Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for Ironheart Episodes 1-3.
When it comes to Marvel fare, I find the things I’ve been enjoying the most are the ones that stand somewhat on their own: the Black Panther movies, Ms. Marvel, to name a couple. Not that I don’t enjoy the rest, but with a cinematic universe this sprawling, the fear of having missed something before going into a new story sometimes feels akin to going to school on Monday, not 100% convinced that I remembered to do all my homework. With Ironheart, the latest series from Marvel, I could at least rest easy: the relevant homework is done, and even then, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever isn’t really about Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne). It’s enough to remember going in that she’s a child prodigy-turned-MIT student with a propensity for building things way outside the skill level required by academia.
‘Ironheart’s Premiere Catches Up With Riri Williams After ‘Wakanda Forever’
The episode kicks off with a compilation of home video footage of Riri and her best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross) over the years, but primarily dominated by a selfie video of the two of them, with the pair sharing what they want more than anything. Riri says she wants to be bigger than Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) or Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), while Natalie, after a quick NSFW detour about a certain god of thunder, says that she just wants to be happy. It’s sweet, which, of course, means this isn’t going to last.
We then jump to a montage of Riri’s time at MIT, narrated by Riri herself as she explains that while she’s got great aspirations for her future, it took her “internship” in Wakanda for her to realize that she’ll never be able to truly realize her dreams and build all the things she wants to build without a steady stream of revenue. Tony Stark might be a genius, but she points out that he wouldn’t have been who he was if he wasn’t also a literal billionaire. Her primary goal at the moment is to create a tech that would revolutionize safety, but trying to do so while also building and maintaining her replica of Shuri’s (Letitia Wright) AI system Griot is proving to be expensive, leading to some less than ethical ways for her to make money.
It’s then that we realize this speech isn’t just for our benefit, but is instead being given to Dean Choi (Tanya Freeman) and Professor Wilkes (Jim Rash), as Riri asks to have her grant extended by another year. They’re not receptive to the idea, in part because her latest experiment wound up injuring Wilkes, but also because, for as long as she’s been there, and despite the course of study specifically tailored to her genius ways, she’s not any closer to actually earning her degree. Dean Choi doesn’t believe Riri’s attempt to act like a degree is completely irrelevant, or that earning one would make her “small,” but she also points out that the school has a zero-tolerance policy towards plagiarism, and Riri has helped students at not just her school, but every school in the area plagiarize their work.
With that in mind, Choi expels Riri, effective immediately — which, fair, but I don’t like Wilkes’ snarky implication that Riri is a “horrible steward” of Stark’s legacy, since last I checked said legacy began in weapons manufacturing and sales, and she’s just trying to protect people — and sends her to the lab to gather her belongings. The only belonging she’s really interested in is her Iron Man-esque armored suit, which a classmate points out she built with her own grant money, so she technically owns it. She doesn’t stick around for campus security to work it out, though, as she takes off and, with the help of TRVOR, MIT’s built-in AI assistant for students, sets a course for home, aka Chicago.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, a gang made up of John (Manny Montana), Clown (Sonia Denis), Slug (Shea Couleé), Ros (Shakira Barrera), Jeri Blood (Zoe Terakes), and Stuart, aka “Rampage” (Eric André), prepares for a heist. Things go poorly as Stu doesn’t manage to disable the alarm, and the gang winds up fleeing from the authorities. They rendezvous with their leader, The Hood, aka Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), who sends most of them home before conferring with John. This is either not the first time Stu has let them down, or else they’re just that unforgiving, because The Hood tells John they need to fire him and find someone new, but the clock is ticking with three more jobs lined up. But who could keep up with their hardware needs?
Luckily, Riri chooses that exact moment to fly by in her suit, texting her friend and Natalie’s brother, Xavier (Matthew Elam), asking him to meet her at her mom’s place to come up with an escape plan. TRVOR gets the message out, but shuts down shortly after as MIT revokes Riri’s access to the student AI. Riri loses control of the suit and crashes down on the street, luckily within walking distance from home. Landon (Harper Anthony), one of the local kids, offers to help her carry her suit home with his wagon in exchange for $20 — in this economy, we do what we gotta do — and she heads up to her mom Ronnie’s (Anji White) place. Through the door, she overhears her mom and her friends, particularly her one friend Madeline (Cree Summer), talking about her, and the trauma Riri still carries from losing both Natalie and her stepfather, Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins), without being able to say goodbye to either of them.
