Black Widow Finally Reveals What Happened in Budapest

| July 10, 2021 |

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Black Widow in The Avengers — *Photo: Curiosity Studios / Disney*

This commodity contains Black Widow spoilers.

During the first Avengers moving picture, in the midst of the Chitauri invasion into Manhattan'southward Midtown commune, Natasha Romanoff (Blackness Widow) and Clint Barton (Hawkeye) are continuing shoulder to shoulder every bit moving ridge later wave of aliens swarm. The archer has just saved civilians on a jitney while the Russian spy is emptying her pistols into intergalactic monstrosities' skulls.

Under normal circumstances, this should be a one time-in-a-lifetime event. And even in the instance of the Avengers, it should at least be a outset. Yet in the middle of all this baroque carnage, Nat takes a moment to crack, "It's but similar Budapest all over again."

Really? Even Clint seems uncertain as he fires back, "You and I remember Budapest very differently." Notwithstanding, this friendly disagreement raised an interesting question: What exactly happened in Budapest and why is Black Widow nostalgic enough for it to imagine a connection between the Boxing of New York and their previous espionage work?

We finally found out the answers in Curiosity's Black Widow , which revealed many secrets from Natasha Romanoff's past, every bit well as the events which went downwards in Budapest—now spoken of with the city's proper Hungarian pronunciation in the new movie.

Curiosity Studios teased nosotros'd be visiting the Hungarian capital letter years ago, back when it was revealed Natasha and her younger "sis" Yelena would come across up in Budapest. All the same, in the finished flick we acquire Yelena picked the location because this is where Nat left Yelena and her onetime life as a Russian spy behind.

As Nat confirms to Yelena in 2016, Budapest is where she got out of the Widow program, extracting herself from its seedy mastermind, a human being named Dreykov, who founded the Carmine Room schoolhouse back during the Soviet Union'due south reign leading to the forced "adoption" of Nat and Yelena as infants. Hence when Clint Barton was sent by SHIELD director Nick Fury to Budapest to recruit Natasha, a key requirement of her revolt involved assassinating Dreykov.

It's interesting that Nat remembered parts of her previous time in Budapest with nostalgia, since that's where she thought she killed the man who brainwashed her—at a terrible cost. While the act of killing Dreykov should've been thrilling, it actually became i of her greatest regrets since the only manner to seemingly confirm his location was to follow his young girl Antonia. The child'south presence in a Budapest domicile appeared to confirm to Romanoff and Barton that Dreykov was there. So she ordered the detonation of the explosives planted in the same building.

Black Widow shows these grim events in desultory flashbacks, which non so subtly harken dorsum to a sequence in Steven Spielberg'due south Munich . In that picture show, Mossad assassins grapple with the morality of their mission every bit they are similarly ordered to take out declared assets and spies working for the Palestinian Liberation Arrangement, including by most blowing up a young daughter with her begetter. For a woman defined past the trauma she suffered as a child at the hands of Dreykov, Natasha is visibly shaken in her Budapest flashback past the fact she is murdering another innocent girl to get back at him. Yet she is so drastic to be costless of his vindictive and horrific influence that she orders the explosion, fifty-fifty as she sees Antonia in the window.

This harrowing decision is what opened the door to her joining SHIELD and, somewhen, the Avengers, but it's a hell of a lot of red added to her ledger. Black Widow also alludes to it leading to firsthand fallout in Budapest that plain made for better memories.

In another sequence in the new moving-picture show, Nat and Yelena evade Dreykov'southward underlings by escaping into the Budapest subway arrangement'south air ducts. As Natasha confirms to her fiddling sis, she and Hawkeye spent iv days living in these bury-sized tunnels. Information technology is thus easy to infer later on "killing" Dreykov and Antonia, Romanoff and Barton were pursued by Russian spies attempting to capture the traitor in their ranks. This likely led to a shootout that Black Widow was reminded of in The Avengers , besides as their escape in the subterranean ventilation system.

Spending days together in those hot boxes would've been a skilful identify for Clint and Nat to truly connect and form a lifelong bond. Afterward all, it was before either ever met Tony Stark that Natasha would be adopted by the Barton family as "Auntie Nat." Equally Natasha later acknowledged in her final conversation with Clint in Avengers: Endgame , "I don't judge people on their worst mistakes."

She likely learned this compassion and open-mindedness from Clint, who for the improve part of a week got to know the real Natasha beneath her stoic Widow exterior. That'd be well worth treasuring their fourth dimension in Budapest together, even in the face of alien invasion.