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.

The authorship of the Marvel Universe may remain an hotly debated question, though books by writers such as Tom Spurgeon, Sean Howe, and Josie Riesman have long supported the contention of Kirby and his heirs that he played a far larger role in the shared world’s creation and continuation than his erswhile collaborator Stan Lee — and the corporate hagiography recently served up by Marvel’s current owner, Disney — would ever admit. Yet even the movies that deal most directly in Kirby-heavy concepts, Thor and Black Panther and the Fourth World elements of DC’s so-called Snyderverse, look and feel little like the King’s comics. Indeed, years spent in the superhero comic trenches have taught me that many contemporary readers see Kirby’s cartooning as dated, even clumsy, compared to the genre’s current practitioners. 

You know what else was seen as dated, even clumsy, compared to the techniques of current practitioners? Physical sets. Actual costumes. Establishing color and lighting on set rather than through post. Reviving an aesthetic associated with earlier times. 

Barbie, in other words. Everything that Barbie did, it had to do while swimming upstream against a 15-year-old current of CGI slop, set loose by the establishment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the arrival of its many clones and knockoffs. I think it’s fair to say this has worked out for Barbie, no?

And it just so happens that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Six is slated to kick off with a Jack Kirby co-created superhero team — the Jack Kirby co-created superhero team — called the Fantastic Four, with a film helmed by TV veteran Matt Shakman. At the risk of sounding like Kirby myself, do I need to draw you a picture here?

I wrote about Barbie, Marvel, Jack Kirby, and the need for superhero movies to do go back to being bold for Decider.

But the problem with Secret Invasion’s AI credits isn’t just one of ethics, or of ugliness. It’s a waste of some of the most valuable creative real estate any television show has. Throughout television history, thoughtfully crafted opening title sequences have set the tone for the shows to follow, conveying valuable information about everything from the mood you can expect to the plot of the show itself. Some are woven so deep into the fabric of the series they kick off that the two become synonymous. The best function like short films, artistic statements on their own. Speaking plainly, AI just doesn’t have the juice.

When Cheers wanted to show you a place where everybody knows your name, they relied on a carefully curated and edited selection of illustrations and photographs depicting nostalgic good-old-days revelry created by James Castle, Bruce Bryant, and Carol Johnsen. Monty Python member Terry Gilliam established his troupe’s style of surrealistic inanity with animation that would become a staple of the show. David Lynch and Mark Frost used second-unit footage and the evocative music of close Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti to transport you to Twin Peaks.

I wrote about the ethical and, above all, artistic failure of Disney’s decision to use AI to “create” the opening credits for its new show Secret Invasion for Decider.

And it’s an emotionally intriguing note to end on, that’s for sure—a new Marvel Cinematic Universe hero, doing something pointedly anti-heroic, or even just straight-up bad. If we do wind up getting more Moon Knight adventures, Oscar Isaac’s lightly comic performance as all of the Moon Knight collective’s individual components will be the main selling point, no question; they’re what made this show so easy and fun to watch. But after that ending, I’ll be curious to see just how grim’n’gritty the character is allowed to get. I’d imagine that white costume dirties up pretty good.

I reviewed the season finale of Moon Knight for Decider.

An episode like this serves as a good reminder that the show has a secret weapon on its side: the casting of Oscar Isaac as its hero. Isaac has to be equally at home screaming and sobbing from the sudden intrusion of deeply traumatic childhood memories and talking to a CGI hippopotamus woman; he has to play both his Marc and Steven personalities, holding conversations between the two of them thanks to a little movie magic; that split has to be played for laughs, for pathos, and for mind-warping reality-shifting superhero antics. Isaac makes it all look easy.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

We’re now two thirds of the way into Moon Knight, and the show’s strengths are self-evident. No, there’s no cool superheroic death-defying Moon Knight action in this ep, and Khonshu is out of the picture as well. But you’ve still got Oscar Isaac’s charming performance as both nebbishy Steven and deadly serious Marc. There’s still inventively staged action—Layla really makes the most of her collection of flares throughout, at one point stabbing a lit flare into a zombie’s eye. And the show is aware enough of its pulpy B-movie/syndicated-TV roots to make a joke about it in the form of that Tomb Buster video. There’s even a little mystery about the identity of Marc’s old traitorous partner, though the odds are certainly stacked in favor of Harrow himself.