Riri bristles at the attention and from the implication that she might still be grieving, but is saved from having to sit through more of this by Xavier’s arrival. The two of them head out to catch up, and Riri once again shares her fear of being “small” and not respected. This, she says, is the reason she focuses so much on building the armored suits; she sees them as a way of getting people to take her seriously, and allow her to work on whatever she truly wants to, and she tells Xavier she needs to find a job that will allow her to do so, even if it takes her halfway around the world. I feel like the Wakandans would be open to taking her back if she asked, but I also get that the whole “being pulled into a war with an underwater race of beings” thing might leave her a little reluctant to head back.
Riri Is Recruited to Work for The Hood in ‘Ironheart’
She and Xavier also stop by Gary’s old garage, where, in the time Riri’s been gone, the community painted a mural of Gary and Natalie. While Xavier wants to share memories of the two of them, Riri is more reluctant to do so, saying only that she sold the car she and Gary were working on to finance her suit. As he takes her home, in a charming gesture, he gives her a mixtape — as in an actual tape — that he made, along with the tape player and headphones needed to listen to it. Xavier is just the sweetest and absolutely needs to be protected at all costs. As he leaves, we see John standing at the end of the street, having managed to track Riri down.
The next day, Riri heads to the junkyard to pick through spare parts with Xavier. While he loads up the car, Riri heads inside to settle the bill, mentally preparing herself to tell the owner, Jim (Chaim Jeraffi) that she can’t actually afford to pay right away. She doesn’t really get a word in edgewise, as he heaps praise on her for being their own local child prodigy. Once she does start to tell him she can’t afford the parts she needs, John cuts in and pays for her, faking a friendly relationship with her until the two get outside. She doesn’t buy into John’s attempts to flatter her by saying she’s smarter than Tony Stark, but she does acknowledge that part of Tony’s advantage comes from his unlimited resources, which she doesn’t have. John invites her to come meet The Hood, as he says his employer operates outside the traditional structure, and gives her an address with instructions to arrive early the next day.
When Riri arrives at the pizzeria, she takes the service elevator to head to the second floor, as instructed. Or starts to anyway, as the elevator quickly comes to a stop and starts filling with gas. The Hood’s voice comes over the speaker and tells her that she’s got three minutes before the air in the elevator becomes unbreathable, but there’s a gas mask in the device on the floor that can save her. This, he explains, is her interview to join the crew. Rather than waste time breaking into the device, Riri breaks into the elevator itself and gets it moving enough for her to pry the door open, where she’s greeted by the whole crew. Parker welcomes her and essentially offers her a job on the spot, but the trick with the elevator has her shaken enough that she turns him down on the spot, even as he pinpoints her fears about having to stay small and watch other people take the jobs owed to her. He offers to walk her out, but before he does, asks her how much money it would take to get her on the crew, showing that he’s got more than enough to meet whatever her demand is.
He offers her a stack of cash up front, on the condition that she join them for their next three jobs, which he admits are not strictly legal, but assures her that they’re more about theft and extortion than hurting anyone. He adds that if she joins them, she’ll get a cut of the money and the tools to realize her dreams, and Riri agrees, then heads home to rebuild the suit, as Parker says they’ll need it for the job.
Later, Parker and John confirm that the next day’s job is a go, while John also prepares to continue work on the large tattoo that The Hood has spread over his arm and back. But that’s not the only thing spreading across his skin, as he is also run through with black veins snaking out all over. As they take a break, because this doesn’t seem like any ordinary tattoo, The Hood takes his, well, hood, and places it on a dress form in a not-at-all ominous-looking windowless room. Meanwhile, Riri works on reconstructing the suit, but also needs to reconstruct the AI to go with it.
As Riri works, she listens to the tape Xavier made her, initially impressed with his music and vocals, until the tape sends her on an emotional spiral when she hears Natalie’s voice woven into the track, the audio coming from an old voicemail she left her brother. The audio triggers a flashback to the night Natalie and Gary died: Riri was with the two of them, at the garage working on the car, when an unrelated fight escalated just outside, leading to a drive-by shooting. Gary managed to push Riri out of the way in time, but as he tried to get to Natalie, the two of them were shot.
