Black Widow’s Brainwashing Cure Betrays Bucky’s Journey

The red dust brainwashing cure in Black Widow mocks Bucky Barnes‘ (Sebastian Stan) journey in the aftermath of being the Winter Soldier. Bucky has had a traumatic and tumultuous arc during his time in the MCU. Starting out as a normal guy fighting at the side of his best friend Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in WWII, Bucky was lost during a mission, thought dead, was recovered by Hydra, fitted with a cybernetic arm and then brainwashed to be their elite assassin, the Winter Soldier, for over 70 years before escaping and being slowly deprogrammed.

His brainwashing arc is similar to what Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) underwent during the Black Widow training program in the Red Room. The MCU has made it clear that Natasha experienced horrors in her past, horrors done both to her and by her when she was brainwashed, but it has never actually delved into the details of exactly how Black Widow broke free of her Red Room brainwashing. The way in which she was brainwashed differs from Yelena, however. Natasha was brainwashed through psychological conditioning, but Yelena had her brain chemically altered. Despite Yelena’s brainwashing being more complete, though, it was undone far more easily. Yelena simply inhaled a mysterious red mist that instantaneously (if not realistically) negated her chemical mind control.

The ease with which Yelena shook off her thorough brainwashing makes Bucky Barnes’ struggle to regain his mind all the more heartbreaking. Bucky and Natasha underwent similar, older methods of brainwashing through psychological conditioning, but Bucky’s process lasted far longer, with him being reprogrammed again and again over decades. The unseen work Natasha did to fully escape her brainwashing was likely grueling, but Bucky’s mind had been tampered with so many times for so long that it was thoroughly broken when he escaped Hydra. The psychological (and by that point, likely biological) devastation was so thorough that not even Shuri, arguably the most brilliant scientist in the MCU, could figure out how to fix Bucky and had to cryogenically freeze him again while she figured out the delicate process of untangling the real Bucky from his brainwashing. Even afterward, he’s had a hard time always separating Bucky Barnes from the Winter Soldier and knowing what thoughts are his own.

The fragility of Bucky’s mind and his subsequent fight to regain himself have been brutal, with numerous setbacks. It’s made worse by the context provided by Dr. Arnim Zola, who kept secret journals documenting the experimentation he conducted on Bucky when Sergeant Barnes was a POW taken by Hydra. In the canon tie-in book The Wakanda Files, Shuri used Zola’s notes and her own brilliance to figure out how exactly Bucky was brainwashed in order to reverse-engineer Hydra’s process.

The heartbreak of Bucky eventually becoming the Winter Soldier, Hydra’s cold-blooded assassin, was that he initially fought it so hard. Zola documented that Barnes was unexpectedly resistant to their brainwashing, fighting it with a ferocity Hydra hadn’t anticipated. Hydra was determined to break him, however, so they increased the brutality of their methods in order to bend Bucky Barnes’ mind to their will, and Shuri describes the process in her own notes, writing, “Hydra’s Winter Soldier program subjected Barnes to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), followed by suggestive keywords and phrases to activate a brain soup knot that could take years to unravel. If we’re able to reverse it at all. ECT is extremely painful, and Hydra didn’t administer any dulling agents.” That process was inflicted dozens of times over the years to ensure Bucky Barnes remained controllable through his trigger words.

Even after Shuri’s painstaking work on deprogramming him and his court-ordered therapy, it’s entirely possible Bucky still isn’t fully free of his brainwashing and could be compromised again given the right conditions. Yelena being able to regain her mind through a process no harder than snorting Flonase in Black Widow really drives home just what a fighter Bucky Barnes has been. It will be interesting to see what happens should he ever meet Yelena and learn how she was deprogrammed.