Black Widow: Why improvised family works so well for the character

Black Widow’s improvised family concept is especially important given the history of the Red Room.

The Red Room was the training program given to members of the Black Widow program, a Soviet secret training facility/prison for equipping young girls to be the perfect spies, with seductive charm in equal measure. (Firefly’s recurring villainess Yolanda/Saffron/Bridget would have made a perfect candidate if such a thing existed in the future of the ‘verse.)

The MCU version is mostly shrouded in mystery, though the comics version has quite a long history.

What we do know of the Black Widow program comes from the hints Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) has dropped once in a while, mostly in the Whedon-directed Avengers: Age of Ultron, besides the glimpses viewers see of Dottie Underwood’s (Bridget Regan) past in the first season of ABC’s short-lived Agent Carter series.

While it wasn’t ever stated outright on Agent Carter that Dottie’s training came from the Red Room, as she was connected with a group called Leviathan, it seems very likely that it was a precursor to the Red Room program itself. Besides psychological brainwashing and extensive hand-to-hand combat training in various forms of mixed martial arts styles, candidates were also taught to become highly proficient with knives and firearms.

Ballet was part of the program to learn grace and mental discipline, which brings its own mental tortures, as Natalie Portman’s movie Black Swan highlights.

As part of the training was to avoid emotional attachments, a preteen Dottie was forced to execute her best friend. An orphan, as all recruits were, as an adult she desperately wanted human connection and could come across as a bit naive.

As Nat mentioned to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) in Age of Ultron, Black Widow recruits were sterilized as a graduation procedure, further isolating them from the rest of the world by erasing the potential for the tightest human connection of all, between a mother and child.

Furthermore, the missions – often assassinations – wouldn’t have made normal human contact possible, as the only true coworkers you had might just as easily kill you tomorrow should the mission warrant it. This makes Dottie’s isolation more profound, and explains why SHIELD would have been so eager to bring Nat onto their side decades later.