Summary
Ironheart is serviceable, middle-of-the-road Marvel TV in Episodes 1-3. It raises some interesting questions but doesn’t seem entirely sure of the answers just yet.
You have to wonder what Marvel Studios is hoping for with Ironheart. I’m a professional film and TV critic, and someone had to tell me it was out. The curiously soft marketing would be weird enough after a post-production so lengthy that most people have assumed the show has been reworked, reshot, and restructured into oblivion, but Daredevil: Born Again was basically a chimera of two completely different shows and was nonetheless advertised everywhere. It was also given the grace of a weekly (mostly) release cadence, whereas Episodes 1-3 of Ironheart released all at once and Episodes 4-6 will release in a week’s time, bringing the whole thing to an inevitably unceremonious conclusion.
This can’t have been the intention, can it? A Ryan Coogler-produced miniseries focusing on Riri Williams, who was introduced in one of the only decent post-Endgame MCU movies (aside from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and now Thunderbolts or whatever they’re calling it these days), should be a hit. That distinct feeling of sweeping it all under the carpet makes me suspicious, especially with the show already having had a terrible audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, even before it was released (this situation seems to have worked itself out). Marvel is trying to sidestep an inevitably bigoted backlash, I suspect, hoping people will quickly move on from the show and pretend it never happened.
Based on the first three episodes, it has nothing to do with quality. Ironheart isn’t a masterpiece, and it does suffer a little from a lack of connection to the broader MCU and some of its more beloved characters, but it’s also a pretty expensive-looking and lively-feeling affair anchored by solid performances and decent action. There’s certainly nothing to be annoyed about, unless your tolerance for a bit of clunky sociopolitical lip-service is incredibly limited, but for the most part, as far as I can tell, it works on the level that most Marvel properties usually do.
The problem might be the MCU in general. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, when we first met Riri, feels like ages ago, a feeling exacerbated by how loosely and seemingly randomly connected these recent movies have felt. And while Ironheart is set in Chicago and wants to add some city specificity to the action in the same way Daredevil did with New York, it feels like it’s set “in the MCU” instead of in any recognisable real-world location. Mileage may vary for legitimate Chicagoans, obviously.
The events of Wakanda Forever do get a loose mention. Essentially, that “internship”, backed by the highly advanced technology of Wakanda, gave Riri a taste of the unlimited resources enjoyed by billionaires like Tony Stark but not, crucially, young, broke MIT students. Not that Riri remains an MIT student for long, since her desire to prove a point about how much of a genius she is pushes her to drum up funds by selling students completed assignments. When she’s caught, she’s expelled and steals her prototype suit to ferry her all the way back to Chicago. Riri’s a bit… off-putting, I suppose would be a fair word, but she also has a point about the way Stark-like maverick genius is rewarded in some and punished in others, seemingly arbitrarily (we know what she’s getting at but Disney isn’t super keen on pushing any ideological points too forcefully.)
Dominique Thorne in Ironheart | Image via Disney+
Riri is also nursing a fair bit of trauma, which becomes increasingly obvious as Ironheart pushes through Episodes 1-3. She has lost both her stepfather, Gary, and her best friend, Natalie, and one of the show’s smartest ideas is “resurrecting” Natalie as the AI assistant in Riri’s suit. This pushes the idea of how AI works to a frankly untenable degree but I think the upsides are worth it; Riri’s dynamic with Natalie’s hologram is often very funny but also provides the most resonant character drama, with the ethical and internal conflicts of essentially preserving her friend’s life through technology much more interesting than the more literal conflicts sprung up through Riri’s pivot into Chicago’s underworld.
Ironheart is toeing a fine line here. The gang that Riri falls in with, a menagerie of tech misfits led by Parker, aka “The Hood”, is pretty flagrantly sinister, or at least the Hood and his secretive, violent right-hand man John are. The others are a bit more characterful but nonetheless are Robin Hood-style anti-establishment extortionists who justify breaking the law and ripping people off in fairly flimsy terms. Riri’s not an antihero in the traditional sense, but she spends most of the first three episodes carrying out heists and blackmailing people, including Alden Ehrenreich’s Joe McGillicutty, a bedraggled tech ethicist who turns out to be the son of Obadiah Stane – the villain from the first Iron Man movie.
I’m not sure how well this moral fluidity takes. The “eat the rich” mentality, especially among the younger generation, isn’t new or surprising, but it also isn’t especially well justified here because nobody in The Hood’s crew – least of all Parker himself – seems totally committed to their performative allyship. This works fine for Parker because he’s almost certainly an outright villain, but it shouldn’t be the same with everyone, and yet it seems to be. Riri’s “interview” for membership of the group is a literal death trap, and the end goal of every member seems to be personal enrichment above all else.
It isn’t until the end of Ironheart Episode 3 that this moral contradiction really feels like it’s being called out, and it comes in the form of Riri leaving John for dead while trying to steal a slice of the Hood’s… well, hood, in the hopes of testing it and finding out more about what he’s up to. It’s very clear from her panicked reaction that Riri isn’t really cut out for this kind of thing. Thus far, she has been willing to hand-wave away her unethical activities in the pursuit of greatness (and, crucially, credit for that greatness). But now that people are dying for it, has the value proposition changed? It’s the most interesting question the show raises, and will probably underscore the final three episodes. It’s just a shame we’re getting them all at once.
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