Is Moon Knight going to reinvent the genre? No. Is it going to rise to the emotional heights of the better ex-Netflix Marvel shows? I doubt it. Does it need to do either of these things to be an enjoyable action-adventure series? Not as far as I’m concerned!

I reviewed today’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

After watching Moon Knight Episode 1, I wrote on Twitter that “I kind of hope every episode has this same basic tone of Oscar Isaac bumbling around, blacking up, waking up, and realizing he just killed six guys or whatever.” I’m pleased to report that, after watching Moon Knight Episode 2 (“Summon the Suit”), this appears to be the direction in which Moon Knight is headed!

I reviewed the second episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

Written by series creator Jeremy Slater and directed by Mohamed Diab, “The Goldfish Problem” is a fun little diversion. Again, its success largely hinges on Oscar Isaac, who plays the Steven Grant persona as a more chipper and scatterbrained British version of his loser character in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Whether he’s missing a date, taking part in a high-speed chase, getting yelled at by his boss, receiving strange phonecalls from an unknown woman on a burner he found hidden in his wall, or waking up surrounded by people he’s beaten the crap out of, he treats everything with the same sense of mild-mannered “oh, bugger” confusion. He’s a fun secret identity to watch, and that goes along way.

So does that final reveal of Steven/Marc/whoever in full Moon Knight regalia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the character has had the staying power he’s had in the comics world because that costume design—Batman at P. Diddy’s white party, basically—is so bitchin’. Based on the glimpse we get of him in this episode, the show has made no concessions to superhero-movie kevlar-uniform “realism” in translating it to the screen. He really does look like he teleported in directly from the funnypages, and that’s good to see.

I’ll be covering Moon Knight for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. It ain’t bad!

It’s an arresting visual, I’ll give it that. A man in a red, white, and blue angel costume descending from the heavens, cradling the dead body of a slain radical in his arms. If it took five-plus hours to get us to that one image, it was probably worth it to Marvel for the gifs and fan art alone.

The episode that surrounds the shots of the angelic new Captain America sprinkled throughout the Season 1 finale of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, though? Good God, what a mess. Written by series creator Malcolm Spellman and Josef Sawyer, “One World, One People” is a shockingly incoherent product for an experienced purveyor of unobjectionable and slick genre fare like Marvel, right down to borrowing its idealistic-sounding title from the very radical group its heroes spend the episode defeating and killing.

I reviewed the finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

There’s one episode left in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and given the way Sam was eyeing the contents of the high-tech Wakandan briefcase Bucky delivered to him, it seems safe to assume the Falcon—whose wings got torn off by Walker, if you’re in the symbolism market—is about to don the stars and stripes himself. I’d guess some sort of reckoning with Sharon is in the offing, as well as a battle with Karli and the Flag-Smashers that will paint them as well-intentioned but dangerously misguided and militant the way the whole rest of the season has done. Walker, by the way, is still walking around free, lying to the parents of his slain friend Lamar that he’s already killed their son’s killer. He’s got a grudge against Karli and a potential backer in the Contessa, and if we know anything about this show, it’s that people can show up anywhere at a moment’s notice, so I wouldn’t count him out of the final battle just yet either.

All told, it’s a whole lot of work just to get Sam to the place where the movies left him. I get that the show is supposed to be a meditation on the idea of Captain America in light of the fictional peril of criminal superhumans (whether in the form of Karli or the pre-cure Winter Soldier) on the one hand and the real-life issue of anti-Black racism on the other. But a show like this was always going to answer these questions simply by pointing at the heroes and declaring theirs the correct path. The game isn’t worth the candle. Oh hey, look over there, it’s Elaine from Seinfeld!

I reviewed today’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

“The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals.” So says Baron Zemo, the self-appointed scourge of the world’s super-people. Does he have a point? Decades of angry message-board debates between superhero fans and the genre’s detractors would at least indicate that he has a constituency. Is there something inherently fascistic about stories in which superpowered übermenschen fight crime and battle foreign menaces, stories in which might quite literally makes right? Or is it all in the application, and can superhero stories reflect progressive ideals, however retrograde their vigilante violence might seem on the surface?

