Because She Can

I’ve been sitting on this review for a little while now. Ironheart, Marvel’s long-delayed follow-up spin-off of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever featuring Riri Williams in her first leading story, aired a couple of weeks ago (at the time of this writing), and it was… fine? I feel like Disney and Marvel knew they’d screwed up with the way they released this mini-series, as well as many of their other shows and films. They became a firehose of content, spraying shows and films out at a breakneck pace, all to diminishing returns. So the company pulled back, put some things they’d greenlit on the backburner, and shelved some projects that were basically done until their release schedule opened up and then could drop these works quietly when no one would notice.

That’s why Ironheart sat on a shelf for two years, just waiting for the studio to schedule it for release. That’s why they dumped the series out across two weekends, instead of giving it a proper, weekly release like most of the other (non-animated) shows they’ve done. That’s why Riri debuted in her own series long after all the buzz from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has died down and everyone all but forgot that Riri existed. The character could have had a huge debut, potentially, and added someone rich and interesting to the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.. Instead she feels like an afterthought.

Although for that to have happened we’d also need Ironheart to be a good show and, here as well, I just don’t think that’s the case. Make no mistake, there are parts of Ironheart that I like. I think the cast is solid, the special effects are good, and I appreciate that it takes the time to delve into some corners of the MCU we haven’t seen in a while (such as adding a connection for this show all the way back to the original Iron Man film). The series, though, lacks a consistent character that you want to watch at the center of it all because, for all the things it attempts and all the other things it gets right, the biggest flaw with Ironheart is that it’s lead character kind of sucks.

Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a brilliant engineer riding a full scholarship to MIT. She can do anything, build any kind of tech she thinks of. The only issue is that she seems to lack a strong moral core. She’ll build tech and sell it to other students, in clear violation of school policies. She also does dangerous experiments in the school lab, scaring the other students and teachers. All of this is in service of building her own Iron Man-like armor, despite the fact that isn’t what she’s at school to do. When confronted with all this by the Dean and her professor, she tries to lie her way out of the problem and then, when she has to admit the truth, she still doesn’t seem apologetic about it. She wants to build the suit simply because she can, and damn the consequences.

Well, the consequences come back to bite her when she’s kicked out of MIT. She flies off in her suit back to Chicago, but once her expulsion is processed, the AI she stole from MIT backfires and dumps her, and the suit, in the middle of the street, destroying the suit in the process. She goes back to live with her mom, Ronnie (Anji White), and starts to hang out with her best friend (that she’s also sweet on), Xavier Washington (Matthew Elam), but deep down she doesn’t want to be back at home, or with her people; she wants to build a suit again so she can be a protector. Years before, her other best friend and Xavier’s sister, Natalie (Lyric Ross) and Riri's late stepfather (Gary Williams) were both gunned down in a drive-by at Gary’s garage, and ever since Riri has been obsessed with finding a way to keep everyone she loves safe. And if that means falling in with a criminal gang so she can get the money together to build a suit and be that protector, then she’ll do it. Whatever it takes.

Anyone that knows the character of Riri Williams from Marvel Comics is going to see that this version of Riri in the mini-series is a very different person. That’s because Riri’s story was already repurposed and told for a different character, Peter Parker, over in Spider-man: Homecoming. Riri in the comics gets noticed by Tony Stark after she makes some cool tech, so he takes her under his wing, gives her an internship at Stark Industries, and eventually makes her his technological successor in the case of his death. All of that happens in the MCU but it happens to Peter, leaving Riri without a core element of her story. That sucks, and it does mean that if Riri is going to be a part of the MCU a different story has to be told about her.

But here’s the thing I want to touch upon first: does Riri need to be in the MCU. At one point the answer was seemingly “yes”. Tony Stark was dead, Marvel had no intention of bringing him back, and if they wanted an Iron Man-like character, they were going to have to let someone else take the lead. War Machine is great, and I like Don Cheadle a lot, but his character is not a tech genius that could build their own suits. Riri Williams is that tech genius. Introducing her in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and then giving her a lead role that could grow in the MCU made sense at the time… but we’re no longer in that time.

Since that film, Marvel has shifted gears (one could say “done a ton of damage control”) and Riri’s spot in the universe doesn’t feel as secure. First it was announced that a version of Tony Stark would return as a version of Doctor Doom for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. Then, even more recently, Marvel announced that after Avengers: Secret Wars a whole bunch of heroes were getting rebooted, including a new version of the X-MenLaunched in 1963 and written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the X-Men featured heroes distinctly different from those featured in the pages of DC Comics. Mutants who didn't ask for their powers (and very often didn't want them), these heroes, who constantly fought against humans who didn't want "muties" around, served as metaphors for oppression and racism. Their powerful stories would form this group into one of the most recognizable superhero teams in comics (and a successful series of movies as well)., a new Captain AmericaCreated by Simon and Kirby in 1941, Captain America was a super soldier created to fight Germany and the evil HYDRA. Then he was lost in the ice, only to be found and reborn decades later as the great symbol of the USA., and, most importantly here, a new Tony Stark / Iron ManBillionare Tony Stark has a secret: while he travels the world by day as a playboy philanthropist and head of Stark Industries, he combats the evils of the world as the armored Iron Man.. Essentially the MCU would get rebooted, and a lot of what’s happened during the last couple of phases would be wiped away. And into all that we’re somehow supposed to care about Riri Williams?

