Black Widow corrects for Joss Whedon’s controversial “monster” scene in Age of Ultron.

This article contains spoilers for Black Widow. The Red Room’s “widows,” including Natasha, are usually depicted as seductive and lethal, killing machines in catsuits, but in that moment, they’re just girls, bound for a horrible fate that looks more like human trafficking than comic-book espionage. Pugh drags out the word “rip” as if she’s pulling dough, and when she talks about the Red Room removing her internal organs, he hands do a swift chop-chop-chop, like she’s dicing vegetables. Whether or not Age of Ultron’s Natasha believes that a forced hysterectomy makes her a monster—the years of serving as a full-time assassin might have something to do with it—she is saying it makes it impossible for her to be a mother, not just to physically bear a child but to form a bond with one that “might matter more than a mission.” Black Widow responds, in effect: Really? “Turns out I have two.” It’s a bit of a glib conclusion, and it glosses over some of the movie’s darker undercurrents, like the fact that Natasha and Yelena’s “parents” effectively left them for dead, and that Melina has since been the architect of the Red Room program that chemically stripped Yelena’s generation of widows of their free will.