I’m not here to litigate this question, frankly. There are plenty of superhero stories I like just fine, and plenty I think are reactionary garbage, and even more—like much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—that I think cloak militarism and jingoism in palatably colorful costumes, so deftly that people don’t realize what they’re actually being served. If there’s a right answer, you have to pull apart a whole tangle of conflicting threads to find it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

At a certain point, it starts to feel like the plot holes outnumber the plot threads. One minute, Bucky’s so concerned about Baron Zemo’s hatred for the Avengers that he won’t even allow Sam to speak to him; the next, he’s breaking Zemo out of jail and presenting a team-up with him to Sam as a fait accompli. Sharon Carter has been on the run for the better part of a decade for a crime for which everyone else involved has long been forgiven, including various enormously famous and beloved superheroes. (Once again, I just don’t buy the lack of clout Sam commands as a member of the world-saving Avengers who has an ongoing relationship with the U.S. military.) Sharon just so happens to be on the scene when Sam, Zemo, and Falcon need rescuing; bounty hunters spontaneously appear in the hidden location to which the foursome have traveled to find the evil doctor; Ayo appears to have arrived at the group’s destination before they even got there. Stuff keeps happening, seemingly just to keep things moving, regardless of whether it happening makes any sense.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

There’s something so dreary about taking Redwing, the comic-book Falcon’s telepathic, bright-red bird sidekick, and turning him into a drone. An explicitly military one at that, property of the United States government, as this episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (“The Star Spangled-Man”) dutifully informs us. When one of those sinister border-hating Flag-Smashers knocks the damn thing from the sky, it felt like a mercy killing on behalf of imagination.

Can’t say I’m enjoying The Falcon and the Winter Soldier very much! I reviewed this week’s episode for Decider.

I have a confession to make: I have been known, from time to time, to make mine Marvel. I’ve read hundreds of their comics over the years (and even wrote one once myself). I enjoyed the Marvel/Netflix shows Daredevil and The Punisher, as I’ve chronicled at length on this very site. As for the movies…well, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony “Iron Man” Stark was casting so strong it essentially made superheroes the dominant genre nearly singlehandedly (give or take a Hugh Jackman or a Heath Ledger), and the fight scene that opened Captain America: The Winter Soldier however many years back was a pip.

The rest I can take or leave. Mostly leave.

I say all this in the interest of full disclosure. But if I’m gonna cop to being indifferent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, I also want to state for the record that I’m in the liking-things business, and I go into every new series I watch hoping to enjoy what I see. It’s true that I may not have caught a new Marvel movie since the underbaked and overrated Guardians of the Galaxy—after a dozen servings of pistachio ice cream, it’s okay to decide pistachio ice cream isn’t for you and stop eating each new serving just in case this one’s the good one. But I was certainly prepared to enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the latest series to take characters from the blockbuster movies and plop them down on the small screen for several extra hours of screentime. It shares half a title with the one Marvel movie I can actually remember anything about—that’s promising, right?

Wrong, as it turns out! I’ll be covering The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider all season long, starting with my review of the series premiere.

When was the last time you walked away from a season of a Marvel/Netflix show with basically no complaints? The final bullets of The Punisher Season 2 have flown and I’m just freaking delighted to report that pretty much all of them hit the bullseye. Other than that one episode spent playing for time early in the season, this was…great, just great, just a terrific interpretation of the character of Frank Castle and how to tell stories with him. It avoided all of the usual pitfalls of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TV end, like doubling up on villains but then not knowing how to balance them, or reaching an obvious endpoint about three-fifths of the way to the finale and then concocting some absurd plot contrivance to keep the story moving. It played to the general strengths of superhero stories, using violence and action to convey outsized emotion and treating the fallout as a metaphor for psychosexual vulnerability. The specifics of the violence and action were brutal, as befits the character. The politics were, in the main, sharp and counterintuitive given the Punisher’s often reactionary fanbase. Every major actor in it was good. Some (Amber Rose Revah, Annette O’Toole, Josh Stewart, Ben Barnes, and especially guest star Deborah Ann Woll) were fascinating. And one, Jon Bernthal, was an all-timer.

I reviewed the season finale of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.