Tony Stark has a large shadow over the MCU after the character died in Avengers: Endgame. The MCU has been somewhat rudderless, both within and outside of it. In the comics, Brian Michael Bendis, one of the more prolific and influential modern writers in Marvel Comics history, and artist Mike Deodato created a new legacy character, Riri Williams, a fifteen-year-old genius who studies at M.I.T. and decides to create her own armor after being saved by Iron Man. Now, in the MCU, she’s a bit different but still decides to make her armor. We first meet Dominique Thorne‘s Riri Williams in the 2022 Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where she and Shuri become fast friends as young Black girl geniuses. This new series, Ironheart, entirely focuses on Riri as she ends up leaving M.I.T. In disgrace, she must find a way to continue her work and return home to Chicago. There, she is recruited by Parker Robbins, also known as The Hood, to join his Robin Hood-like group, which steals from tech billionaires to improve their standing in the world.
The two most prominent themes I saw in this show are grief and ambition, and how these two elements intersect. These emotions cause the characters to make questionable choices throughout the show, which I understand, I feel the series doesn’t always give the story enough time to expand on. Riri’s drive to make her armor is to hide her feelings of loss of her best friend, Natalie (Lyric Ross), and stepfather in a drive-by shooting years before the events of the show. Thorne’s performance as Riri has a lot of layers to it as she struggles with her decisions of working with The Hood’s crew and hiding so much of her feelings from those closest to her. I think the show does a good job of making you feel and understand what’s going on with her and in her head versus the other main character, Parker Robbins. Anthony Ramos is one of my favorite young actors, with charisma off the charts, and is able to believably become all these characters in projects that aren’t always up to his ability and the level of effort he puts into them. I think this is the case with how The Hood is portrayed in this show.
See, The Hood is my guy. He’s one of my favorite newer supervillains from the more modern era of Marvel Comics. A guy who looked up to supervillains and, through his struggles with poverty, worked his way to being a significant threat to Marvel heroes through solid planning, smart use of his powers, and excellent teambuilding skills. Yet here, his motivations are somewhat lacking; gone are the days of just being a superpowered organized criminal, reaching for power for power’s sake. His motivations stem from rejection and a desire for revenge, the exact opposite of what Riri has. He creates his own family, but as the leader, stealing and figuring out how to control these billionaires becomes only interesting for the first few episodes. After that, he’ll leave you scratching your head about his real motivations as it teases out his origin through most of the series until the last episode.
I did like Alden Ehrenreich as Joe McGillicuddy, a person who pushes and challenges Riri’s motives for her actions to reach this goal. The show does well at spotlighting the unbridled ambitions of smart tech engineers and their vision for our world and communities, which doesn’t always take into account the people there or whether they fit their vision for the future. I think the show needs more than its six episodes to explore these themes, but I think it gets caught up a bit too much in the heist segments of the series. It’s inspiring to see The Hood’s gang of marginalized people of color fighting to make their way in a society that often overlooks them. Feels very X-Men-like, and having it set in Chicago, we see Riri getting readjusted to a home that feels familiar, but I do think that I don’t like the arc of the show for her and why she had to make the decisions she had to make. It is relatively different from the comics version, and I’m not the biggest expert on this character, but it ultimately felt lacking, leaving unanswered questions that I don’t think will be resolved.
One thing I noticed is that they have Riri going through a similar internal battle to Tony’s in Iron Man 3, after his near-death experience at the end of The Avengers. The MCU switched its battle with sobriety to a struggle with trauma, anxiety, and PTSD, while the subtle is more apparent looking back on the whole Infinity saga. Giving this character, whose goal is to fill Stark’s place in the world of creating a better future and protecting the world, the same struggle does well with setting the character up for more in the future, but I honestly don’t have the faith that they will put her there at that level. Maybe that’s unfair to the show and the character, but I can’t help but have some cynicism.
My final thoughts on the show are that I feel the people making it wanted to create a show that doesn’t feel cramped by the MCU constraints imposed. There are times when they feature scenes with Riri and her mother, Ronnie, excellently played by Anji White, and her friend Xavier (Matthew Elam), which constantly feel cut short as they return to the crew scenes. You see, there is a community and things around her stepfather’s closed garage that seem fertile for more, but it has only just scraped the surface of what the MCU Chicago is like. Cree Summer and Regan Aliyah both give very delightful characters that feel very distinct from the types of characters they are we’ve seen in other MCU projects. I choose to dance around who and what they are, so you can not be spoiled by everything, even as they release this show in big chunks. I was very hopeful about Ironheart, and I do feel that they didn’t put their all into promoting this show. However, Chinaka Hodge and all the people involved in making Ironheart created a good show. I just don’t feel it’s a great show. Dominque Thorne does great as its star, and Lyric Ross stands out throughout the series, but with its wasted use of Ramos’ talents and not giving it enough space to breathe, it’s another MCU project leaving me very wanting.
Rating: C+
Level of Enthusiasm: 50%
