Contains spoilers for “Thunderbolts*”

Marvel Studios has somehow taken supporting characters from “Black Widow,” “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp” to form the next superhero team — the Thunderbolts. And amazingly, it works really well, with “Thunderbolts*” being hailed by Looper as one of the most solid Marvel movies in recent memory. It’s an emotionally poignant story about mental health struggles, exemplified mainly by Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) not knowing what to do with her life and Bob, aka Sentry (Lewis Pullman), in a literal battle with the dark side of his own psyche, aka the Void. 

But everyone gets a chance to shine and prove that no matter what you’ve gone through in life, redemption is possible. That is, unless you’re the one member of the Thunderbolts who is inauspiciously killed off before the action even really starts. “Thunderbolts*” contains a fair amount of death, but it mostly comes from secondary sources, like Yelena remembering her own complicity in the killing of a young classmate in the Red Room or Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) inadvertently causing her father’s murder when she was still small. 

But there’s one main death in “Thunderbolts*” that’s worth dissecting. Even if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you could probably guess it from the copious fan theories online and the character’s absence from many scenes in the various “Thunderbolts*” trailers. 

“Thunderbolts*” kicks off with Valentina needing to wipe out evidence of her various crimes, so she sends Yelena, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) into an O.X.E. Group vault to secretly kill them off. A deleted scene from “Black Widow” actually shows Taskmaster getting carted off by U.S. authorities, which likely explains how she fell under the purview of Valentina as the CIA director. Before the four realize they’ve been played, Ghost shoots Taskmaster point-blank in the head, killing her instantly. 

It’s a quick, shocking demise for a character who’s done so much more in the comics than the MCU has allowed. But a surprising death is precisely what director Jake Schreier wanted. “We felt like a movie like this needed something like that,” he told GamesRadar+. “Where you’re like, ‘Okay, if they’ll do that, they could do anything,’ you know, and you don’t really know exactly where the thing is going to go. It needed a bit of shock or surprise.” Despite that, no one else of note dies in “Thunderbolts*.” Even everyone who’s turned into a shadow by the Void comes back once Bob’s regained control of his emotions. 

Despite being one of the weaker members of the Thunderbolts, it might have been cool to see Taskmaster fight against Sentry, mimic his moves, and still get overpowered. But as it stands, she only appears in a few minutes of the film. She’s not even technically a Thunderbolt, since she bows out of the party before they come up with the moniker. Maybe Taskmaster is the one who needed an asterisk by her name.