Riri Brings Her Best Friend Back From the Dead, Kinda, in ‘Ironheart’
She heads back into the house and is met by Ronnie, who could hear her crying, and tries to talk to her daughter about it. Instead, Riri lashes out at her mother, asking why she never bothered cleaning up the shop after what happened, and accuses her of not caring about Gary’s dreams. Ronnie holds her ground, recognizing that her daughter is so full of unprocessed grief, she can’t see past it to realize Ronnie is still hurting too, but doesn’t apologize either. Nor should she. Where Riri had her studies to throw herself into after what happened, Ronnie had to stay behind, in a city and a neighborhood full of memories, with no one to process her own pain with. But she gives Riri the space to go to her room and deal with it however she feels is best.
The brain-mapping process needed to create it is several hours long, leading Riri to sit there overnight while it does its thing, her thoughts full of Natalie as she falls asleep. She wakes up the next morning to someone calling her name. That someone? Natalie. A digital, AI recreation of Natalie, but Natalie all the same. This is the first time over the course of this series that I really lamented the release structure. Because a cliffhanger like that really loses its punch when it takes 10 seconds to hit “Next Episode.”
And speaking of the next episode, things kick off with Riri picking herself up after getting the shock of her life when seeing Natalie standing in her kitchen. Or rather N.A.T.A.L.I.E. — Neuro Autonomous Technical Assistant and Laboratory Intelligence Entity, but I’m just going to call her “Natalie” because typing it the other way is exhausting — a 3D image projected out of the chest plate of Riri’s suit. Riri isn’t keen on keeping this version of the AI around, since talking to her dead best friend is freaking her out, but Natalie isn’t like Shuri’s AI Griot, and pushes back against running the diagnostics that could get her deleted. Before Shuri can push any harder, she hears Ronnie at the door and orders Natalie to stay hidden. I don’t know why she thinks this would be hard to explain to her mother, given that Ronnie knows she’s a prodigy and a genius, but I guess she thinks it’s just easier this way, especially if she’s planning on deleting Natalie anyway. She heads out to meet with Parker, leaving Natalie to her own devices, and runs into Xavier, who invites her out later that night. Again, he’s truly just so sweet and earnest, and I adore how much he’s trying with Riri.
Riri meets up with Parker and co. to prep for their first job, targeting a company called TNNL, which is turning Chicago’s freight tunnels into a private highway at the expense of local communities, and their CEO, Sheila Zarate (Zhaleh). He introduces her to the team properly, except for Stu, who is no longer there, and then John walks them through the job: disrupt Sheila’s TNNL demonstration by uploading a virus to the system to shut it down, allowing the crew to take it over, and for John to conduct “negotiations.” They tell Riri they’ll need her in the suit that night, and she assures them that it’s just charging, but it’ll be ready to go.
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Riri Meets a Black Market Tech Collector in ‘Ironheart’
Problems with the AI aside, the suit is decidedly not ready to go, and Riri reaches out to Stu to see if he’s got someone who can help her get the parts she’s missing. He sends her to voicemail, but Natalie shares the list of black market shoppers she found in the area while Riri was out, the closest being Joe McGillicuddy (Alden Ehrenreich), which sounds extremely fake, but at least he’s likely to have what Riri’s looking for. Natalie is excited that Riri is going along with her idea, and in the process lets slip a memory of what Real Natalie and Riri used to do together, which freaks Riri out. After all, this is just an AI that looks like her best friend. It’s not actually supposed to be her best friend. She tethers Natalie to her laptop so she can’t leave the room, then heads out to find Landon and borrow his wagon from him so she can wheel the suit out to Evanston, where Joe lives.
She bumps into him just outside his house, and the man is as bumbling and awkward as his name is fake, as he confronts — or tries to confront, anyway — a neighbor for letting her dog poop on his lawn. She tells him what she’s looking for, and while he initially plays dumb, he lets slip just a little too much, and she threatens to call the authorities if he doesn’t help her out. Since his collection is stored off-site and requires retinal scanning, he caves almost immediately and offers to drive Riri there himself. Even though he caved, on the drive over, Riri catches him nearly crying, and he explains that while blackmail is a regular occurrence for him, he’s loath to part with any of his collection. While Riri doesn’t have anything to say to the latter, she tells him he really needs to stand up to himself, since, as a white man, he was born with the sort of power and respect Riri can really only get with her iron suit. This will absolutely come back to bite, but for now, I’m enjoying watching their little friendship blossom. And really, what’s a friendship without a little car karaoke. Alanis Morissette, anyone?
