Ironheart S1E01-03 Review | "Take Me Home," "Will the Real Natalie Please Stand Up?" "We in Danger, Girl"

At long last, Ironheart takes flight!

The MIT prototype suit, as piloted by Riri Williams. Photo courtesy of Disney+.

[Welcome to Decoding TV’s coverage of Ironheart Season 1! For each of Ironheart’s two 3-episode drops, we’ll be running reviews by Dan Gvozden. If you’d like to support what we’re doing here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The review below contains minor spoilers for Season 1, Episodes 1-3 of Ironheart.]

For many, 2020 may as well be a lost year in their lives, as the world sheltered in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We were advised to maintain a six-foot distance from the person closest to us if we went out in public. Theaters were shuttered, many never to reopen, and a heated political election challenged the continuance of our democracy and public health. So, it would be easy to forget that, in December, Marvel Studios announced at Disney’s 2020 Investor Day that an Ironheart series was in development for Disney+.

The character at the center of this new series, a 15-year-old Black girl named Riri Williams from Chicago's South Shore, was first introduced four years earlier in co-creators Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato’s “Invincible Iron Man (Vol. 2) #7.” The two men created her as a legacy character whose genius in technology and engineering would enable her to follow in Tony Stark’s footsteps by wearing a supersuit she built and called “Ironheart.” It wasn’t even a year later until Tony Stark died in the comics, and Riri was temporarily elevated to fill his spot, at least until a backup of his brain was put into a cloned body. Comics, everybody!

Her debut in the comics didn’t resonate with readers as powerfully as Brian Michael Bendis’s other legacy character, Miles Morales, did a few years earlier when he burst onto the comics scene. Marvel Comics was intent on making Riri a core part of their universe and paired the character with superstar writer Eve Ewing for her first solo series, which, despite critical acclaim, wasn’t successful enough to run past twelve issues. However, after Tony’s noble sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, her addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe felt like a logical step for the continuation of his onscreen legacy.

Shortly thereafter, it was announced that Chinaka Hodge, a relatively unknown figure in Hollywood who had attended prestigious film schools but was primarily a poet and screenwriter, was their surprise pick as the showrunner, with Ryan Coogler (Black Panther) co-producing the show. It was only months earlier that the world learned of star Chadwick Boseman’s death from colon cancer, which sent a shockwave through the public, the industry, and all the plans that Coogler had for his upcoming sequel to Black Panther. Dominique Thorne was immediately cast as Riri and made her debut as the character in Marvel and Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where, because she had invented a vibranium-detected device, she was whisked off to Wakanda to help them hold back an attack from Namor and his kingdom of Talokan. By the film’s conclusion, she had both suited up as Ironheart and had to return the supersuit to the Wakandans for safekeeping.

So, when the show began filming in 2022, it was only natural that audiences would expect to see this new character appear on their television screens shortly thereafter. However, when the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes halted all production in 2023 and Marvel experienced several failures from their television division, the show’s progress and value to the studio took a serious hit. Rumors began to spread about a messy production, with suggestions that Marvel was trying to entirely rework the project before the 2024 announcement of its release the following year, or deemphasize its importance to their Disney+ lineup. These feelings were seemingly confirmed for many when the release schedule for the show was finally revealed, with two three-episode releases only a week apart from each other and with very little fanfare, even if the big names behind the project, like Ryan Coogler, were willing to put their face on the project’s advertising.

Riri wears a remade Ironheart suit. Photo courtesy of Disney+.

So, now that the first three episodes of the series have been released on Disney+, nearly five years after the show was announced, is Ironheart the disaster it was rumored to be?

To put it plainly: no.

To put it less plainly: I would argue that the first three episodes of Ironheart demonstrate a promising direction for Marvel Television as they strive to regain their audience’s trust and refine their approach to producing streaming content. The first half of Ironheart’s first season plays less like what you might expect when you imagine an Iron Man-adjacent television show would be, as it features minimal high-speed, suit action. What it bears the most resemblance to is the recently released season of Marvel Animation’s 'Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man,' with its playful shifting between a variety of tones, young-adult appeal, and focus on youthful characters navigating their place in various worlds: technological, social, and moral.

