I Watched the Rest of Ironheart and It Is Still Terrible

Ironheart is the latest Marvel show from Disney. I watched the first three episodes when they premiered last week and, as you can see here, I was not impressed. Here’s a bit of what I said:

In Ironheart, Riri Williams is a genius inventor who makes a copy of the Iron Man suit but does so by selling completed projects to other MIT students. She needs the money to build her suit because, unlike Tony Stark, she’s not a billionaire. Selling her ideas seems harmless enough but MIT finds out and expels her.

Things take a turn when Williams returns to Chicago and, in no time, agrees to join a crew of thieves run by a sketchy guy with a hooded cloak who works out of a pizza shop…

And just like that, Williams goes from ghost-creating academic assignments to what could probably be called terroristic threats and mob-like control of a major company…

…in episode three we get the crew’s second robbery. This one involves breaking into a cutting edge greenhouse run by another rich person. Again, we get one line about him “putting local farmers out of work” and that’s the only justification given for why targeting him should be okay with the audience…

So halfway through this show my take is that Riri Williams is a self-absorbed brat who has literally been given a golden ticket and a free ride to MIT but who decides she can’t use her vast talents to get a real job in Palo Alto because those people are beneath her. Instead she joins a group of thieves who are murdering and extorting people so she can become an icon like Tony Stark.

I predicted there would be a redemption arc of some kind in the last three episodes and there kinda-sorta is but not really. [Spoiliers ahead] Riri Williams aka Ironheart is turned on by The Hood when he realizes she killed his best friend (leaving him to suffocate in the high-tech greenhouse they were robbing). At this point, Riri’s entire focus for the rest of the show changes from making money to keeping herself and her friends alive.

She analyzes the piece of the hood she stole and concludes it’s magic and that nothing in her suit can destroy it. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew has been ordered to kill her and finds her having dinner at a White Castle. What follows is a low-rent TV version of the restaurant fight scene from Iron Man 3. Riri manages to defeat most of the crew without her armor and then the armor finally shows up to save her from a truck.

At this point, Obadiah Stane returns having been turned into a bionic weapon who can shoot lightning bolts. He rips Riri out her armor but decides not to kill her.

At this point, Riri’s armor is destroyed and she comes up with a new plan. She’ll kill the Hood by creating a new suit of armor in the old garage where her step-father used to work. But this suit of armor will also be endowed with magic thanks to her friend from a Chicago magic shop.

The biggest magic here is that Riri seems to create a new and better suit of armor in an old garage out of…nothing? I mean at least Tony Stark had scraps from his own weapons when building the Mark I suit in a cave. Riri seems to have nothing at all. It’s not a machine shop, it’s a garage that has been closed for years. There are no CNC machines or raw materials. 

Honestly, I may have missed something because by this point I was barely paying attention. But generally speaking she built the first suit in a well-equipped and well-funded lab at MIT and the second one is an old garage. The big moment from this part of the story is that when the suit is nearly done, something goes wrong and her AI friend NATALIE gets deleted. Riri tries to save her but is too late. Riri promises to find a way to fix this later on.

Anyway, in the final episode we get the showdown with The Hood and in what may be the only really moral decision Riri makes in the entire show, she doesn’t kill him. He’s clearly been driven mad by the the demonic hood and she leaves him writhing in agony without it. And yet…

Immediately after the battle she meets up with the person who gave The Hood his hood. And that person is Mephisto. He’s basically making deals with the devil. Having just seen what that did to The Hood, you’d think Riri would run the hell out of there and never look back. Instead she sits down with him and lets him make her an offer. Because, really, what could go wrong?

The show ends with Riri spending weeks trying to work out the magic that led to the destruction of AI NATALIE and then, suddenly, Natalie appears. Only this isn’t an AI version but appears to be a real, human Natalie back from the dead. Riri hugs her and as she does we see her arm burning with the same kind of evil magic that consumed The Hood. In other words, Riri made a deal with Mephisto. She is being consumed by evil. 

There’s actually a moment in the show where Riri asks her potential love interest if she’s a good person. He gives a whole speech about her being smart and curious and driven and suggests that goodness doesn’t really matter for someone like her. And that really does seem to be the perspective of the writers. As several people have said in video reviews, this really is the origin story of a villain. Riri goes from relatively minor violations of school policy to theft, terrorism, then violence against innocents and finally murder. And just when you finally think she might be turning it around, she makes a deal with the devil.

I don’t know who is supposed to like this but it’s absolutely the worst thing Marvel has ever produced. It makes She Hulk look like a work of staggering genius.

Honestly, who cares about one Marvel show, right. But this is so bad and so off-putting it makes me despair for our culture in general. That anyone would pay $150 million to produce this dreck and present it as a “superhero show” makes me wonder if anyone at Disney knows how to tell a story anymore.

Here’s a pretty good summary from Nerdrotic: