Florence Pugh

            On Friday morning I continued working on memorizing the rest of the first chorus of “Ballade de la chnoufe” (Ballad of the Snuff) by Boris Vian. 

            I started memorizing the second verse of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I might have that finished tomorrow. 

            I weighed 88.24 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since December 12. 

            During song practice I played my Martin acoustic for the last of four sessions. 

            I had planned on going downtown today to look for a new backpack because two of the zippers are worn out on my current one. I think it’s still under the three year warranty but I don’t know if I want to go through the hassle of trying to get a free on e that way. Anyway I couldn’t go downtown because a snow storm made that impossible.

            I weighed 89.25 kilos before lunch. November 30 was the last time I pushed the scale that far in the early afternoon. 

           In the afternoon the roads were not clear enough for a bike ride downtown but I still wanted to go to the supermarket. Even the short ride to Freshco was treacherous. As I was struggling through the snow with my bike some driver rolled down his window as he drove by and told me to go home. I bought seven bags of green grapes, a pack of raspberries, some bananas, and two packs of Full City Dark coffee. I did a price match on the grapes with the Real Canadian Super Store’s price of $4.39 a kilo.

            I weighed 88.85 kilos at 17:40. The highest it’s been in the evening since December 9. 

            I was a day behind on my journal and so I worked on getting caught up but was still behind at suppertime. 

            I made a new batch of gravy from roast chicken dripping and had some with a potato, a chicken leg and some cranberry sauce while watching Thunderbolts*. 

            Yelena Belova the Black Widow feels depressed and unfulfilled but throws herself into her work anyway. She is working for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, the director of the CIA who is undergoing impeachment because of her use of super beings for her own agenda beyond that of her country. Valentina has sent Yelena to destroy the evidence in a certain lab in Kuala Lumpur but she ends up killing everybody who can get her into the part of the lab where the evidence is and so she just rescues a guinea pig and then blows up the entire floor of the building that contains the evidence. 

            She gets a new mission but first goes to see her foster father Alexei Shostokov the Red Guardian who is now working as a limousine driver. She asks him when he was most happy and he says when he was a hero. He suggests that she might follow her sister’s example but Yelena doesn’t want to be reminded of Natasha who died saving the world. 

            She calls Valentina and heads for her next mission. There’s a warehouse on a mountain with a vault built 1.5 km down that stores all of sensitive material relating to Valentina’s black ops group O.X.E. Valentina has learned that Ghost plans on robbing some of that material and sends Yelena there to stop her. There she finds some papers relating to a project called Sentry. Just then she is attacked by the super soldier US Agent who was chosen to be the second Captain America but lost the title after committing murder in public. He says he’s there to kill her and is winning the fight when he is ambushed by Taskmaster who says he is her target. Then Ghost appears and kills Taskmaster. Then they all stop fighting when they hear someone struggling to get out of a metal container. He is wearing hospital clothes and says his name is Bob. 

            Suddenly all the heavy rolling doors slam down and they are all trapped inside. Suddenly Yelena realizes that all of them are part of the evidence that Valentina wants destroyed. Ghost tries to phase through the door it causes her and everyone to be hit by a painful sonic alarm. An infra red heating system goes on and there is a timer indicating it will be two minutes before they are all incinerated. They have to work together to get out. They have to find the power source for the sound barrier that prevented Ghost from leaving. They find it and Agent smashes it. Ghost goes through with thirty seconds left. She opens the door with two seconds to spare. Yelena touches Bob as they break free and relives her first kill when she had to betray another girl in the Black Widow program but in this case Bob sees it happen. 

           Meanwhile Valentina is in a limo with her assistant Mal and learns that Yelena, Agent and Ghost were not killed as planned. She also wonders who the mysterious innocent looking guy is that’s with them. After they leave the limo we see it is driven by Red Guardian. 

           Back in the facility they are free of the incinerator but still trapped. Agent demands answers from Bob but all he remembers is getting his blood drawn and waking up in his pajamas. Agent is so obnoxious that suddenly Bob starts laughing because it’s uncharacteristic of someone who claims to be Captain America. Yelena stops Agent from attacking Bob. She advises Bob not to start fights with super soldiers until they all get out. 

           They break through into the bottom of a circular shaft but they can’t see the top. Agent tries to jump but falls back down. Bob has an idea. They put their backs together and their feet against the wall and push against each other while walking up the wall. The last time I saw an escape like that was on the Batman TV series in the 60s. Batman and Robin did it together up a similar but not nearly as high shaft. They complain that Ghost’s suit is hard against their backs but she explains she can’t help it since without it her body would dematerialize forever. They are climbing for an extremely long time.

