The big problem with all this is pretty much what you’d expect it to be: Riri has never seemed stupid enough to literally shake hands with the Devil. Nor has she ever deluded herself about what N.A.T.A.L.I.E. really is or was, not even when she came around to treating the simulation, if not like her old friend, then at least like a new one. It doesn’t hold water that she’d risk turning into a berserk demonically powered killing machine forced to do the business of an infernal devil-king in order to revive what amounts to a really good version of Siri. Smart people get scammed all the time, I get it. But to get scammed by the guy whose minion just tried to tear your face off with his claws? That’s not the Riri Williams I know. 

It feels like another place where Ironheart’s short six-episode length can really be felt. With more time, maybe we could have gotten Riri to a place where her desperation to revive the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. AI felt raw and real. Maybe turning to the evil cosmic entity responsible for creating the supervillain who’d just tried to kill her would have felt like the desperate act of a heartbroken friend, instead of the impulsive decision of a genius hero who should know better.

The glass-half-full way of looking at it all, though, is that Ironheart is the story of a Marvel superhero permitted to be kind of a fuck-up. She starts the season by getting expelled from MIT after maiming a professor. She ends the season by selling her soul to the Lord of Lies. In between she joins a gang of bank robbers, leaves a defenseless man to die, jams up a friend with legal trouble so bad he becomes a supervillain to cope, and (admittedly this bit was an accident) creates the least ethical form of MCU AI since Ultron. 

That’s all kind of interesting, right? As clumsy and rushed as it was to get there, the deal with Mephisto was necessary to undercut the sense that Riri had made everything right with everyone she could, done her good deed for the day, and could soar off into the sunset in her bitchin’ new suit. That would have erased all the work done in the paragraph above in creating a character whose intelligence and impulsivity are constantly either working in concert or at odds. Whether or not the ending works for you depends on whether or not you think her impulsivity is really capable of beating her intelligence that decisively. 

I reviewed the season finale of Ironheart for Decider.

In the sport of kings known as professional wrestling, there’s a concept called “selling.” Pro wrestling’s combat is staged and its moves are designed to eliminate injury and minimize pain as best as possible, and the wrestling audience knows it, but they’re buying their tickets in order to pretend like they don’t. It’s the wrestlers’ jobs to sell those tickets by selling the impact and power of their opponent’s moves. No one’s gonna care that you got dumped off a 15-foot ladder through a table covered with thumbtacks if you just get right back up again, even though you’re a trained professional who can totally do so if you want. You’ve got to act like you’re in pain and peril. You’ve got to sell. 

Is Ironheart doing a proper job of selling Riri Williams’s danger? With only one episode remaining in its short six-episode season, I’m leaning towards no.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ironheart for Decider.

Thanks to an almost unnecessarily heartfelt performance by Alden Ehrenreich during their jailhouse meeting, Zeke’s assessment rings loudly as we watch the rest of the episode play out: “You’re just a selfish kid who can’t take any responsibility for herself. You lie, you cheat, you manipulate, you’ll do anything you can to save yourself, even if that means hurting other people in the process.” 

This is unfair, in that it completely erases any kind of context or consideration of motive. But if you were in Zeke’s place — or Parker’s, or the crew’s, or Ronnie’s, or Xavier’s, or N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s — would you be inclined to be charitable to her? She’s not a bad person, but in much the same way that she scavenged and scrounged for parts to rebuild her armor, Riri essentially took the people around her and assembled them into a second suit, using them to achieve her own ends. Parker’s not the only person with a superhuman garment that’s draining their humanity, then — but Riri’s the one with a fighting chance of getting hers back. 

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ironheart for Decider.

Put it all together and it’s one of the most entertaining hours of Marvel superhero TV I’ve seen that doesn’t involve a blind ninja lawyer. 

I reviewed episode three of Ironheart for Decider.

The show’s portrayal of AI strikes me as grossly irresponsible. Again, I get that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “AI” means J.A.R.V.I.S. and the Vision, not the thing Amazon has announced is going to help them fire people or the thing the Trump regime is using to decide which vitally important medical programs to shitcan. But that is what AI is in the real world. 

In the real world, AI is designed by rich people, on purpose, to make people stupider and poorer, the end, full stop. People who use it for other purposes boil their own brains, convincing themselves they’re talking to a new girlfriend or a dead relative when what they’re actually talking to is a magic 8-ball, a mechanical Turk, a fucking Clippy. (Ironheart riffed on this last bit in the first episode, when Riri’s suit used an AI that acted like a talking pencil.) You either reckon with that reality when you’re writing your show or you don’t. Personally, I can’t enjoy watching people talk to dead friends using this bullshit technology when I know people are doing this to themselves for real. AI is the Anti-Life Equation.

On the other hand, creating a superhero whose weakness is the sight of a gun feels like a proper reflection of the real world. Gun violence, a cause to which the ruling political party in America is dedicated like a worshipful acolyte, is frequently a foundational trauma for superheroes, from Bruce Wayne on down. Making it a continued, kryptonite-style chink in the armor (no pun intended) for Riri and N.A.T.A.L.I.E. feels like a natural evolution, and a thematically appropriate one given the historical focus on gun violence in Chicago in particular. I’ll take what I can get.

I reviewed the second episode of Ironheart‘s three-part premiere for Decider.

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.

I reviewed the series premiere of Ironheart for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show for the duration.