Writer-creator Chinaka Hodge and lead actor Dominique Thorne don’t quite surmount the standard “Here’s who I am and here’s who everyone is and here’s how I feel and here’s why I feel that way and here’s what I need” over-explanatory first-episode syndrome, but they do their level best. You can rarely judge a show by its pilot in that regard at any rate, since the structural requirements of a first episode are so much different even than the needs of a second.
A bigger problem for the script is the sense that it’s out of step with the moment. Riri’s lionization of billionaires and, as they put it in Speed Racer, the unassailable might of money feels real real weird right now. So does the constant invocation of so-called AI as the wave of the future. I get that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, AI means “Paul Bettany” rather than “fascist technology developed by rich men who want to own slaves that steals from writers and artists in an attempt to eliminate freedom of expression and thought,” but at a certain point you have to adjust with the times.
None of this would be so bad if it weren’t for the two most recent Disney+ franchise dramas of note. The last MCU show, Daredevil: Born Again, was an anti-Trump allegory that was as subtle as a crushed skull. Andor, Ironheart’s immediate predecessor, is somehow one of the most politically radical things ever aired on American television, to the point where thousands of people from MSNBC resist libs to honest to god leftists (ask me how I know!) quoted from it unironically while protesting against Trump and his ICE gestapo on No Kings Day. Those are big shoes to fill.
Of course, you can simply sidestep the shoes entirely, and tell a kickass story about a woman of steel who battles a guy in an evil cape. I’d be 100% down with that! Certainly the fight choreography we see in this episode feels promising — it’s not the brutal bonecrunching of the Born Again and its Netflix antecedents, but it’s fluid and physical and fun. Which, when you think about it, is maybe exactly how a superhero story should be.
But Ironheart has something going for it that those other shows don’t: it’s…well, I was gonna say “unapologetically Black,” but it’s the kind of show that recognizes that being unapologetically anything only gets you so far. Every time Riri pipes up with some prepared speech about she’s a special young giant being made to feel small while rousing music swells on the soundrack, someone’s there to undercut the easy catharsis of speechification. I think there’s a very real possibility that by the end of this short six-episode season, Riri may feel very differently about the almighty dollar, too, especially if an obvious evildoer like Parker is speaking up on its behalf. We’ll just have to stay tuned for the next issue — I mean, the next episode — to find out.
In the meantime, though, just seeing Chicago photographed lovingly, while the most powerful man on the planet demonizes and attacks it…just hearing a guy say hello by saying “Hey, Black people,” which feels like a radical statement while books and people are being purged based on their race by the white supremacist government…just seeing Black characters who are straightforwardly portrayed as brilliant without a single concession made to segregationist anti-DEI scaremongering…This is a world people are actively trying to take away from us, even within our imaginations. These things are not nothing. In a way, these things are the only thing.
Tags: decider, ironheart, Marvel, TV, TV reviews