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Black Widow’s sinister villain could give the Avengers their greatest threat to date, and also prove disastrous for the entire cosmos.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Black Widow, now playing in theaters and streaming on Disney+ Premier Access.
In the Marvel Universe, the Super-Adaptoid has always been one of the less heralded yet most intriguing foes for the Avengers. The robotic entity can mimic the powers of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, wielding several at the same time, but while its main struggle is with free will — a lesser version of Ultron, if you will — the events of Black Widow can indeed help put a new spin on this enemy and provide the Avengers with their greatest threat to date.
Originally known as the “Adaptoid,” it debuted in Tales of Suspense #82 as a tool of Advanced Idea Mechanics. This android was meant to kill the Avengers and over the years, the super-robot incorporated Captain America’s fighting style, used its body to mimic Thor’s hammer and Iron Man’s armor and impersonated characters like Bucky and Jarvis. It came off as a one-man army, evolving into a weapon of mass destruction called the Super-Adaptoid.
The Super-Adaptoid kept its signature green hue in the years that passed, but what increased was how strong and efficient it was. The way it perfected using multiple powers, demonstrating the ability to change size like Hank Pym and generate blasts like Iron Man’s repulsor rays all at the same time, really proved it deserved to be an A-list villain.
This is where the Marvel Cinematic Universe can level it up, thanks to the tech behind Black Widow‘s Taskmaster. The movie reveals that General Dreykov (Ray Winstone) rebuilt his daughter, Antonia, after an explosion, turning her into a mind-controlled assassin who could copy the fighting skills of Natasha, Cap, Hawkeye and more. Taskmaster even had her own shield, arrows like Clint and claws like Black Panther, effectively becoming a perfected Winter Soldier. Now, if this tech gets into the hands of other villains, the Taskmaster initiative can be converted into the deadly Super-Adaptoid.
The comics version of the villain was engineered using the Cosmic Cube, and seeing as the concept was compounded into the Tesseract for the MCU, remnants of Hydra could have the energy signatures to power a new bot this way. Coupling the Black Widow‘s Taskmaster data with a shell, such as the Vision that escaped in WandaVision, could give birth to the Super-Adaptoid, whose molecules and density can be altered to not just copy skills, but shapes as well.
The MCU already has the formula for shape-shifting experiments in the Skrulls. It’s not hard to see a sinister organization, maybe even Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina, kidnapping one of the aliens and secretly running a major project like this with its blood. Combining all of these unique properties may well produce something unstoppable, especially if it could unlock the secrets of Thor, Hulk and Thanos in battle. And seeing as Vision has sentience, the Super-Adaptoid could break free and even transcend Ultron as a villain.
This could be dangerous for the Avengers in the same way that Taskmaster was for Black Widow, especially since Natasha didn’t really beat her opponent. Instead, she survived by using a special gas to free Taskmaster from control to become Antonia again. So this shows that if Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have to face their equivalent in one vessel, the stakes will be high. It fits with Phase Four’s running theme of introducing dark reflections of the MCU’s heroes, like White Vision, Abomination and super soldiers like the Flag Smashers, Red Guardian and U.S. Agent.
To make it even more interesting, magic and supernatural abilities could be coalesced into this being, producing a mystical amalgamation that not even Doctor Strange could handle. For instance, if dark energy from Dormammu was used to create the Super-Adaptoid the same way Thor’s lightning and the Mind Stone imbued the original Vision with life, then the MCU could definitely have something apocalyptic on its hands. That’s the kind of ambitious challenge the next era of movies needs.
Directed by Cate Shortland, Black Widow stars Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle and Rachel Weisz, with William Hurt and Ray Winstone. The film is playing in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access.
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