This review will have spoilers for Season 1, Episodes 1-3 of Ironheart.
Four and a half years since Kevin Feige first announced the series and two and a half years since Riri’s MCU debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ironheart is finally here with the first three episodes streaming now on Disney+. And let me tell you!! It was absolutely worth the wait! I loved so much about these episodes: the characters, the Blackness, the setting, the FUN, the sneaky feelings, and the heart (no pun intended). But before I delve deeper into everything I loved, let’s get into a quick overview of what went down in these first three episodes!
The show picks up after the events of Wakanda Forever, with Riri briefly back at MIT until she is expelled for selling assignments and causing damage to one of their laboratories. She decides to fly in her suit back to Chicago and as soon as she gets there, it’s immediately clear to us as viewers that Something Bad™ happened five years prior and Riri has done everything to avoid processing her feelings around it. She’s reunited with her mother and her friend Xavier, brother of her best friend Natalie.
RIP to TRVR, Riri’s school A.I. We hardly knew ya.
All Riri wants to do is figure out how to fix and upgrade her suit now that she no longer has access to MIT’s resources. Our girl might be a genius, but a billionaire she is not, so she’s recruited by a group of incredibly good-looking (the show will repeatedly remind you of this) criminals to help them run a few jobs and earn some quick cash. We learn that Riri’s stepdad, Gary, and best friend, Natalie, were both killed in a drive-by shooting five years earlier. One night while Riri is mapping her brain to her suit (casual), she accidentally creates an A.I. of her dead best friend called… N.A.T.A.L.I.E. (Neuro Autonomous Technical Assistant and Laboratory Intelligence Entity). In her quest for more suit parts, Riri meets a random white guy named Joe who I think the show is telling us has pure intentions, but I DON’T TRUST IT. It’s revealed that “Joe” is actually Ezekiel Stane, the son of Obadiah Stane, former COO of Stark Industries and Iron Man antagonist, but he allegedly wants to be nothing like his father.
The leader of the crime crew is a man named Parker (played by Anthony Ramos) who goes by “The Hood” and wears a cape with, you guessed it, a big hood. (Someone on Threads said he looked like Darkwing Duck and I cannot unsee it.) The cape gives him magical abilities like invisibility and bending bullets, but both N.A.T.A.L.I.E. and Riri think something is off with him, so Riri risks it all to go rogue during one of the team’s heists and steals a piece of Parker’s cape in order to analyze it. Unfortunately, her risk causes a complete shutdown of the facility eventually resulting in the death of John (Parker’s right-hand man and cousin).
Where Ironheart shines is in its characters and their relationships with each other. Riri is layered, complex, and flawed. She’s a literal genius, but feels like everyone around her wants her to be small and to shrink her talent to fit in the status quo; she’s tired of being overlooked and disrespected. Sure, she can be a bit cocky, but she’s earned it! Riri wants to use her genius and iron suits to revolutionize safety and improve first responder response times so that “help will never be too late”; a desire undoubtedly driven by the deaths of her stepdad and best friend. With that goal in mind, she makes some admittedly questionable decisions, and watching her deal with the consequences of those decisions and how they affect her relationships with the people around her is one of the most interesting aspects of the show so far.
I knew in the first 30 seconds of episode 1 that I would love Ironheart, and that’s down to Dominique Thorne and Lyric Ross’s (Natalie and N.A.T.A.L.I.E.) performances and chemistry. From the flashbacks of the besties before the shooting, to navigating their new relationship as creator and A.I., their friendship feels authentic and lived in. It makes sense that N.A.T.A.L.I.E. is what would result from Riri’s brain mapping; Natalie, the person, is ingrained in Riri’s soul, and in turn Riri infuses that soul into her A.I. There’s growing pains at first, but over the course of these episodes, Riri and N.A.T.A.L.I.E. fall back into the rhythm of best friends – laughing and joking together, roasting each other, Real Talk™ing each other. It’s so much fun to watch and I think it’s a really interesting way for Riri to have to confront her grief when she’s been avoiding it for so long.