           Valentina learns that Bob, aka Robert Reynolds was one of the subjects in the Sentry project. All the subject s died and so he must have appeared dead to the scientists in charge and was placed in a container. If he survived it may mean that Sentry was a success. 

           In the shaft they are just below a door but the problem is that if one of them reaches for it the others fall. Agent breaks free and they fall but Ghost digs into the wall, Yelena grabs her and shoots her grappling line to catch Bob by the foot. They make it back up and Agent pulls them in. When he grabs Bob’s hand he has a flashback like Yelena did and is teetering on the edge of the shaft when he comes to consciousness. 

           They can see a small army waiting for them outside the facility. Valentina arrives and tells the commander she wants this non-lethal because of Bob. Yelena sets off an explosion. Bob reveals to Yelena that he has mental health issues with highs, lows and memory losses. A strike team goes in and Agent takes them out. The next team comes in. Yelena straps Bob with his back to hers and she starts fighting the strike team. She takes one of their automatic weapons and gives it to Bob. He shoots one the soldiers in the foot and says sorry. Ghost has gone to get a vehicle. Yelena, Bob , and Agent leave disguised as strike force members. Ghost pulls up in an armoured vehicle. Bob is placed alone in the back. Agent is driving and they get stopped by guards. Agent is not very good at subtly convincing people of anything. 

           The guards tell them to get out but suddenly they hear gunfire as Bob is distracting them by running away while firing his weapon in the air. A large number of soldiers open fire on Bob and he is riddled with bullets. Yelena, Ghost and Agent drive away. Bob gets up and he is surprised to find himself floating above the ground. Then he suddenly flies into the sky but not in a smooth flight. He flies up the way people tumble down. Bob reaches a certain height in the clouds, then loses consciousness and falls. He hits the ground like a meteorite and makes a crater. 

           Valentina has Bob’s unconscious body placed in a metal coffin and flown to New York where she has taken over the Avengers’ high rise and now calls it The Watch Tower. 

            Yelena, Ghost, and Agent watch them fly Bob away and then a stretch limo arrives driven by Red Guardian. Yelena is embarrassed. He gets out and shouts to Yelena not to go in the vault because Valentina plans to burn her alive. As they are riding in Red Guardian’s car he tells Yelena that the light inside of her is brighter since she met this team. He says they need to become team of scrappy anti-heroes and stop Valentina. Yelena says Valentina can’t be stopped. 

           Suddenly assault vehicles are in pursuit behind them. Red Guardian’s car is not fast. The bad guys open fire. Red Guardian says his limo is bullet proofish. Guardian grabs a bottle of vodka, takes a swig, sets fire to the rest and throws the Molotov cocktail out the window to hit one of the vehicles. It looks impressive but the fire does little harm. Ghost tries to attack the vehicles but a sonic weapon stops her. Yelena clims out the window and shoots one of the vehicles out of commission. A disc hits one of the vehicles and blows it up. From behind the other vehicle they see Bucky Barnes the Winter Soldier on a motor cycle. He goes up beside the vehicle and grabs a weapon from a soldier, then takes out the front tire. Then he attaches a grappling cable to the front of the vehicle, goes back behind it, drives his end of the cable into the road and causes the vehicle to flip backwards. They think he’s saved them but he blows up the limo and captures them all. He wants to use them all as evidence against Valentina. 

            Mal calls Bucky to tell him what Valentina plans to do with Bob who is unstable with tremendous power. Bucky lets them free and says they have to help him stop Valentina. 

            Meanwhile Bob wakes up with Valentina by his bedside and she begins to manipulate him in a motherly way. She starts to train him to use his powers. 

            Bucky and the others have no real plan. They just smash their vehicle into the Watch Tower and start fighting. In the middle of the fight they hear Valentina over the intercom inviting them in. She tells them they are adorable in the way they didn’t kill each other. She sees Alexei and asks, “Who’s this old Santa?” He says he's the Red Guardian and she says, “The what?” Bucky tries to grab Valentina but a force stops him. 

            Bob walks down the stairs in his golden Sentry suit with the cape. Valentina has bleached his hair. Guardian attacks but Sentry easily knocks him away. Yelena tries to stop the fighting but Agent attacks as well. Sentry is too fast and strong for everybody. He folds Agent’s shield. Yelena tries to use her Black Widow shock stingers to subdue him but he tosses her aside as well. He tears off Bucky’s mechanical arm and knocks him out with it. The Thunderbolts run away. Valentina tells him to finish them but he says “No” because they aren’t a threat. She says he needs to do what she says but he asks why. He asks why a god would take orders from anyone. She thinks he’s using the word “god” a bit loosely. But he argues that she told him that he’s more powerful than all the Avengers, one of which is a god and so he must be a god. 