It even showcases an improvement on Marvel Television’s other YA series, 2022’s Ms. Marvel, with tighter plotting and higher stakes, though without that series' distinct, graffiti-inspired visual style and unusual, self-reflexive lead character. There is some repetition in these episodes, with two of their third-act action set pieces being heist adventures, but they are distinct enough in their visuals and setups that déjà vu never sets in. Plus, if Andor could do it, so too can Ironheart.

The most alluring element of the new series is the look, design, and inclusion of the city of Chicago. Cinematographers Alison Kelly and Ante Cheng (Pachinko), production designer Andrew Menzies (Avatar), and costume designer Terrance Harris (Selma) have pumped color into every inch of Ironheart, whether it be the neon lighting of nighttime Chicago, the amber colors and rich, smoky atmosphere of Riri’s mother’s (Anji White) apartment, the vibrant murals of the city, or the technicolor, flamboyance of Parker Robbin’s (Antony Ramos) techie gang.

An example of the colorful imagery from Ironheart. Photo courtesy of Disney+.

The Disney+ shows have ranged wildly in the quality of their production design, WandaVision perfectly replicated the various shows it was satirizing and Loki played down its unusual colors in the strictly controlled hallways of the TVA for a look that was wholly unique, balanced out by humdrum, visual bores like Secret Invasion, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Hawkeye. Ironheart isn’t going to win any cinematography awards; its ambitions are still grounded in simple television fare. Still, its design is punching above its budget, particularly when compared to Marvel Studios' latest film offerings, to the point where there were times when I felt I could have mistaken it for a scene from a Barry Jenkins film.

The visual effects are minimal compared to some of the other Marvel Television productions, such as Moon Knight. Still, they are convincing and appropriately utilized, particularly when it comes to the various Ironheart suits, which regularly shift between practical costumes, full-sized props, and computer-generated models. One early sequence, where Riri attempts to flee MIT with their proprietary Iron Man suit and Clippy-inspired AI helper, showcases the full range of what makes Ironheart enjoyable as a series. The animation on the suit, as it flies through Chicago, is brief but convincing. The drama of Riri’s attempts to hold onto the suit, as the pieces of it deactivate and fall onto the streets, is fun and bolstered by solid practical effects work. The following scene where she walks down the urban street wearing the awkward, remaining pieces of the suit, while the Chicagoan populace mocks her appearance, as if this kind of thing happened every other Tuesday, is a delight.

But it is also a prelude to the shortcomings of Ironheart’s fairly obvious plotting, overabundance of one-note characters, lack of meaningful challenges and consequences, and a protagonist who is at times hard to root for. After Riri is expelled from MIT for injuring the Dean of MIT (Jim Rash, who must have transferred from Greendale Community College), and steals the supersuit as mentioned earlier, crashing it onto the streets of Chicago, there’s no follow-up consequences for her actions, injury from the crash, or reflection on what it’s meant for her to abandon in institution that placed so much trust in her—thinking of stealing an expensive, advanced, proprietary weapon from MIT? Go for it, it’ll be super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Ironheart avoids some of the conflict-free storytelling and impossibly perfect protagonists that appear all over YA fiction. But it often feels like when its various characters find themselves in bad situations, they just so happen to be the perfectly shaped key that allows them to unlock the conflict immediately. Riri is presented as “the hero who could be you.” She’s effortlessly cool, cracks jokes, has a loving family and friends - e.g. Xavier (Matthew Elam) who randomly pops up here and there - and also could build an Iron Man suit in a cave out of a box of scraps. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark was a huge weirdo whose brain worked faster than his mouth, which was already impressively quick. Not all genius presents itself the same way. Still, the idea of having a chill conversation over a beer with Tony Stark sounds like an impossibility, without him reinventing fermentation along the way. Riri is so confident and worldly that you could imagine her as the homecoming queen. It’s a bit of a mismatch that makes it hard to accept the levels of genius she displays, particularly when her dry-erase board includes the equation “Iron Suit + Advanced AI = !!!”

Alden Ehrenreich as “Joe McGillicuddy” in his bunker. Photo courtesy of Disney+.

Riri professes to her reluctant, weapon-hoarding ally “Joe McGillicuddy” (a game Alden Ehrenreich) that her interests in building a supersuit and subsequent criminal activity are motivated by her desire to prove herself to those who haven’t accepted her, no matter the costs along the way. This sets up a classic hero’s journey, where Riri’s character flaws will lead her astray and force her to find her way back to redemption. Meanwhile, the audience is ten steps ahead of her and fully aware of the enemies she’s getting into bed with, so to speak.