🎵”Go best friend, that’s my best friend”🎵
The way the show depicts Riri moving through grief and anxiety stood out to me as well. Or rather, how she’s avoided her grief and anxiety. I love the visual shifts that occur when she’s in the throes of panic to show what it’s like when it feels like you have no control over your thoughts and emotions. The addition of Natalie being the only one who could bring Riri down from her spiral and N.A.T.A.L.I.E. doing the very same thing damn near broke me. I told you – sneaky feelings!!
It’s not all seriousness though! This show is downright FUN! From the Clippy-esque pencil A.I named TRVOR to almost everything out of N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s mouth to the brilliantly delivered “Go home, Roger” reference, I laughed out loud several times. The moment when N.A.T.A.L.I.E. is controlling the suit in Riri’s room and dancing on the chair has been playing on repeat in my head. Iconic. And everything about the ragtag crew of gorgeous criminals was entertaining as heck. Every member of this crew is either queer or a person of color or BOTH and you LOVE TO SEE IT! BE GAY DO CRIME. Ahem.
I also love how grounded the show is in the community of the South Side of Chicago; it feels similar to the role Jersey City played in Ms. Marvel. Magic and advanced technology exist right alongside folks in the street clowning Riri for her broken suit and a kid hustling her so he can make a few bucks. The classic dude on the corner typically yelling to passerby about Jesus is instead yelling about Thanos. Sure, this is a world with aliens and time travel, but it’s also a world with neighborhoods of streets filled with music, life, and love.
Landon really gives Riri a run for her (literal) money.
And while I’m talking about Chicago, one of the few things I didn’t love about this block of episodes was whatever the heck they’ve got brewing with Xavier and Riri. He obviously has a crush on her, and while they share some cute moments reminiscing about Natalie, their connection just hasn’t hit for me. Plus, I’m a little annoyed that he sneak attacked her with Natalie’s voice on the mixtape!
At this point you might be wondering, “Hey Nic, how gay is this show?” Well reader, it’s not NOT gay! Slug (they/them; crime crew hacker), is played by Rupaul’s Drag Race alum Shea Coulée, and nonbinary transmasculine actor Zoe Terakes (of Wentworth fame) takes on the role of Jeri of the Blood Siblings. At this point, we don’t have confirmation one way or another about Riri’s sexuality outside of her mother asking if she has a boy OR a girl in her room, so for now my ShuRiri shipping heart will replay their Wakanda Forever interactions in my head.
The most refreshing thing about this show for me is that it is Black as HELL from jump. It is helmed by an incredible crew of Black women behind the scenes in addition to the Blackness on screen. From using Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody” during a fight scene to Riri’s mom yelling about slamming doors in her house, this show is for US. In Ironheart, Blackness is a girl genius gagging her ownself over the improvements to her suit; it’s a mother and her friends recommending crystals to cleanse a daughter’s aura; it’s two friends enjoying a local rapper’s concert; it’s a fierce nonbinary hacker breaking into complex systems without breaking a nail; it’s two besties literally clapping at each other in frustration; hell, it’s even belting “You Oughta Know” in the car with a dude you barely know. Ironheart is doing an incredible job showcasing the beauty, depth, and breadth of the Black experience.
“What’s 4+4? Because I did that.” — Riri Williams, probably
So far, Ironheart is everything I love about the MCU when they let themselves have fun. My favorite MCU projects are the ones where I can be laughing one minute and crying the next; where the characters feel relatable even though their daily lives are filled with aliens and wizards and mine is filled with sending emails. I was so nervous for this show because unfortunately when a cast looks like this one does, there’s no room for error in the eyes of some studios and fans. From where I’m sitting, they knocked this one out of the park. The show raises questions about technological morality, what makes a hero, and whether doing the wrong thing for the right reasons will send you down a dark path. I hope future episodes continue to explore Riri coming to terms with her grief and the aftermath of her dark decision at the end of episode 3. I’d love more information about how The Hood got his powers, and of course, what implications this story will have on the larger future of the MCU. Ironheart started off flying high and I cannot wait to see how they stick the landing.
