Shadow Work at the Multiplex:

What Thunderbolts* Says About Power and Accountability

SPOILERS:

The first time we see Yelena Belova in Thunderbolts*, she’s destroying a laboratory in Kuala Lumpur on behalf of CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. It’s cleanup work—erasing evidence of a failed super-soldier program called Project Sentry. Routine mercenary business for a former Black Widow. But when Yelena accidentally touches the program’s sole survivor, an anxious man named Bob, she gets pulled into something that won’t stay buried: a memory from her childhood in the Red Room.

She’s a little girl in a snowy forest, calling to her friend Anya. “Come here,” young Yelena says, and Anya trusts her, walks toward her—and a Red Room handler shoots the child dead. It was Yelena’s first test. She passed by leading an innocent friend to slaughter.

The memory lasts only seconds before Yelena snaps back to the present, shaken. But it’s a preview of what’s coming. By the film’s climax, when Bob’s darker alter ego—the Void—engulfs New York City in supernatural darkness, Yelena will have to walk voluntarily into that shadow and face not just this memory, but all of them. The little girl she couldn’t save. Her alcoholic self, passed out by the bathtub in a shitty apartment. Every terrible thing she’s done in service to systems that treated her as disposable.

And then, after doing her own shadow work, she’ll have to guide Bob through his: the abusive father ranting downstairs while young Bob tries to stand up to him and fails. The shame of thinking he could ever be more than nothing. The recursive hell of trauma that created the Void in the first place.

This is not metaphorical shadow work. This is literal Jungian integration happening on screen in a Marvel movie, complete with practical sets designed to feel like mazes—”shame rooms,” the filmmakers called them—where characters have to break through walls (both literal and psychological) to reach each other. The climax isn’t resolved by Yelena punching harder. It’s resolved by her embracing Bob, breaking free from her own constraints, and the rest of the team joining in what might be the greatest group hug in MCU history.

So here’s the question a mongoose might ask: What does it mean that this narrative—shadow work as the source of power, integration as the path to victory—is what Disney decided to greenlight for mass consumption in 2025?

The Therapeutic Turn Goes Mainstream

We live in the age of therapy-speak. Everyone’s talking about trauma responses and attachment styles. “Toxic” and “gaslighting” have become everyday vocabulary. Mental health awareness campaigns are everywhere. But there’s a difference between talking the language and doing the work.

Marvel’s been flirting with therapeutic themes for years. WandaVision gestured at grief processing. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier had Sam Wilson literally sit Bucky down for a therapy session. But these were always window dressing—emotional flavoring for stories that ultimately resolved through action sequences. Wanda doesn’t actually process her grief; she mind-controls a town and then runs away. Bucky gets a few therapy scenes, then goes back to being the competent soldier.

Thunderbolts* does something different. The entire third act is structured around the mechanics of actual trauma therapy. Yelena can’t fight her way out of the Void—she tries, literally punching and running through her shame rooms, and it doesn’t work. She has to stop running. Face what she did. Accept that “it already happened” and can’t be changed. Only then can she help Bob with his own trauma response.

The film even gets the sequence right. You can’t guide someone else through their shadow work until you’ve done your own. Yelena has to confront her complicity in Anya’s death, and her own self-destructive coping mechanisms, before she can be present with Bob in his formative trauma. That’s not Hollywood shorthand for therapy—that’s how integration actually works.

And the resolution isn’t Bob “overcoming” the Void in some triumphant moment of willpower. The Void doesn’t disappear. Bob doesn’t become “cured.” What changes is that he’s no longer carrying it alone. The darkness is still there, but as Yelena says, it feels lighter now. They found a way out together.

The Institutional Failure

While Yelena and Bob are doing the hard work of integration, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is doing the opposite. She’s trying to erase her mistakes.

She created Project Sentry. It failed catastrophically—Bob became unstable, the Void emerged, people died. Her response? Destroy the evidence. Send Yelena to blow up the Malaysian lab. Eliminate the records. Make it disappear.