The pair pull up at a silo set on an overgrown property where he tells her he started hiding his collection out of sheer fear that he would be caught. Despite the derelict exterior, the inside is very well-maintained and extremely well-stocked — and not at all shady, because shady bunkers don’t have light-up “Live Laugh Love” signs. Riri doesn’t buy that this is just a hobby, and Joe tells her that the collection helps him feel close to his father, an engineer who maintained that technology was the future. Where he differs from his father, though, is the belief that the benefit of bionics is weapons manufacturing. Joe says that there are so many more humanity-benefitting applications, like organ transplants and prosthetics, and even though Riri won’t tell him the real reason behind why she does what she does, it’s clear the two of them share the desire to benefit humanity through tech.
Back at Riri’s, Natalie has learned how to text from inside the computer, but with Riri leaving her on read, she instead turns her efforts to breaking out of the laptop by going through Riri’s files. She manages to get out, and even gets as far as the kitchen by beaming out of Ronnie’s projector and onto the canvas she’s working on. She’s understandably startled, but she’s also Riri’s mother and is therefore immediately on board with the idea of an AI Natalie. With Riri still out, the two of them get to chatting, and Ronnie tells her that the only way for her to be truly a part of Riri’s life is to force her way in.
Riri asks Joe for his thoughts, from an ethical standpoint, on someone hypothetically creating an AI using brain-scanning technology, and he tells her that if such a thing were possible, it would ruin the brain of whoever tried it. Since this is not a hypothetical, she asks whether he thinks this is ethical, and he tells her that it all depends on the creator’s ethics. If she was trying to hide that she’s the one she was talking about, the smirk is not helping matters. With Joe’s reluctant help, she adds the final piece to the suit, and not a minute too soon, as Clown messages her, summoning her to the job site.
Riri Helps Parker Robbins Rob a Tech Billionaire in ‘Ironheart’
The early parts of the job at TNNL go off without a hitch, with Clown getting Ros and Jeri into the control room. Riri also arrives on time, and is making her way through the tunnel to get Slug’s virus set up when Natalie takes Ronnie’s advice and forces her way in by appearing on Riri’s heads-up display, which startles her enough that she drops the hard drive containing the virus down a drain. Natalie tells Riri there’s another way to shut down the system, and says she’ll walk her through it, starting with turning off her Magnetic Repulsor Field. While Slug tries to get the team back online with her, Riri attaches herself to the platform under one of the cars. She gets in touch with Slug to talk her through the new plan, which involves her disabling a part of the platform for Slug to break in and override the controls, which they do about half a second before the system crushes Riri under a platform.
Using the stillness of the shutdown, Parker appears in Zarate’s car to “negotiate.” This is not the “aggressive negotiations” of the Star Wars galaxy but rather Parker actually using his words as he presents Zarate with a contract that will put the crew on TNNL’s payroll, with six-figure salaries and benefits, equity, and more — I don’t really see how that’s going to be paid out fairly, much less how they’ll use those benefits without their government names, but if they’re not worried, then I guess I’m not either. With her lift at risk, Zarate signs with no argument, and the crew leaves the scene.
Riri and Natalie head back up to street level, their celebration interrupted by the arrival of a security guard who draws his gun on them, at which point Natalie freezes and glitches, no longer responding to Riri’s requests. Before the guard can shoot Riri, but after Natalie disappears, a bullet fired by Parker drifts over Riri’s shoulder and hits the guard in his shoulder. Despite how shaken this leaves her, she heads back to headquarters with the crew to celebrate, and asks Clown about Parker and his hood. Clown doesn’t know much, but does tell Riri about the scaly veins running down Parker’s back. Later, she slips out and summons her suit, asking Natalie what happened when the guard arrived. She says the gun made her freeze, and shares that she only remembers snippets of the night Real Natalie died, but more pressing than any of that is the energy she sensed off of Parker in the tunnels, which is something that feels not of this world. This would be a valid concern in a normal world, but this is the MCU — aliens, wizards, mutants, and Norse gods run around all the time, otherworldly energy is not that weird. Riri tells her as much — obviously without calling it the MCU — and acknowledges Parker is sus, but tells her that her bigger issue is why an AI would have a panic attack related to a memory she isn’t supposed to have.
