[Editor’s note: The A.V. Club will return to recap episodes four, five, and six on July 1.]
For being a follow-up to one of Marvel Studios’ highest-grossing and consequential entries since Avengers: Endgame, the hype surrounding Ironheart has been notably subdued. Created by Chinaka Hodge and executive produced by Ryan Coogler, the six-episode miniseries sure looks as though it’s premiering under protest: paired with a muted marketing campaign (“unceremonious” might be a better word), the rollout of Ironheart, with its first three episodes debuting on June 24 and the last three dropping a week later, suggests that Marvel is grounding Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) before she takes her first solo flight.
This seeming diffidence comes after an opaque and lengthy post-production (principal photography wrapped in late 2022), encouraging the online speculation apparatus to forensically evaluate every possible reason why Ironheart seems to have been set up to fail. Did the series fall victim to the same restructuring quagmire that hamstrung Daredevil: Born Again? Or did Marvel lose confidence in backing an untested property? The latter option is not without precedent (Echo had it worse), but it muddles Disney’s shifting attitudes toward its Marvel TV offerings. Say what you will about Secret Invasion, but at least it was allowed to coast to an ignominious end on a weekly schedule. What did Ironheart do to deserve its arrival in steerage?
The answer is not much. Ironheart is neither an instant classic nor a debacle, but a breezy, reasonably engaging bit of Marvel business that doesn’t skimp on hardware or mystery. If it is guilty of anything, it’s being too pat and frictionless. Its politics and drama get obligatory lip service, but the series glosses over its few genuinely provocative ideas concerning class and personal responsibility (for now, anyway). And the show’s CG effects are solid for TV—Riri’s suit soars convincingly and falls apart even more so—and its vibrant cast of characters brings a little life to a corner of the MCU that has been largely overlooked: Chicago, specifically its Humboldt Park and South Shore environs. This setting superficially expands the franchise while also grounding it, as the series’ modest revelations connect its ironclad hero to those who came before her.
We rejoin Riri following her “internship abroad” in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where she enjoyed access to the infinite technological resources of Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright). Back in the States, Riri is broke and persona non grata at MIT after getting busted for selling assignments to students, which creates a rough transition back to the real world that humbles our intrepid inventor and limits her advancement of the AI that operates her prototype suit. (“Do you think Tony Stark would be Tony Stark if he wasn’t a billionaire?” she asks rhetorically.) Her methods of scrounging up cash are a smidge unethical, but at least she isn’t a war profiteer like a certain departed Avenger I could mention. And she remains, at least initially, sanguine about her choices. Riri is an unapologetically messy character, an aspiring technocrat whose ethics adapt to her financial situation. Hell, on her way out the door, she “finesses a few resources” from the university by suiting up in the latest version of her armor, her brilliance (not to mention labor) trumping the sanctity of school property. Riri isn’t merely a genius; she’s an iconoclast who refuses to play nice with academia or be made to feel small.
Her rebellion against social constraints isn’t fueled just by prickly financial and intellectual needs but a jackpot of trauma: the simultaneous deaths of her stepfather, Gary (Laroyce Hawkins), and her best friend, Natalie (Lyric Ross). The latter is resurrected as Riri’s grief-coded AI assistant by the end of the first episode (“Take Me Home”), adopting Natalie’s sparkling personality and injecting the show with anodyne banter and a moral core. Her digital existence suggests a new angle to what drives Riri’s chaotic choices: Does she do this out of survivor’s guilt (she was present during their deaths) or the lonely pursuit of greatness? How much does the former influence the latter? Ironheart skirts serious introspection in its first three episodes. For now, it’s enough to know that she will do whatever it takes to “revolutionize safety” with her innovations (“Help would never be too late,” she says), her successes making her bigger than Jobs, Gates, Pym, and Stark. Just don’t get in her way.
Riri’s cash-strapped return to Chicago compels her to pivot into the local underworld. Soaring over the Chicago River, her suit’s high-flying antics catch the eye of Parker Robbins, a.k.a. The Hood (Anthony Ramos), a criminal who operates out of a shuttered pizza joint and boasts a motley crew: Clown (Sonia Denis), the resident arsonist; Slug (Shea Couleé), the bedazzled hacker from Madripoor; Stuart, er, “Rampage” (Eric André), another, sweatier hacker; hired muscle Ros and Jerry, a.k.a. the “Blood Siblings” (Shakira Barrera and Zoe Terakes, respectively); and the knife-flipping John (Manny Montana), Robbins’ moody right-hand man.
Before he brings her into his fold, Parker subjects Riri to a unique job interview: defusing an elevator death trap. (“This is illegal!” is her adorable response.) Her escape impresses The Hood, so he seals their Faustian pact with carefully chosen platitudes that cut to her core. “Soon enough, you’re gonna get tired of making yourself so small to fit inside those awkward boxes they put you in.” He offers validation with his extortion jobs, and while you’d think someone as smart as Riri would see through the noise, the money is green. So, you see, ethically, her hands are tied.