When that doesn’t work and Bob resurfaces, she tries to weaponize him instead. Rebrand the failure as a success. Put him in a suit, call him Sentry, present him to the press as the new Avengers-replacement. Use the spectacle to avoid her impeachment hearings. Never mind that Bob is deeply unstable and the Void is a ticking time bomb—the optics matter more than the reality.

This is the logic of institutions under pressure. Don’t fix the problem, manage the perception. Don’t face what you’ve done, erase the evidence. When forced to confront consequences, double down and spin it as intentional.

And here’s where the film gets interesting: Valentina’s strategy almost works. By the end, she’s standing at a podium announcing the Thunderbolts as “the New Avengers,” taking credit for assembling them, framing the whole disaster as her master plan. The crowd cheers. The media buys it. She’s successfully rewritten the narrative.

Except Yelena leans in close and whispers: “We own you now.”

Power Flows to Those Who’ve Done the Work

That moment is the film’s thesis. Valentina tried to control them, tried to use them as tools to clean up her mess, refused to face her own shadows—and now she’s trapped. The people who did that hard internal work have all the leverage.

She has to publicly announce them as heroes while privately being controlled by them. She gets the appearance of success while losing all actual power. The façade is maintained, but the real authority has shifted to the people who were willing to integrate what they’d done and face who they actually are.

This isn’t a new idea—the concept that wholeness provides power while fragmentation creates vulnerability is ancient. But it’s unusual to see it depicted this clearly in a blockbuster film, and even more unusual to see it applied to institutional dynamics rather than just individual psychology.

Think about what’s being modeled here: A CIA director facing impeachment tries to erase evidence and manufacture heroes. A group of damaged people—assassins, failed super-soldiers, expendable assets—do the actual work of facing their worst moments. The institution maintains its public face but loses control to the people who stopped running from their shadows.

Why This Story, Why Now?

So back to the mongoose question: Why is Disney greenlighting a film where the climax is literal shadow work and the villain is an institution that won’t face its mistakes?

The commercial answer is easy: the therapeutic turn is real, younger audiences are fluent in this language, and mental health themes resonate. But there’s something else.

We’re living through a moment of cascading institutional failures. Government agencies shamelessly lying. Corporations obviously cooking the books. News organizations abandoning factual reporting. Leaders being impeached, indicted, or simply refusing to leave when they lose. And in almost every case, the institutional response is what Valentina does: deny, erase, rebrand, spin. Never face what was done wrong. Never process the collective trauma. Just increasingly frantic attempts to control the narrative while actual authority drains away.

Thunderbolts* offers a counter-narrative: power flows to the people willing to do the work. The ones who face their worst moments instead of erasing them. Who integrate their shadows instead of projecting them. Who build actual relationships based on mutual witness to each other’s wounds rather than manufactured spectacles of heroism.

Yelena doesn’t become powerful by getting a new super-suit or a public relations campaign. She becomes powerful by walking into the Void voluntarily, breaking through her shame rooms, and being present with someone else’s pain after processing her own. That’s where the leverage comes from.

The Asterisk

The film’s title carries an asterisk: Thunderbolts*. The marketing played coy with it for months. At the end, we get the reveal: the name changes to The New Avengers. The asterisk was always marking a substitution, a replacement, an “actually this instead of that.”

But the asterisk does more work than that. It’s a footnote marker. A signal that there’s more to the story than the official version. A reminder that what you’re seeing requires annotation, context, a closer look at what’s really happening beneath the surface.

Valentina announces “the New Avengers” and takes credit. That’s the public story, the one that goes in the press release. But there’s an asterisk. The real story—the one about who actually has power and why—is being written in the footnotes, in the whispered “we own you now,” in the shadow work that the cameras didn’t see but that changed everything.

The mongoose sees both. The official narrative and the actual power dynamics. The spectacle and the substance. The press conference and the whispered truth.

And what the mongoose sees in Thunderbolts* is a mainstream film teaching a very specific lesson: In a moment when institutions are trying to erase their failures and manufacture legitimacy through spectacle, power is flowing to the people willing to face their shadows and do the actual work of integration.

That’s not just entertainment. That’s a diagnostic. Maybe even a prescription.

Beò an Reàbhlaid 🐸