Character Highlight: Melina Vostokoff (Black Widow)

*Black Widow spoilers.*

It’s been a while since I talked about Black Widow, but the final member of Natasha’s “family” is as deserving of a write-up as the rest of them. Melina, Red Room scientist and the mother of the sleeper-agent family, is a complex character who isn’t quite explored to her full potential within the film, but Rachel Weisz’s performance helps to flesh her out.

As with the rest of the family, we meet Melina in flashbacks of her and Alexei’s time working undercover in Ohio, posing as ordinary American citizens with Natasha and Yelena as their children. In that short sequence, we learn that Melina is absolutely dedicated to their mission, but the affection she has for Natasha and Yelena isn’t merely part of her cover. In her estimation, she truly cares for them, and when they’re made, getting the kids out safely is just as important to her as escaping with her stolen intel.

And yet, once they’re out of the country, the girls are sent away to the Red Room. Melina went through the Red Room herself when she was younger, conditioned and brainwashed to be one of Dreykov’s perfect assassins. She knows about the intense, dangerous training, the involuntary hysterectomies forced on the “graduates.” She knows that all the girls in the Red Room were trafficked, kidnapped from the families they once had. But she makes no move to help her “daughters” escape that life.

It's not until Natasha and Yelena are grown, having both broken out of the Red Room’s conditioning and escaped it at different times, that they reach out to her. They have a plan to destroy the Red Room once and for all, rescuing the women still trapped there. But to do that, they need Melina’s help.

See, Melina’s talents extend beyond that of a traditional Black Widow. As Alexei explains, “She was the scientist, the strategist. I was the muscle.” Melina designed the chemical compound the Red Room uses for brainwashing, having swapped out the psychological conditioning they used in Natasha’s day. That means Melina directly contributed to Yelena losing control over her own mind, which is horrific to think about.

But it also means Melina has unique intelligence that can be used to counteract the brainwashing. Her scientific work for the Red Room gives her intimate knowledge needed for infiltrating it, freeing the controlled women, and stopping Dreykov. She doesn’t really apologize for her hand in what happened to her daughters, but she does intend to rectify her sins by helping them save the remaining Widows.

It's easy to look at Melina in a simple way. Is she the victim who stayed in the only life she knew, so brainwashed herself that she eventually gave up on trying to break free until Natasha and Yelena asked for her help? Or is she the monster of a scientist who gave Dreykov the very tools he needed to assert absolute control over abused women until she made a last-minute pivot and decided to betray him?

Even though I think the film could’ve delved into Melina’s character more, I do think she ultimately defies this black-and-white categorization. The abuse and conditioning she suffered certainly inform her actions and help me understand why she didn’t push back earlier, but that doesn’t absolve her from the part she played in victimizing others. Like every member of the family, she has “red in her ledger” (to quote Natasha,) and when she joins her daughters in taking on the Red Room, she’s making a first attempt to balance the scales.

Character Highlight: Alexei (Black Widow)

*Some Alexei-related spoilers.*

While Yelena is clearly a new figure in the MCU, it’s unclear whether Alexei or Melina will be appearing again. And I don’t normally make a habit out of doing write-ups for characters who seem one-and-done (not including Wenwu, for whom I’ll make all manner of exceptions,) but I’ve got another week before the inevitable Moon Knight posts begin and I do enjoy Alexei a lot, so I wanted to talk about him.

In his heyday, Alexei was Red Guardian, the Soviet Union’s answer to Captain America, but while Steve got frozen in the ice and reappeared in the modern era still in his prime, Alexei had time to go to seed. We’re introduced to him in flashback, but when we first see him in the main setting of the story, he’s cooling his heels in a Russian prison, trying to impress his fellow inmates with almost-assuredly embellished stories of the glory days.

And that’s the Alexei we get to know in the movie. He’s very self-centered; his celebrity is important to him, and he’s constantly on the lookout for validation of his prowess. When Natasha and Yelena bust him out of prison and semi-reluctantly enlist him in their mission to take down the Red Room, he squeezes into his old Red Guardian suit even though he’s far past the days of it fitting him, and he’s arrogant enough to think it still looks good on him. He’s more than a bit of a lunk, with the women in his makeshift family spending a good chunk of time rolling their eyes at him.

As such, he’s a comedic character on the whole. There are some lazy fat jokes (the MCU, a.k.a. the land of abs for days, isn’t huge on body positivity,) some jokes that play on him being obtuse, and some jokes that take full advantage of his overly high opinion of himself. It’s not the most well-drawn characterization out there, but in David Harbour’s hands, Alexei stays entertaining throughout the film.

