Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the college-aged science prodigy known in comic books as Ironheart, was introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with an awkward fanfare that quickly trailed off. The character first appeared in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” an unwieldy sequel to the MCU’s best movie — one that felt like a respectful funeral staged within a frantic corporate meeting about how to best maximize revenue on a series of popular but imperiled properties.
Her small role in the film was intended to serve as an appetizer for her own spinoff series on Disney+ set to turn up shortly after the movie. But while the series itself was already filming as “Wakanda Forever” filled theaters, it’s only just now making it to the streaming service — in a pair of three-episode batches that suggest the company hastily losing faith in the character.
Why this particular series was seemingly chosen as a scapegoat for various MCU woes is a mystery, though few of the possible solutions paint a flattering portrait of the parent company and their assumptions about what their audience wants to see. “Ironheart” may yet prove a lightning rod (however brief) with the manosphere outrage factory, given that the iconography of the series positions Riri — a Black woman — as a next-gen Iron Man, despite her lack of particular veneration of Tony Stark. (This was true in the comics, too, but in the movies the nerds’ precious hero is dead.) Per her own insistence, she’s attempting to create her own version of Stark’s high-tech suit as an “iconic” calling card — just because she knows she can.
That kind of ambition costs money, though, and the show opens her with getting ejected from MIT for a cheating scandal. (She raises money by completing other students’ projects for cash.) She returns home to Chicago to live with her mom Ronnie (Anji White) and work on her project. Returning to her old neighborhood reopens barely-healed wounds as she grieves the loss of her best friend Natalie (Lyric Washington) as well as her beloved stepfather, killed in a shooting before the events of “Wakanda Forever.”
Still desperate for cash, Riri falls in with a slick gang of criminals led by Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), who pull off complicated heists, mostly for the purpose of redistributing wealth and undermining developers that threaten various Chicago communities. Parker’s motivations aren’t quite so pure, however, and Riri quickly notices that he appears to draw some kind of eerie powers from the weird-looking cloak he wears all the time.
As the six-episode series goes on, “Ironheart” spends an increasing amount of time exploring the borders between technology (which Riri understands) and magic (which she does not), and how these characters attempt to manipulate both to fulfill their wishes. The most potentially controversial element is Riri’s accidental creation of a sophisticated A.I. assistant for her suit – her version of Jarvis, the cordial British voice often heard assisting Stark in the first two “Iron Man” films. This iteration goes further: It feels exactly like Riri is interacting with Natalie, revived by a computer with all of her mannerisms, memories and Washington’s considerable charm intact.
While it’s clearly an extension of ideas from “Iron Man,” this element of the series nonetheless threatens to make “Ironheart” feel ill-timed even with the two-year delay. Here, amidst a corporate push to treat A.I. as a necessary resource more valuable than actual humans, is a full-on character, arguably the most likable person on the show, who plays a bit like A.I. propaganda: Isn’t having one of these virtual assistants just as good as a flesh-and-blood best friend?
But by the end of the series, the show’s relationship with this tech has been appropriately complicated, even turned menacing in ways that are satisfying without resorting to evil-robot boilerplate.
Getting there requires some standard MCU overpopulation and overbusy loyalty-switching among various shades-of-gray sorta-good and sorta-bad guys. There are also some bits that may have moldered while waiting on the shelf. Maybe when it was first written, showing the main character having a physical panic attack was still a novel subversion of superhero expectations. At this point, though, those scenes have become cliches of their own. Overall, the show is more fun as a heist-of-the-week vehicle featuring an uneasy alliance between a disgraced star student and an eclectic group of talented criminals than as a ramp-up to an obligatory powers battle, not least because Riri barely seems interested in superheroes. Still, “Ironheart” is neither as cluttered nor as erratically paced as so many of its MCU siblings — and on a purely technical level, it looks and sounds a lot better, too.
The show’s warm and varied color palette is reminiscent of those early “Iron Man” movies, where there was a modicum of real-world weight and grounding to the action, and the dialogue is a little looser and less canned than the sour sarcasm-and-buzzword punch-up cocktails that often passes for patter in these things. (There’s a sly command of generational references when Riri and Natalie repeatedly compare their high-tech heist shenanigans to the “Spy Kids” movies.) Maybe that’s the influence of Ryan Coogler, the “Black Panther” director whose company produced the series with Disney, or maybe creator Chinaka Hodge and her staffers are better at shaping episodes and characters than the teams behind previous MCU shows.
Whatever the reason, “Ironheart” rarely feels like a distended low-budget movie. Its closest relative is probably “Ms. Marvel,” which also had a younger character inhabiting a world populated by both recognizable people and fantastical marvels spun off from a larger universe. The low-key mixing and matching elements from that series, “Iron Man,” “Doctor Strange” and “Agatha All Along,” among others, actually feels like its creators having fun with the Marvel toolkit, rather than tediously adhering to a list of universe requirements. When the show arrives at a late turn that will have some fans buzzing, there’s enough character groundwork laid to get less devoted viewers excited, too (though a second season is far from assured).
“Ironheart” doesn’t swoop in last-minute to save the MCU on television; in all likelihood, this is a remnant of a Marvel TV model that’s about to be replaced. But like Riri’s eventual supersuit, it’s a pretty decent iteration from outside the established order.
“Ironheart” premieres Tuesday, June 24, on Disney+.
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