Parker’s first mission with Riri involves extracting cash from TNNL, a startup repurposing Chicago’s ancient freight tunnels into Musk-coded private highways. Riri’s prep leads her to suburbanite and human paradox Joe McGillicutty (Alden Ehrenreich), a tech ethicist with a secret bunker filled with illicitly procured bionics. After a few scenes of bonding, including a carpool-karaoke rendition of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” it becomes agonizingly clear that Joe is hiding more than just a stash of illegal gear.
At least the person he eventually reveals himself to be is a surprise: Ezekiel Stane, son of Obadiah (Jeff Bridges), the Iron Monger who died trying to kill Tony Stark at the end of 2008’s Iron Man. “He went full supervillain,” Zeke says of his father. “Then you come knocking on my door with that same iron energy.” The irony is rich: Riri, trying to distinguish herself from Stark, ends up collaborating with the offspring of one of his enemies—albeit reluctantly and with a considerable amount of mutual blackmail.
The TNNL job kicks off with minor hitches—mainly, a guard catching a magically lassoed bullet from Parker, even though Riri insisted that she didn’t want anyone hurt as a result of their crimes. She doesn’t trust this sulky hunk in his ridiculous crimson hood despite his talk about shared vision and community empowerment, and she definitely doesn’t like the implications of his powers.Clown says she heard he stole his mysterious hood from coat check at Bottom Lounge, while lore suggests he wrestled it from a demon. One thing is for sure: That hood is not vintage Hermès, and its owner’s vague allyship feels phonier by the minute.
One conspicuous wrinkle in Parker’s crew is that they each claim to care about “the community” (in all its forms, presumably) while committing crimes that enrich only themselves. Each member is hostile toward CEOs, imbuing them with a Robin Hood “take from the rich” mentality while neglecting the other part of that credo: tempering the hypocrisy (some say they will use their ill-gotten gains to open spaces for like-minded individuals someday) without fully excusing it. This creates a hazy demarcation between good and bad for Riri to navigate, as it also draws imperfect parallels to recent class-war news items. (“Are we Ocean’s Eleven or The Sopranos?” she asks at one point, to which The Hood replies: “What’s the difference?”) Perhaps the remaining episodes will see The Hood’s coterie embracing chaos despite their morality, which may, in turn, give Ironheart a knottier complexity. Time will tell.
The third episode, “We In Danger, Girl,” is where the series makes its first substantial moral collision. During a heist at Heirlum—a company whose monastic CEO disrupts Parker’s plans by throwing them in his face—Riri tries to carve off a piece of the hood to scan its magical properties. From here, things go sideways. John, believing she has betrayed his leader and friend, flies into a rage and ultimately suffocates in one of Heirlum’s climate-controlled biospheres, left for dead by Riri. It’s an effectively gnarly cliffhanger: Her guilt spirals into a full-blown panic attack, while the fallout calls into question Parker’s loyalty to the sinister force that granted him his hood.
John’s grim demise underscores the show’s thesis: By building herself up, Riri inadvertently breaks down her relationships, ideals, even her sense of self. “The best way to know a thing,” her father once said, “is to take it apart and put it back together.” Riri has stripped her morality down to the frame in pursuit of greatness. The question now is what she’ll build from it. So far, Ironheart is more interested in its heroine’s contradictions than her triumphs. That’s a strength. More than being important, Riri wants to be iconic. But what does it mean when your hard-won glow-up is subsidized by people with horns under the hood?
Stray observations
- • The sage-burning Maddie Stanton is played by Cree Summer, the prolific actor who voiced Max in Batman Beyond and played Freddie Brooks in A Different World.
- • Fun fact: Ironheart comics writer and awesome Chicago native Eve Ewing is listed as a consulting producer.
- • We discover the fate of Riri’s Plymouth Barracuda Fastback from Wakanda Forever, which had been rebuilt, part by part, by Shuri and her Wakandan technicians: Riri sold it for cash. I sure hope we see it again!
- • One aspect Ironheart nails about Chicago living: riding the CTA before and after a Cubs game is insufferable.
- • So, what happens when someone blunders into Desperito’s Pizza, looking for a slice? As John says, The Hood doesn’t tolerate loose ends.
- • N.A.T.A.L.I.E.: “Neuro Autonomous Technical Assistant and Laboratory Intelligence Entity.” J.A.R.V.I.S., eat your heart out.
- • How heavy is Riri’s suit, anyway? It can be carted around in a wagon and rests easily atop Zeke’s Subaru.
- • Life isn’t making Riri’s dubious choices any easier: Her criminal deeds fund new headphones for Natalie’s brother, Xavier (Matthew Elam), who notes this sudden influx of cash with concern.
- • Fun line from Natalie: “You’re going to get caught being a high-tech asset to a halfway crook.”
- • Even before that ominous shadow draped around Parker, Ironheart was not being subtle about the true nature of The Hood. After his big seduction speech in episode two, Riri has a heart-to-heart outside with Natalie in front of an array of posters that read “Faust.” #MephistoConfirmed?
- • Eric André’s Rampage appears to be a victim of reshoots. How else do you explain the dude’s ignominious (and off-screen) death in episode three? His profile is just high enough that he doesn’t need a glorified cameo in a Disney+ show, right? So what gives?
