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Did Black Widow Secretly Kill Hundreds Of People?
Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) could have secretly killed hundreds of people in Black Widow. In Natasha's solo film, Romanoff teams with her Russian 'family' to take down the Red Room and its villain leader, Dreykov (Ray Winstone), who was responsible for the creation of the Black Widow program. However, Natasha and Yelena seem to leave a startling body count behind as Black Widow's story unfolds.
The reveal that Dreykov was the mastermind behind the Red Room and the Black Widows filled in the blanks about Natasha Romanoff's mysterious past as a Russian assassin. As a Black Widow, Natasha was a standout assassin but in her era of the Red Room, Dreykov only utilized behavioral conditioning instead of mind control to keep his Black Widows compliant. Romanoff had deep moral and ethical issues with being one of Dreykov's trained killers and she brokered a deal with SHIELD to defect to the United States. Natasha was ordered to assassinate Dreykov in order to prove herself. The hit in Budapest was overseen by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), where Nat detonated a bomb in an office building that they believed killed Dreykov until Black Widow revealed the spymaster survived the hit. However, the bomb caused considerable damage and injured Dreykov's young daughter Antonia (Olga Kurylenko), who her father turned into the mind-controlled killer called Taskmaster. But it's quite possible many innocent people instead of Dreykov died because of Natasha's office bomb.
Midway through Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff and Yelena Belova break their 'father', Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), from a Siberian gulag. Their plan doesn't exactly go off without a hitch and the prison guards open fire on the helicopter acquired for them by Natasha's fixer in Black Widow, Rick Mason (O-T Fagbenle). When Yelena returns fire with the helicopter's gun, she inadvertently triggers an avalanche that buries the prison, although Natasha and Alexei are able to escape aboard the chopper. When the avalanche started rumbling, Yelena quipped, "This is a cool way to die," but the prisoners and guards in the gulag who were buried by the avalanche would have disagreed.
Black Widow doesn't address the cause and effect of the avalanche but it's quite possible there were hundreds of casualties thanks to the catastrophe Yelena and Natasha inadvertently caused. As a result, the human cost of the two Black Widows freeing the heavily tattooed Red Guardian from prison may have been enormously high. Even though most of the gulag's population were violent criminals, being buried by an avalanche is not "cool" but a horrible way to die. Not to mention that the gulag's guards and support staff were just doing their jobs to prevent a prison break by the two Black Widows and they didn't deserve to lose their lives.
Although Black Widow glosses over all of these presumed deaths, it's possible that Natasha's silence after the prison break was her absorbing and coping with what just transpired. Alexei was offended that Romanoff was giving her estranged 'father' the silent treatment but Natasha could have been taking the moment to think about the deaths they caused to break Shostokov from the gulag. Natasha may have been an ex-Avenger on the run for violating the rules of the Sokovia Accords in Black Widow, but her film deals with her moral fiber and the innate heroism within Romanoff, which made Nat a cut above the other women Dreykov turned into Black Widows.
Between Black Widow's flashback to the Budapest Operation that failed to kill Dreykov, the story Natasha told about how she and Clint Barton had to shoot their way out of the city and spend days hiding in a subway tunnel, and the prison gulag avalanche, Black Widow's body count may be higher than it appears. Further, the Red Room's orbital base most have had dozens of personnel and it's possible not all of them made it to escape ships before the structure crashed. Although Natasha Romanoff saved Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster while Yelena Belova, Alexei Shostakov, and Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) survived, audiences may never know exactly how many hundreds might have died in Black Widow.