That’s not to say that this character doesn’t have potential, because she does. I think an understudy for Tony Stark that has the knowledge and desire to actually follow in his shoes (instead of going off to be SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002.) is an interesting plot thread that has merit. I think Riri as a character has a lot going for her that I’d like to see. The issue is that the Riri we see in this version of Ironheart is not only not Tony Stark’s successor, but she’s also a pretty shitty character in general.

What we see from Riri is her getting kicked out of school for dangerous and erratic behavior. She almost immediately falls in with a bad crowd, a bunch of criminals blackmailing corporate types to make millions. She seems perfectly fine with theft and blackmail as long as it lets her build her suit, no matter if it makes her a criminal or not (even if she swears she’s not one, all evidence to the contrary). She also blackmails a perfectly normal looking dude who has been collecting illicit tech so she can steal that tech to make her suit work. She gets him in trouble, she gets a man killed (even though she could have saved him), and she ends up (spoilers) making a deal with the Devil (metaphorically and also actually) to get what she wants. This is not a hero but, more to the point, she’s also not enjoyable to watch.

I don’t blame the actress for this. I think Thorne is doing what she can with a poorly written role. I do think the writers on the show, though, assume that complications are the same as character development. Riri swings wildly from one plot beat to the next, making choices for her own needs without worrying about the consequences for anyone else. She has a tendency to go off half-cocked, flying dangerously into situations and only realizing afterwards, “hey, someone could have gotten hurt.” Even then, if it works out okay, she brushes it off and moves on like nothing happened. That’s not heroic, it’s sociopathic. Tony Stark might have been a little careless and carefree when he was building his first suit (which, to be clear, Riri is on her fourth suit by the time the series ends) but even he had more regard for the lives around him than Riri ever shows.

To make up for this the show tries to create a rich and interesting cast of characters around Riri. I like Anji White as her mom. I think Matthew Elam shows a lot of charisma as her friend, Xavier. The cast of criminals in the gang are varied and interesting, including Eric André as Stuart Clarke / Rampage, Sonia Denis as Clown, Shea Couleé as Slug, Zoe Terakes as Jeri Blood, and Shakira Barrera as Roz Blood. And the villain, Parker Robbins / The Hood, is performed well by Anthony Ramos, who works to make his character seem threatening and dark. But the series doesn’t have enough time to develop all of these characters, even over six episodes, and make us care about them, Riri, and everything going on in the adventure. The actual plot of the series is seriously underbaked, flying past a lot of story to get to the next action sequence as fast as it can.

The series does do two wise things that almost help to redeem it, though. The first is that it introduces N.A.T.A.L.I.E., an AI that Riri accidentally makes, modeled on the memories of her dead friend. NAT (as I’ll call her as writing that all out is a pain) is a great character, spunky and interesting, and the time the show spends using her to delve into Riri helps inform both characters. She breathes life into the show. And then it also pairs Riri up with Ezekiel "Zeke" Stane (Alden Ehrenreich), the son of Iron Monger Obadiah Stane (from Iron Man), and she gets to connect with another tech genius and talk shop. I like this connection, and how it could add to Riri and her world, along with the fact that it draws some kind of line from Riri to Iron Man, which this show desperately needs.

On the whole, though, it just isn’t enough. This series rushes seasons worth of storytelling in six episodes, crashing through a lot of content as if Marvel was saying, “right, we greenlit this… let’s take what we have and make something watchable so we can fulfill this obligation. It’s too slight and too under-developed, failing to live up to the potential of its main character, her world, or the changes to her story that could have been interesting. I really want to like Ironheart, and I really wish its main character were more heroic and less of a sociopathic monster. There’s a version of this that works buried somewhere in these episodes, but what we have on screen isn’t it.

I’m not going to be surprised if somehow, after the world reboots and we get a new version of the MCU after Avengers: Secret Wars, shows like Ironheart are completely forgotten. This series will likely get brushed under the rug, rebooted away so that, in a decade or so, a new version of Riri Williams shows up with the new version of Iron Man to have new adventures that ignore everything that happened here. That might be better for the character, even if it means this show was a narrative dead end. Maybe, in the long run, it would have been better for this show to remain on the shelf.