Ironheart Tries Its Best to Blast Out of the MCU’s Mold
Published on June 25, 2025
Credit: Marvel Studios/Disney+
Credit: Marvel Studios/Disney+
What’s a genius to do with no funding and a dream of changing the world for the better? Crime, of course!
Ironheart is the latest MCU television endeavor, centered around Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) as she works to find a way to continue her engineering career after she is expelled from M.I.T. The first (and last) time Riri made an appearance was all the way back in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, when she is tracked down by Shuri and Okoye after creating a vibranium detector. In the process, the pair observe her selling completed schoolwork to other M.I.T. students, and apparently saving the world doesn’t get you any sort of reciprocal support (what happened to all of the Wakandan Centers?) so Riri is back to hustling assignments like never before until she gets caught. Instead of adopting a “woe-is-me” attitude, she absconds with her latest attempt to recreate Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit and heads back home to the waiting arms of her friends and family in Chicago.
Not everyone she loves is back home, however. Natalie (Lyric Ross), Riri’s best friend, has been dead for five years, killed in a drive-by shooting that also took the life of Riri’s stepfather, Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins), leaving Riri as the sole survivor of the incident. Though she was able to avoid her grief by busying herself at M.I.T., being back home triggers her in a multitude of ways and forces her back onto the path of accepting what happened and getting over her survivor’s guilt. She is pushed to do so by her other friend Xavier (Matthew Elam)—who is also the late Natalie’s brother—and her very supportive mother, Ronnie (Anji White), who doesn’t blink when Riri comes back home wearing what’s left of her trashed suit prototype.
As nice as it would be for the story to progress with a cast that minimal, Marvel is obsessed with a large team dynamic. While Riri adjusts to her new reality, we meet The Hood (a.k.a. Parker Robbins) (Anthony Ramos) and his gang—Clown (Sonia Denis), the upbeat pyro, Slug (Shea Couleé) the cool and collected hacker, Stuart (Eric Andre), the bumbling tech specialist who wishes everyone would call him rampage, John (Manny Montana), Parker’s cousin who has an enthusiasm for knives, and the Blood Siblings, Jeri (Zoe Terakes) and Roz (Shakira Barrera) the incredibly capable muscle—as they try to pull off a heist. When Stuart ruins the mission, Parker and John seek Riri out at a scrapyard after seeing her crash-land, and when she proves herself to be far more capable than Stuart ever could be she replaces him. Riri does reject Parker’s offer for work at first, but when she sees how much money she can get out of it, how much progress she’ll be able to make on her suits without having to bleed herself dry, she leaps at the opportunity to join the ragtag team.
In order to be an effective member of The Hood’s gang, Riri has to make extensive repairs on her suit, including creating a replacement AI assistant due to her original one, TRVOR, going dark after her expulsion. Instead of taking a more traditional route, she tries to create her own version of Shuri’s AI, Griot, by mapping her own brain into the suit’s interface. Instead of neutral, obedient AI she was hoping for, Riri wakes up after her 3-hour-long self-administered brain scan to see that her new AI companion is not only the spitting image of Natalie, but that it has named itself N.A.T.A.L.I.E. as well. So begins Riri’s impossible balancing act—developing her suit, keeping N.A.T.A.L.I.E. hidden and controlled, heisting around Chicago with The Hood (who is not all that he seems he is), and dealing with the fact that she has never properly mourned her best friend and stepfather, nor has she processed her very obvious PTSD from watching them die in front of her.
Clearly, Riri has a lot going on. Unfortunately, if the last five years of Marvel’s television ventures have taught us anything, it is that no amount of criticism will get them to change their awful release strategies. As good or bad as any of the MCU TV projects have been, six episodes will never be an adequate amount of time to tell these complex stories with ensemble casts. There is always going to be something missing, executed rudimentarily, or simply rushed when you are creating something that falls in the purgatory between a feature length film and a mid-sized season of TV. I lay this all out because the character of Riri Williams has faced racist backlash since her inception, and anyone who had their eyes on the Ironheart rollout saw that exact same sentiment back in the mouths of the loudest, most annoying, comically racist people on social media who have now taken the time to review-bomb this series without having ever watched it.
