Bridget Regan played “Dottie Underwood,” an alias for a Soviet agent who was almost certainly an early version of today’s Black Widow. ABC/Kelsey McNeal
Howard Stark’s right-hand man Edwin Jarvis (James D’Arcy, right) lives on in the present as the voice of the artificial intelligence in Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor. Agent Carter (Hayley Atwell) has appeared in the present, as an elderly lady in a nursing home in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. ABC/Patrick Wymore
In the movies and on TV, Dominic Cooper has played the hilariously shallow and brilliant Howard Stark, whose greatest legacy is probably his son Tony, the inventor and superhero Iron Man. ABC/Kelsey McNeal
By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Agent Carter, the recently ended miniseries starring Captain America’s wartime sweetheart as an espionage agent in 1946, gave us a number of connections to the present-day Marvel movie and TV universe. Agent Carter and Howard Stark connect us to Captain America. Stark and Jarvis connect us to Iron Man.
And one other character connected us to yet a third Avenger, one not all that obvious. A character that appeared on the final six episodes connects us directly to The Black Widow.
No, Scarlett Johansson’s mother didn’t appear in cameo. Nor was Dr. Ivchenko (who was really a German named Fenhoff) her father. Nor did the current Black Widow herself appear, although that’s possible in the comics, where her birth year has been established as (gulp) 1928!
That alone is a clue, though. And to understand it, one must know … The True Origin of The Black Widow!
Which is not, I hasten to add, what we were told when she first appeared, in a 1964 issue of Tales of Suspense. In those days, Natasha Romanoff was a Russian espionage agent sent to assassinate defector Anton Vanko, who had battled Iron Man as the Crimson Dynamo before switching teams. She was also to seduce defense contractor Tony Stark (nobody knew he was Iron Man in those days) and steal some of his inventions. She was, as the spy guys say, a “honey trap.”
And to tell you the truth, not a very good one. Oh, in the comic book she was supposed to be totally va-va-voom (as they said in those days), but to a kid reading comics in the early 1960s, she looked like someone dressed up like your grandmother. She wore an evening gown, a pillbox hat with a veil, opera gloves and, of course, a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark.
But, as the cartoonish antics of the males around her indicated, she was supposed to be quite the looker. Still, she failed in her mission to seduce Tony Stark (maybe because he was secretly wearing an iron chestplate he couldn’t take off) and ended up snaring instead a new, minor superhero wannabe named … wait for it … Hawkeye the Marksman. Because, while the Avenging Archer is an impressively grim master assassin in the movies, in the comics he’s kind of a doofus.
Hawkeye went on to redeem himself and become an Avenger, with the Widow along as his plus one. She defected, and ditched the evening gown for something more superhero-y. Eventually she too became an Avenger, as well as Daredevil’s partner for a while, briefly the leader of a team called The Champions and an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. At one point, she even got a more plausibly Russian name (Natalia Alianovna Romanova).
During all those adventures we were told bits and pieces of Natasha’s past. It turns out she was a ballerina with the Bolshoi, married to a famous Soviet test pilot. But when he was killed, she was convinced in her time of grief to be a spy. Thus was born The Black Widow.
And that was true … for a while.
Unfortunately, her full story included a childhood during World War II – specifically, she was present at the Battle of Stalingrad. Unfortunately, I say, because as 1943 receded farther and farther into the past, it became increasingly implausible that a geriatric gymnast could continue fighting supervillains in skin-tight Spandex. Other heroes, like Iron Man, could have their origins continually moved up in time so the characters can remain perpetually the same age. But Natalia had that whole Stalingrad business tying her to a specific time and place that is now more than 70 years ago!
So her past had to change. And, since she’s a comic-book character, that really wasn’t a problem.
Early in the twenty-first century, several stories revealed that the ballerina business was an implanted memory. Instead, Natalia had been a war orphan who had been inducted in the Soviet “Black Widow Ops” program with a bunch of other war orphans, trained to spy and kill and deceive and other rotten stuff. The worst of it was taught in in something called “The Red Room,” where all the girls competed with each other (often fatally) to be The Black Widow – a title, it turns out, which is not Natalia’s alone. In fact, since she’s defected, another Black Widow trained in the Red Room, Yelena Belova, has become something of an arch-enemy.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar? If you’ve watched Agent Carter, it should.
Beginning with the episode “The Blitzkrieg Button,” we met Dottie Underwood (Bridget Regan), a young lady who appeared to be a naïve kid from the sticks. But we quickly learned that “Dottie” was an alias, that she was a staggeringly efficient killer and espionage agent … and that she had been raised with a lot of other little girls in a harsh program somewhere in the Soviet Union.
Yep, it was the Red Room. And Agent Carter, along with some of the Howling Commandos (from the Captain America movies) even visited that nigh-legendary site, although it was never named. If you had read the comics, you knew exactly where they were. (And you knew not to trust the innocent-looking girl they found there!)
So, no, we didn’t have THE Black Widow in Agent Carter. But we certainly had A Black Widow, although she never mentioned the name. And if you watched Dottie in action, you have some idea why the Scarlett Johansson character in the Marvel movies is a warrior respected by a Super-Soldier, a modern knight and a Thunder God.
Speaking of Dottie, she disappeared at the end of the last Agent Carter episode, one of the many storylines left unresolved at the end of the series. Another unknown is what’s to become of Agent Carter herself, who at the end was no longer employed by the Strategic Scientific Reserve. And yet, she must somehow stay on, because Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. told us us she’s fated (along with Howard Stark) to be instrumental in turning the S.S.R. into S.H.I.E.L.D. But how? And why? Plus, there was that creepy scene where the imprisoned Dr. Fenhoff – his mouth wired shut so he can’t use his hypnosis trick – was approached by another malevolent character, Arnim Zola (last seen in Captain America: The First Avenger). What awful stuff are they going to do?
So let’s hope that the eight episodes of Agent Carter were just the beginning, and we get more of the terrific characters and atmosphere of the show in the future. If nothing else, my wife wants to see what awesome ‘40s outfit Hayley Atwell will wear next.
Oh, and as to Natalia’s aging problem? According to the Marvel Wiki, “Government treatments have slowed her aging, augmented her immune system and enhanced her physical durability.” So that’s that.
What, the Soviets couldn’t have their own version of the Captain America program?
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Replies
...Seeing that top pic super-briefly/glancinglyon the front page made me think (Have yet to gander " M'sAC " yet ~ :-() " Whaa - ? Margaret Thatcher ?!! "
Well...same era !!!!!!!!!!!
That makes her 36 when she met Hawkeye.