            Valentina has a device that is meant to be Sentry’s kill switch but he stops her from pushing the button and has her by the throat. Suddenly he collapses because Mal has another kill switch and knocks him out. They think he’s dead and leave him alone but suddenly his dark side takes over. 

            Outside the building Guardian says they just need to regroup but they’ve given up. Yelena walks away and goes after her. He catches up but she tells him they are not family. She lost her sister but he never contacted her. He says he didn’t think she wanted him to but now he knows he should have. He tells her that before she was trained in the Red Room she was special and would light up every room she entered. She wanted to be goalie on her football team so she could be the one everyone could rely on. He says he still sees that same Yelena. 

            Sentry is floating above New York. Helicopters attack but now Sentry just casually gestures to turn his attackers into dark shadow shaped spots. Without pilots the helicopters smash into buildings and concrete is falling. Yelena and Guardian begin to save people. She gets him to throw her to save a woman from a truck. Bucky begins to help, then Ghost and Agent join in. Guardian saves a little girl from falling concrete but then Sentry turns her into a shadow. He begins turning everyone to shadows. All the team runs except for Yelena who walks toward Bob and is turned into a shadow. Guardian freaks out but the others hold him back. 

           Yelena wakes up in the same flashback she had when she first touched Bob. She runs and crashes into another flashback from the Red Room when the other girls are whipped for not assembling a gun as fast as Yelena. She smashes through a mirror and finds her adult self drunk in a bathroom. They fight. Meanwhile the others decide that Yelena might not be dead and decide to enter the darkness as well. She finds Bob and he’s just sitting there. He asks what’s happening and she says she’s just watching New York disappear into a big maze of interconnected shame rooms. Bob says it’s not him that’s doing it but the Void. Bob appears to be bipolar. In the room next door there is a flashback to Bob’s childhood and his abusive parents. She tells him not to bear his burden alone. She gets him to agree to find a way out together. But then the Void starts attacking them with the rooms and their parts. They are both being strangled by a curtain but the Ghost arrives and cuts it. The rest of the team is there as well to fight the room. Bob doesn’t really know the way out but Yelena says to show them the worst room. Meanwhile Sentry’s shadow is engulfing all of New York. The team is attacked by Bob’s father but Agent knocks him out with his bent shield. Then they are attacked by Bob when he was a meth addict and spinning a sign in a chicken suit. 

            Then they arrive in the lab where O.X.E started experimenting on Bob for the Sentry program. That Bob confronts them and says they aren’t leaving. He pins the team to the walls with furniture. He stabs Agen with a scalpel and showers everyone with broken glass. Bob begins fighting with his dark self and loses at first but gets angry and begins to win but the more he wins the more everything is being destroyed around him. His dark self laughs as Bob begins to become engulfed by shadow. Yelena sees what’s happening. Guardian helps her break free and she runs to Bob as she dodges flying furniture. She embraces Bob as he’s punching his dark self and tells him he’s not alone. The others break free and also join Bob. They pull him back from his dark and they are suddenly back in real New York as the shadows recede. Bob doesn’t remember anything. They have to keep him with them in case he does. 

            Guardian wants to kill Valentina but Bucky says they can’t. She ducks behind a canvas and they follow to arrest her but she is standing in front of a bunch of reporters and introduces the team as The New Avengers. Yelena whispers to her “We own you now”. 14 months later they are in the Avengers tower. There is some dispute with Sam Wilson the new Captain America over the Avengers name. Wilson has copyrighted it. Guardian has had jumpsuits made for everybody with the Avengerz spelled with a “Zed”. There is a space craft approaching. Guardian suggests that they should have a Sentry who can fly. Bob says he can’t be the Sentry without being the Void but he did do the dishes. They get an image on the screen of the extradimensional ship and it’s the Fantastic Four’s Excelsior. The question is, who’s on board. Is it the FF or is it Doctor Doom with Franklin Richards? 

            Yelena was played by Florence Pugh, whose raspy voice comes from having tracheomalacia as a child. She made her film debut in The Falling while still in high school (which is called Sixth Form in Britain). She starred in the movie Lady Macbeth, King Lear, The Outlaw King, Fighting With My Family, Midsommar, Black Widow, Malevolent, Little Women (for which she was nominated for both a BAFTA and an Academy Award), Don’t Worry Darling, The Wonder, A Good Person (which she also produced and for which she wrote and sang two songs), . She co-starred in We Livie in Time, Puss In Boots, She starred in the miniseries The Little Drummer Girl. It looks like she will be the new Black Widow in any Marvel movies or shows. She appeared as Black Widow in the TV series Hawkeye, trying to kill him. She is also a singer and a song writer. She says if you show Hollywood who you are they will love you for it but if you don’t know who you are they will make you who they want you to be. Empire Magazine voted her one of the 50 greatest actors of all time.