So Is Bucky Cured Now…?
You’ll recall that the post-credits scene for Captain America: Civil War introduced Wakanda for the first time, as Steve Rogers took Bucky Barnes there to be cryogenically frozen. The plan being that T’Challa would get his best minds onto the job of curing him of his HYDRA brainwashing.
Fast forward to Black Panther‘s own post-credits scene and Bucky is now unfrozen again and living low amongst the Wakandan villagers. We see him talk to T’Challa’s sister Shuri in the scene and it seems that he’s pretty much back to his old self. So, has he been cured?
The answer to that is yes, but you won’t find that explained in the movie at all. We only know this thanks to the official Black Panther tie-in prequel comic, which featured a brief scene where Shuri revealed that she’d created an algorithm that basically flushed HYDRA’s tinkering out of Bucky’s brain.
This is a pretty important piece of info to dump in a spinoff comic, but it’s possible that it’ll be reiterated on screen in Avengers: Infinity War.