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WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Black Widow, now in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access.
Today, we look at how a major moment in the new Black Widow movie was lifted almost exactly from a Black Widow miniseries!
This is a brand-new feature called “Repeat the Past.” It is basically the reverse of another feature of mine called “Follow the Path,” where I spotlight changes made to comic book characters that are based on outside media, as well as characters who entirely came from outside media. Nowadays, there are so many comic book films and TV series out there that we can spotlight examples of TV and film adapting specific and less famous comic book stories to other media (so no “Spider-Man lifts up debris” or stuff like that).
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MOVIE
In Black Widow, Ray Winstone plays Dreykov, the head of the mysterious Red Room, which uses orphaned (or otherwise acquired) young girls and brainwashes them into becoming perfect little obedient killing machines. In modern times, Dreykov does so by thoroughly brainwashing the younger Black Widows so that they are not even really in control of their own bodies. However, we see that in the earlier Black Widows, like Natasha and Yelena’s “mother,” Melina, Dreykov still used a special pheromone to make sure that the Widows obey him whenever they get close enough to him to smell him.
This allows him to feel confident that no Black Widow will ever actually be able to harm him. Natasha is surprised to find that she, too, is affected by this pheromone (when she tried to kill him in the past, it was a sneak attack and long range, so the pheromone did not come into play). Dreykov takes great pleasure in tormenting Natasha while controlling her, but she then goads him into striking her a number of times. He is too weak to actually break her nose, though, so Natasha just smashes her face on to Dreykov’s desk and breaks her own nose, thus neutralizing his pheromone control!
Things go poorly for Dreykov in the rest of the film until he is killed in a helicopter explosion and Natasha acquires the names of all of his various Black Widow sleeper agents so that they can be cured of his control.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE COMICS?
The first Richard K. Morgan Black Widow miniseries came out in 2004 and Morgan was interested in playing with the idea that he felt that all of Black Widow’s previous comic book appearances had had the character being sort of subservient to men, that she only existed in terms of her relationship to men and that Morgan wanted to turn that idea on its head, which led to the revelation in the miniseries (which was drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz and Goran Parlov) that Natasha and all of the other Black Widows in the Red Room program were controlled by a pheromone.
Not only that, but as I revealed in a recent feature, it is then revealed that Nick Fury stole said pheromone and used it to recruit Natasha into S.H.I.E.L.D. and still used it to this day to keep Black Widow in line…
Fury didn’t even bother denying it. It’s not so much that Fury is not a totally amoral character at times, but this goes beyond amorality and edges into just pure cruelty, no? She has been working with him for years, she is clearly loyal, as we see from the fact that she does her missions while she is not in any contact with Fury, so it is clear that he no longer NEEDS the pheromone to control her, and yet he continues to use it.
That is almost certainly why later writers have just dropped the “Fury controls her with pheromones” approach, as it just doesn’t seem to fit all of the stuff she does when she is well beyond any range of pheromones. I mean, she was in charge of the Avengers for years, was that due to the pheromones, too? It’s a clever enough idea (hence the Black Widow movie picking up on it), but the scale of it is way too large to fit in with all of her other character decisions over the years.
NOSE-BREAKING ACTION
The specific scene in the series, though, occurred later in the final issue of the miniseries. A young woman has been kidnapped to become part of a sort of variant on the Black Widow operation that turned women into “dolls.” Natasha assumed she was dead and wanted revenge and she focused on the man who supplied the Red Room with the chemicals that had controlled Natasha.
However, he was being guarded by an agent who had access to the pheromone, as well.
They fought, with Black Widow only being able to block his attacks, not make any attacks of her own, but she then decided to use her endurance to her advantage and get him to break her nose…
The reveal of her broken nose is handled wonderfully by Parlov and Sienkiewicz, as he knows right away that with her nose broken, he is severely outmatched…
And sure enough, she very quickly kills him and then kills the man that he was guarding, as well, which she knows just started the whole organization that she was tracking down to set their sights on her, which set up the SECOND Morgan Black Widow miniseries in 2005 (the second of a planned trilogy of miniseries that was never completed. I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed about how it WOULD have ended).
If anyone has a suggestion for a future edition of Repeat the Past, be sure to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com. Remember, I’m not looking for the really obvious stuff, but more stuff that many people wouldn’t even necessarily automatically know was adapted directly from a comic book like this pheromone/broken nose stuff.
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