**This review contains spoilers**

I have unfortunately felt this way about a decent amount of Marvel content lately, but I just could not get excited about this show. Clearly, neither could Disney, because they just unceremoniously dumped these episodes in two 3-episode drops (for a total 6-part series) in the middle of summer. Maybe they were putting all their energy towards The Fantastic Four: First Steps which came out one month after Ironheart and is inarguably a bigger deal. But, as always, I’ve come this far with Marvel. I’m committed to watching it all. Ironheart stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams. The character was first introduced in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Black Panther writer/director (and most recently writer/director of Sinners), Ryan Coogler, executive produced this series. Now, we find Riri recently expelled from MIT for selling homework to her peers to help fund her own experiments (because unlike her namesake, Iron Man, she doesn’t have the means or connections to do it herself) and heading back home to Chicago. It is there that Riri is recruited by Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos) to join his crew of criminals that plans to heists to target the area’s multimillionaires. An “eat the rich” kind of thing. I’ll get right to the point: nothing about this show worked for me.

Pretty much from the get-go I was out, but I’ll air my two main grievances. One of the plotlines brings Riri’s trauma to the forefront with memories of her best friend, Natalie (Lyric Ross aka Deja from This Is Us), who was killed in a random shooting that also claimed the life of Riri’s stepfather. Riri somehow accidentally resurrects Natalie in the form of an AI assistant. She’s sometimes just the voice in Riri’s ironsuit helmet, but also often appears as an extremely realistic hologram. There’s a world where this could have been an interesting take on the ethics of AI (very relevant today) and using it to deal with grief, but the show never really gets there (or tries too) and also seems a little too heavy for an MCU/Disney+ show anyway. Instead, we get this weird version of AI Natalie who somehow has memories and feelings that Riri has to apologize for hurting? I wanted to yell at the TV, “She’s not real!” But is she? It got way too confusing. All to culminate in Riri telling AI Natalie, “You’re a glitch, but you’re my glitch.” Absolutely not. We’re not making her concerning relationship with an AI bot into a cute friendship thing. 

Issue number two is Mephisto. If you’ve been in on the MCU over the past five years, the character of Mephisto has almost become a running joke. He was first seriously rumored to be appearing in Wandavision and never did, and then, after that, was jokingly rumored to be popping up in any upcoming Marvel vehicle. Although the odds of him finally showing up in Ironheart were so slim, I don’t think anyone even joked about it. But lo and behold, it finally happened. Played by Sacha Baron Cohen. I was behind on watching Ironheart because, once again, I didn’t care. So the Mephisto thing was, of course, spoiled for me on Twitter. But even knowing it, I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself. And, honestly, still barely believed it then. There was so much anticipation for this character. And from what I understand about him from comic book fans, he’s a pretty big deal. He is the literal Devil, after all. So why introduce him here? In a show that the majority of people are not watching. Maybe as a way to get more viewers for the show? To make Ironheart feel more significant in the cannon? I think it does the opposite. It makes Mephisto feel like a lower stakes character than he actually is. But even besides that, what is he actually doing here? In this world. In this story. With these people. Why is Parker Robbins special enough to be hand-selected by the devil? I don’t know how or why we got here, but I will say that ending with Riri making a deal with the devil is an interesting place to leave the character. It sets up intriguing possibilities for when this character is brought back into the movie universe and how that could open up a window for Mephisto’s film debut. The MCU has always drawn on the conflict of combining science and magic, but, for some reason, the two operating in tandem did not work for me in this story.

I really do hate to be so negative about these shows because it is somehow always the female characters get such short shrift. Ms. Marvel. She-Hulk. Echo. Ironheart. That’s not to say all of those were bad (but they weren’t great). Or that shows that did not center women weren’t also bad (I’m looking at you Secret Invasion). But it just seems like more often than not it’s women. And young women. Of color. At least give them the same respect as other shows by still doing a weekly episode release instead of dumping them all at once just to get rid of them. I will also add that while I greatly disliked this show, I was genuinely surprised to see some demi-decent reviews. Usually I’m higher on these things than critics are, but maybe I was just so checked out at the end I couldn’t even let myself enjoy it or see the positives. I don’t know. It’s getting tougher and tougher to stay committed to being a Marvel completionist when a lot of it feels like a slog. But all we can do is power through and stay hopeful the content will get better!

2025 Count: 51 movies, 36 seasons of television, 3 specials