If that was all he was, Alexei might wear thin by the end of the movie, but fortunately, we do glimpse some deeper layers for him. First there’s the contrast between his enthusiastic “getting the band back together” attitude to reuniting with Natasha and Yelena. For him, it’s a chance to prove he’s still got it, while for them, it’s a deeply personal mission to dismantle the organization responsible for their trauma and exploitation as children. He and Yelena butt heads over his obvious annoyance in looking back on the years that they were together in a cover-story family. When Yelena blows up at Alexei over him making yet another joke of what were, for her, the formative years of her life, he seeks her out to make it up to her, singing “American Pie,” her favorite song back when he was a sleeper agent acting as her father. And regardless of his comic-relief status, he’s still there infiltrating and attacking the Red Room with the rest of them.

The biggest reason I’m going the Character Highlight route with Alexei, rather than Favorite Characters, is because there’s a definite disconnect between the Alexei we see in the opening flashback and the Alexei we know in the rest of the film. True, more than 20 years pass in the interim, but the Alexei at the start of the movie is a sharp Russian agent, commanding and decisive, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. The guy who next pops up in a Russian jail is more arrogant, dim-witted, and tone deaf than the guy we first met, and there’s no real attempt to explain the disconnect between the two.

Favorite Characters: Yelena Belova (Black Widow)

*Some Yelena-related spoilers.*

It’s interesting, because I loved Natasha throughout her run in the MCU, but when her long-awaited after-the-fact solo film finally came around, Yelena emerged as the movie’s MVP. Black Widow’s annoying kid sister (who’s also a trained assassin) leaps off the screen with life, snark, and unresolved rage.

When Natasha and Yelena were young, they were part of the all-American-family set dressing for a pair of Russian agents under deep cover. Natasha, who’d already been through the Red Room by this point, knew that their “family” was fake. Yelena did not. When Alexei’s cover was blown at the completion of their mission, the quartet escaped capture by the Americans but were split up, with little Yelena taking her turn to be brainwashed and indoctrinated by the Red Room.

The next time we see Yelena, she’s a young woman who’s been under the control of the Red Room for most of her life. She’s only just been freed of her conditioning, and she has no intention of losing that newfound free will. As she quickly points out to Natasha when their paths cross again, Red Room programming in Natasha’s day was psychological, while Yelena’s was chemical, her brain altered by a drug to the point where she couldn’t disobey. Natasha was eventually able to break through her own conditioning, but Yelena needed someone else to break it for her, dosing her with an antidote to counteract the drug.

Given all that she’s been through and the agency that was stolen from her, Yelena is understandably angry. She’s still trying to figure out who she is now, what the Red Room made her into and what she might make of herself, and her grievances are many. And yet, while she very naturally reviles Dreykov, she saves her most personal anger for Alexei, who now makes a mockery of their fake family, and Natasha, who escaped the Red Room but never came back for her.

But Yelena is ultimately a pretty reasonable person, and so when Natasha proposes they team up to take down the Red Room once and for all, she comes around to the idea and puts her anger at Natasha aside enough for them to work together. Both of are highly-trained and lethal, but they’re dropping into a situation where they’re trying to get to a man who’s protected by layers of women with the exact same training, women who are still trapped in his thrall. If they have any hope of succeeding, it has to be together.

And more than that, despite her guardedness and her justified rage, there’s a part of Yelena that still longs for the people she once thought were her family. So, as she and Natasha plan their mission, she takes Natasha to task for the way she was seemingly able to shake the Red Room from her life and reputation in becoming an Avenger, but she also totally falls into the little-sister pattern of giving Natasha crap while simultaneously craving her approval. She has nothing but contempt for Alexei’s easygoing, joking attitude toward the past, but when he sings the song she used to love as a child, she finds something in her that still resonates with her not-father.

And honestly? She’s just entertaining. On top of all the general Widow badassery, Yelena is really funny, brimming with dark snark in a way that few female MCU characters have really gotten the chance to be. For all that I love so many of the MCU’s heroines, they’re frequently framed as no-nonsense and highly-competent, especially in comparison to the men around them (this applies to Natasha and the Avengers, but also Gamora and the Guardians, Hope and Scott, and others.) Often, the most they get to be is coolly wry. Yelena has a biting sarcasm that she deploys readily, along with other humorous qualities baked into her personality, like her annoyance at Natasha’s superhero poses or her over-the-top enthusiasm for her tactical vest. Whenever she’s onscreen, she’s definitely one to watch, and I can’t wait to see more of her in the franchise.