<i>Ironheart</i> Lays the Path for a Bright Future

Despite having a six episode season, Ironheart has come to an end just a week after its premiere. The final three episodes of the series wrap up this installment of Riri Williams’ story with a bow that looks pretty nice from a distance, but is plainly fraying at the edges when you take a closer look. 

After leaving John (Manny Montana) behind to die after the Hood’s attack on Heirlum, Riri (Dominique Thorne) is a nervous wreck, and Parker (Anthony Ramos) is growing more unstable and suspicious of her. Due to Riri leaving Zeke’s (Alden Ehrenreich) technology behind at the crime scene, he is arrested, outed as Obediah Stane’s son, and imprisoned for his illegal possession of unauthorized technology. He no longer trusts Riri, and when Parker offers him a way out of prison in exchange for helping to hunt down and kill Riri, he accepts. Zeke is then enhanced in a process that includes having his skull drilled into, gaining electric abilities while also being subject to Parker’s control. 

Meanwhile, Riri and N.A.T.A.L.I.E (Lyric Ross) investigate the piece of Parker’s cloak they managed to swipe. Riri’s mother (Anji White)—who has let her get away with so much—takes her to visit her friend Madeline (Cree Summer) and her daughter Zelma (Regan Aliyah). Riri has spent her whole life thinking that Madeline is just a witchy kind of person, but she and Zelma are both well versed in the very same magic that Doctor Strange and the many sorcerers of the MCU use. They quickly determine that the cloak is from a different dimension and tell Riri to do everything she possibly can to destroy it, which she attempts to no avail.

After the sting of her failure begins to mix with her ever present PTSD, Riri finally reaches her limit. She has her worst panic attack yet while  flying her suit, and N.A.T.A.L.I.E is unable to calm her down like she was before. N.A.T.A.L.I.E goes against Riri’s wishes and reveals herself to Xavier (Matthew Elam) after bringing him to help. He, understandably, has a bad reaction to seeing his dead sister in the form of a sentient AI assistant and cuts Riri off. In a world where she wasn’t mid-panic in the middle of a junkyard, she may have been able to effectively explain how N.A.T.A.L.I.E came to exist in the first place, but instead her inability to do so leads to N.A.T.A.L.I.E growing angry with her as well, and she storms off with Riri’s suit. 

Left with no other avenues, Riri meets up with Zelma, who believes that the entity behind Parker’s cloak is none other than Dormammu, the final boss of 2016’s Doctor Strange. Unfortunately, Parker has directed the remaining members of his team (plus Zeke) to bring him Riri’s head, and the Blood Siblings (Zoe Terakes and Shakira Barrera) interrupt her meeting with Zelma and attempt to take her out. After the clunkiest fight scene in the entire show, Riri is able to trap the pair inside of a protective shield, but is unable to escape before Clown (Sonia Denis) appears and makes multiple attempts to shrapnel bomb Riri to death. She manages to evade Clown as well, but not before slipping to her that Stuart (Eric Andre) is dead, clearly at the hands of Parker and John. 

Where was N.A.T.A.L.I.E this whole time, you may wonder? Inside the suit, trapped by Slug (Shea Couleé) with the help of a giant magnet and a box truck. N.A.T.A.L.I.E escapes just in time to save Riri from being turned into roadkill, but they are still unable to make an easy exit when Zeke shows up and completely destroys the suit. He almost kills her too, but is unable to do so, and instead tells Riri to get out of Chicago before Parker finds out she’s still alive and comes after her himself. She runs home to lick her wounds, and Zeke and the gang head back to Parker, gifting him the head of Riri’s suit and maintaining the lie that she died at Zeke’s hand.

In all of this, Riri’s mother is a true saint. She allows for Riri’s antics to flourish under her roof, is almost entirely unphased when N.A.T.A.L.I.E appears to her for the first time, and though she does progressively become more concerned about what’s going on in her daughter’s life, she never attempts to pull rank on her to completely yank her out of the situation, no matter how bad things are. She remains there for Riri whether Riri likes it or not, and when Riri hits rock bottom, she’s the first person there to get her back on track. With the help of basically everyone who didn’t spend the night trying to take Riri out—including Xavier, who has now forgiven her—she takes apart her stepdad’s car and builds it into the final version of her suit. Still in need of a power source and with no ARC reactor in reach, she again turns to Zelma. They figure out how to power the suit with magic, but it isn’t able to hold the energy and N.A.T.A.L.I.E’s programming all at once. N.A.T.A.L.I.E is destroyed before she can be transferred to a different data bank, and Riri is left without her for the remainder of the show.