Is Ironheart the victim of a bloated cast? Absolutely. Do its first three episodes feel rushed at times and a little listless at others because of this fact? Of course they do, because this paltry episode count simply isn’t enough to make all of the secondary characters feel like fully fleshed-out people, and rational people understand that these things are not symptomatic of Riri being a black character, but of the wider issues in the MCU that make it impossible to create a show that doesn’t feel like it would have been better off as a movie. At the very worst, this show is standard Marvel fare that lines up in quality with every other live-action show that Marvel Television has ever released—they all have the same problems structural problems, and to some that means that none of them can ever rise above the others regardless of whichever one you think is the most fun to watch.
In truth, Ironheart is shaping up to be one of the only MCU series that actually has a chance to stand on its own outside of the wider franchise. Dominique Thorne picks up right where she left off in Wakanda Forever with her performance here, layering in Riri’s sense of humor and unabashed confidence over her deeply rooted trauma from her past and her present. It is so nice to see a character as unapologetic as this who isn’t a white man! Thorne and Lyric Ross make for wonderful scene partners as well, with Ross slight differentiation between Natalie and N.A.T.A.L.I.E. making for as much heartbreak as they do fun. Fictional AI is the only kind of AI I can bring myself to enjoy right now, and she does a wonderful job of portraying the nuances of a being that has all of the knowledge in the world while lacking the greater understanding of why it cannot be accepted as the person whose face it wears. N.A.T.A.L.I.E. remains endearing despite her many missteps, and that is a credit to Ross’s talent alongside that of the writing team.
Because of its size, the ensemble cast of The Hood’s gang doesn’t always get the amount of time that they should—the Blood Siblings are the main victims of this—but when they do they are so much fun to see in play, especially when someone splits off to conspire with Riri for a bit. It’s also nice to see a little more queerness than we usually get from Marvel in this series. Both Slug and Jeri are nonbinary (as are Shea Couleé and Zoe Terakes), and while there simply being representation of gender minorities is something that floats around the threshold of the bare minimum, the fact that there are two gender non-conforming characters who express that non-conformity very differently is not something we often get to see all in the same show. No one is tokenized, they are just there to exist in an equal capacity to everyone else, and that’s something we need so much more of because that’s as close to a true representation of real life as TV can get.
To that end, Ironheart feels like one of the only MCU projects in the last decade to actually latch onto being “realistic.” Iron Man and The Dark Knight are famously the heralds of the era of realism in superhero media that we have been subject to for almost 20 years, but many productions mistake grit for realism—Ironheart does not. Riri’s life feels as real as Rose Tyler’s did back in the first seasons of the modern Doctor Who revival. Her home is lived in, she has relationships outside of the bounds of the science-fiction and fantasy elements of her story, and her desires and pains are as straightforward as any real persons are. You absorb who Riri is so quickly, and a part of that comes from the world around her actually portraying a wider community that she clearly interacts with everyday, something that is missing from many projects in the superhero genre across the board.
The future holds a lot for Ironheart. The Hood may be the ringleader of all of these high-tech heists, but nothing comes without a price, and his seems to be some sort of magical curse that won’t stop spreading all over his skin. Parker’s downslide into whatever the cloak is influencing in him is moving forward full speed ahead by the end of episode 3, and it’s not looking like that will mean anything good for the people around him, much less himself. Riri’s search for replacement suit parts took her into the home of Obediah Stane’s incognito son, Ezekiel, and her decision to encourage him to be more unabashedly confident like her has come back to bite her now that he’s shown up at her home to make demands of her. After abstaining from technological development after the death of his father, Zeke has done a complete 180 with his morals and personality all because Riri reminded him that he has privilege as a white man, and it’s not looking like anything good will come of that. At the center of all this, Riri’s world is collapsing around her, and even with N.A.T.A.L.I.E. there to try and help her, there is only so much she can do before everything spins out of control.
Ironheart’s release schedule is a double edged sword. Is it exciting that we’ll have all the answers to everything (what is the “big job” John mentioned in episode 1?) we want to know by next week? Yes, but there’s not much fun in a series that’s so short getting even less time in the sun because the studio wants to release it as quickly as possible. Regardless, this show is a good time, MCU formula flaws and all, and if it can continue to break past those limits, it’s solid.[end-mark]
The post <i>Ironheart</i> Tries Its Best to Blast Out of the MCU’s Mold appeared first on Reactor.