on a mission to travel back in
time and re-assemble the Infinity Gauntlet in order to undo Thanos' heinous act.
Upon journeying into the past, the remaining Avengers split into smaller teams to accomplish
individual tasks.
Barton and Romanoff took the Guardians of the Galaxy's spaceship to the planet of Vormyr,
home of the hidden Soul Stone.
There, they found the ghostly form of the Red Skull, banished there since attempting
to wield the Tesseract back in World War II, who told the pair a grim truth: to obtain
the Soul Stone, one of them had to die.
In one of the most tragic moments in the entire MCU, Romanoff made the ultimate sacrifice,
giving her life so that Barton could be reunited with his wife and son, a final gift to him
for his years of friendship and restitution for rescuing her from the Red Room.
The debt she felt she owed Barton had at last been repaid, for it was he who had given her
a new life as the Black Widow — a daughter, a sister, a hero, and an Avenger forever.
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