These enemies appear in the form of a gang led by the menacingly tattooed Parker Robbins, also known as The Hood, because of his demonically possessed hood and his paper-thin attempts to act as Chicago’s tech-oligarch-dismantling Robin Hood. Anthony Ramos’ portrayal of this unhinged comic book character, also a working-class thief turned into a powerful supervillain by his ill-gotten, magical cape and hood, opts to mute Parker’s emotions and personality. His gang members—Rampage (Eric André), Slug (Shea Couleé), The Blood Siblings (Zoe Terakes and Shakira Barrera), Clown (Sonia Denis), and John (Manny Montana)—are the complete opposite: colorful, flamboyant, one-note caricatures, so much so that I wondered why they follow the wide-eyed vacuum of charisma that is Ramos’ The Hood, especially after his tightening grip and reliance on the hood’s demonic powers pushes him to more radical extremes.

The two characters are meant to be mirrors to each other, both relying on their suits and flexible moralities to elevate their profiles and support their arrogant quests for relevance in the eyes of the people who have shunned them. By the conclusion of the third episode, we don’t quite know enough about The Hood to truly understand where all of his hurt originates and why he’s willing to go to such extremes to prove his worth. For Riri, her pain is all tied up in the tragic deaths of her stepfather, Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins), who encouraged her to find ways to fix broken things, and her friend Natalie (Lyric Ross).

The connection between their deaths and Riri’s current struggles is tangential at best, except that Riri’s memories of Natalie are somehow scanned from her, which allows her to become an annoying, holographic AI companion in Riri’s suit. The technology is so illogical, despite the show’s explanation, that it undermines much of the work the suit’s designer put into making it feel realistic. For some reason, Ironheart’s story treats Gary and Natalie’s deaths as a late-stage reveal to the audience, after hinting at it with a series of lazily edited flashback sequences. The reveal doesn’t do much to deepen our understanding of Riri’s journey or what drives her character, other than to give her panic attacks the weight of her narrative history. Meanwhile, the AI version of Natalie is this show’s take on the quirky pet that our protagonist needs to hide from their parents (see: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Encino Man, How to Train Your Dragon, The Indian in the Cupboard, etc.). As she grows more controlling, she even commands Riri to take her out on the town. Is that what our AI future looks like? Walking our pet holograms?

Riri and the AI “ghost” of her best friend Natalie bicker over control of the Ironheart armor. Photo courtesy of Disney+.

Their powers are also meant to mirror each other, with Parker using demonic magic and Riri developing tech-based abilities.In the MCU, it's a long-standing truth that, as Thor put it, “your ancestors called it ‘magic,’ but you call it ‘science.’ I come from a land where they are one and the same.” It’s a neat idea to establish this commonality between the characters and their powers, as if they represent both sides of the same coin. Parker appears to have made a deal with a demon (finally, Mephisto?) for his powers, while Riri has made a similar Faustian bargain for her criminally acquired tech and finances. But, I’ll admit, I wish there were a greater distinction between each character’s process of acquiring even greater power.

Magic should feel easy to tap into, like the Dark Side of the Force, and a cheat code to obtaining whatever you want. However, the technology often works similarly, with Riri seemingly waving her hand and inventing the next big, world-changing gadget. This raises an even more fundamental question about Riri’s quest for the finances to support the development of her Ironheart suit. If she can suddenly invent a forcefield and sell it to a classmate at MIT, why can’t she also approach any of these tech magnates they steal from and persuade them to invest in her work? Isn’t that a more straightforward route than robbing them?

Still, there’s enough working in Ironheart to make for an enjoyable experience, especially for teenagers who want to dip back into the MCU, those who value representational media, and fans of the Eve Ewing comic it draws heavily from. By the end of the third episode, the central conflict and themes are starting to come together, which hopefully will lead to a dramatic showdown that challenges Riri and pushes the characters into uncomfortable territory. Additionally, a late reveal about the true parentage of one supporting character introduces an interesting connection that spans all the way back to the first MCU film. This could create more drama in upcoming episodes as they confront their legacy and the extent to which anyone has control over their fate, just as Riri seems poised to do.

Dan Gvozden is a film and comics critic who lives and works in Baltimore. If you enjoyed this review, check out his Spider-Man podcast, The Amazing Spider-Talk.