In the midst of this, Parker is abandoned by Clown, Slug, and the Blood Siblings after they dig up Stuart’s autopsy. With no one else to manipulate, he breaks his promise to leave Zeke alone and activates his control mechanism, forcing him to help Parker break into a mansion he failed to rob back when he first started running cons with John. In a reveal that feels very trivial, we learn that the mansion is the home of Parker’s father (Paul Calderón). Not only is he a CEO like all of the other targets, he also abandoned Parker when he was 12-years-old following the death of Parker’s mother, citing the fact that he “didn’t want him.” It’s pretty weaksauce as tragic backstories go, but Parker was hurt enough by it to turn to a life of crime that eventually led him into the hands of the man that fans of Marvel Television have been begging to see for half a decade: Mephisto (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Mephisto is the one who gave Parker the cloak the night of his failed break-in, using his powers to manipulate Parker into asking for wealth beyond imagination in exchange for something “he wouldn’t miss.” The cloak’s influence is tied to Mephisto, and by the time Riri shows up to finally take Parker down, he’s a rageful shell of himself who is dead-set on murdering her. In their final conflict, Riri gets him out of the cloak and leaves him on the floor of his lair. She then comes face to face with Mephsito on her way out, and while she does a better job of resisting his will than Parker did, he still manages to make a deal with her before she leaves. We are faced with two things as the season comes to a close. First, Riri is reunited with N.A.T.A.L.I.E, except she seems to be having some memory issues because she isn’t AI at all, she’s the Natalie who died 5 years ago back in the flesh. Second, we see a post credit scene featuring a very alive—and seemingly well—Parker seeking out magic from none other than Zelma.

As predicted, Ironheart was not able to break the MCU curse that comes along with a six-episode season, but there is a clear desire for a second season that cannot be ignored. As well as the ensemble cast does with the little that they are given, they get an even shorter end of the stick in the back half of this season, which is unfortunately pretty typical of MCU TV. When Parker’s allies abandon him in episode five, that’s the last time we ever see them. It would have been cool to see everyone come back together with Riri to stand against Parker and take him down, but there clearly wasn’t enough room for that to happen. The small scene we get of the remaining four bonding was really nice as it was one of the few times we saw them interact outside of the main character and their cult-like leader, and I wish that there had been more casual interaction similar to that across the entire cast.

With even more characters appearing in the back half of the season, the motivations of characters like Zeke and Parker felt flimsier than I’m sure were intended, but again this all comes down to the fact Ironheart would have been even better with a ten or 12-episode runcount. Zeke’s arc flies by in a blink, and the build-up to Parker’s father is non-existent before it doesn’t even matter anymore. Thankfully, Riri is not sidelined in her own show—something that commonly happens to Black female characters in leading roles—but we don’t get to see her make strong bonds with a lot of the people she interacts with regardless of whether or not she knew them before the starting-point of the series. Zelma was an instant favorite of mine, and while it seems like she’ll get some more screentime in a hypothetical season two, it would have been cool to see a full episode of her and Riri working together instead of the sporadic bits that we get in-between Riri working with half a dozen other people.

Luckily, every good thing that came out of the first half of the season is still intact here. The performances are incredible from everyone, and Ironheart has so much potential as a longer series that it’s impossible not to want more. As clunky as things started to get, there is a ton of potential for the show now that the door has (finally) been opened on Mephisto and the realm of magic. The only thing holding it back (aside from the episode count) is the way Disney+ chose to release the series. There was no need to squeeze the season into a two-part release when there are more than two episodes—Ironheart should have been released weekly like every other series (except for Echo, one of the other two series featuring a female lead of color). Riri Williams deserves to be more than a flash in the over-full pan that the MCU occupies.

As a final note, I have to bring up how wonderful the title cards were. Starting an episode trying to guess how Ironheart was going to show up on screen was super fun, and my personal favorite remains the broken pavement with Riri in the suit as the “A” from episode one. It’s the little things that count for the most, and in the event that a second season happens, I hope they carry that tradition through.