Warning: Full spoilers follow for Black Widow.
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One of the highlights of the Black Widow movie is David Harbour’s Red Guardian, a.k.a. Alexei Shostakov, the former deep-cover Russian spy who was also at one point that country’s answer to Captain America. While the main arc of his character is based around his relationship with his adopted family of fellow former and/or current Russian agents Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), and Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz), a running joke in the film involves Alexei recalling his glory days, and particularly his self-proclaimed rivalry with Captain America.
But the thing is, Alexei is probably making it all up… Or is he? Let’s take a look at the evidence.
The first time we hear about these alleged adventures is when we meet up with the former Red Guardian, who has been imprisoned in the Russian Gulag for years. He’s arm-wrestling fellow inmates one at a time, and beguiling them with stories of fighting Cap. “There he is — Captain America,” he says. “Finally, the Red Guardian’s time has come! I grab hold of his shield. Face to face, it’s a test of strength!”
Sounds exciting! And yet, when one of the inmates asks Alexei what year this confrontation took place, he replies, “I don’t know. 1984.” Which, as he is then reminded, would mean Captain America was still on ice at the time, frozen in suspended animation. So how could they have fought each other?
As we all learned in history class, Steve Rogers was born in 1918 in good old Brooklyn, USA. After years of dreaming of joining the army so he could fight in World War II, he underwent Dr. Erskine’s Super Soldier experiment as part of Project Rebirth and adopted the Captain America mantle. Rogers became a hero and ultimately went into the ice in 1945 while preventing a bombing attack on the United States initiated by the Red Skull. That’s when Cap entered suspended animation and remained frozen for approximately 66 years before being discovered and thawed by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in 2011 or 2012.
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So that would mean that Red Guardian’s story about fighting Cap in 1984 doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? But maybe Alexei just got the dates wrong and actually he was talking about something that happened back in the ’40s…? Well, putting aside the fact that the prologue of Black Widow pretty much establishes that Alexei was a younger man in the 1990s than he is in the more or less modern time period that most of the film is set during 2016 — which would seem to indicate that he ages normally like the rest of us — there’s also the fact that the U.S. and Russia were allies during World War II. So why would they be fighting? Also, the Guardian mentions “having the nuclear codes” during his fight with Cap, which again, doesn’t line up with a 1940s match-up.
It is possible, of course, that Red Guardian actually fought a different version of Cap, as we now know that the U.S. government continued to experiment on its own soldiers, including many African-American men, at least into the 1950s. These experiments resulted in Isaiah Bradley, who we met in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, becoming a super soldier in his own right. Marvel has left it unclear at this point whether or not Bradley actually donned a Captain American uniform as he did in the comics, but it’s not out of the question that he or some other American soldier did in 1984.
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But then again, at one point in Black Widow Alexei asks Natasha if Cap ever talked about him to her. He even says that he feels like they’re more “contemporaries” than enemies — so, you know, guys from the same era. And since Steve Rogers’ identity is publicly known, presumably Alexei would be aware that his “contemporary” is like 100 years old. Doesn’t really add up…
Of course, what’s really going on with Red Guardian is that this is all a funny little throughline for David Harbour’s character, and it also contrasts the whole concept of the shiny, upstanding, perfect Captain America — symbol of the good old U.S. of A. — with the fallen relic of the past that was the Soviet Union, which of course Red Guardian symbolized.
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But then again (again)…
Steve Rogers did travel through time in Avengers: Endgame when he was on a mission to return all the Infinity Stones to their rightful places in time/space. We have no idea what he did during that period or even how long he was gone for, so he actually could’ve fought Red Guardian in what would’ve been Alexei’s past but Steve’s present!
You know what? I really hope that’s the answer here, if only for Alexei’s sake.
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For more on the film, check out our Black Widow post credits scene and ending explained, dig in on the history of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, or get an explanation of Taskmaster’s true identity in the film. You can also read our review of Black Widow here!