Back at Parker’s, with everyone gone, the door to his Hood closet is open, with the hood whispering sinisterly at him. He takes his shirt off, and the dark veins trail even further down his back as the voices quiet. John walks in just in time to see this, and refuses to keep trying to cover up the veins with tattoos. Whatever this is, it’s a price Parker feels he has to pay for what “he” did to him, and John leaves him to his own devices.
Riri leaves the HQ to meet up with Xavier at the concert he invited her to, and they get to talking about Natalie, with Xavier admitting he wishes he could talk to his sister. She heads home, and Ronnie reveals that she knows about Natalie, and commends her daughter for the job she did, then asks if she’s able to make one of Gary too. Riri apologizes and says that she can’t, because she doesn’t even fully understand where Natalie came from, and as heartbreaking as it is to see the hope leave Ronnie’s face, I’m grateful the show doesn’t go full Black Mirror at this point. Having a fake Gary around wouldn’t help Ronnie heal, just as the fake Natalie certainly isn’t helping Riri.
The episode ends on a lighthearted note, with Joe accidentally stepping in dog shit left behind by his passive-aggressive neighbor, and finally standing up for himself by going over to her place and ruining the flowerbed she was so proud of. Episode 3 begins in an equally lighthearted way, with the crew celebrating their TNNL victory by making it rain, and discussing what they want to do with their new windfall. Clown keeps the party going by finally breaking into Parker’s vault to take out the hood, but tells them there’s something off about it. She and Riri are just figuring out how they can use the hood to figure out Parker’s powers when John arrives, furious that they’d even touch the hood.
Parker Robbins Plans a Second Heist in ‘Ironheart’
Parker intervenes, telling John to back off as they have another job to focus on, this one at Heirlum, a biotech firm. The CEO, Hunter Mason, is using farming technology to put local farmers out of business. The only problem is the tech designed to protect the seeds and the produce will detect any metals that might prove harmful, meaning most of their usual arsenal is out. With that snag in the plan, and everyone still tense over John manhandling Clown over the hood, Parker sends them all away for the night. Riri is wrestling with the idea that taking part in these heists means she’s a criminal and a bad person, when she’s only here as a means to an end, but Parker tells her that anyone who ever achieved the kind of greatness she’s looking for had to do some questionable things to get it done. He uses himself as an example, saying he was “nobody” before his hood, but is unstoppable now. She asks how the hood actually works, and he tells her it’s magic. Considering she was just telling Natalie about the various sorts of magic that have become commonplace in recent years, I’m not sure why she’s so skeptical about this now, but maybe she was just hoping Parker would elaborate more.
Riri heads home, where Xavier is waiting for her, and there she gifts him with a set of brand new headphones, purchased with her spoils from the heist. Xavier is skeptical about accepting the gift, given that Riri paid for them with her new job she can’t tell him anything about, but more than that, he’s reluctant to part with his worn-out old headphones; they make him feel closer to Natalie since she was always borrowing them from him, and not taking good care of them, and now even the scuffs make him think about his sister. If Ronnie’s way of grieving is to not touch anything of Gary’s, and Riri’s is to run away from the problem, we now see a third way in Xavier, as he tries to find the good memories while missing his sister, but might also be clinging too hard to the past. Grief is tricky, and none of them are wrong for how they handle it, but I appreciate the series really emphasizing that none of them are handling things the same way.
Joe turns up then, wanting to speak to Riri. They lie and tell Ronnie they’re coworkers before Riri hauls him out into the hall to see what brought him out so far, and so late. Since helping her rebuild the suit, Joe has felt inspired to take his ideas for bionics even further, listing off a bunch of ideas he’s had and asking Riri for her help. She tries to put him off, but taking her words about blackmail to heart, he refuses, blackmailing her in turn. With no choice but to agree, Riri takes the blueprints he brought over and heads back inside.
There, she tries to get Natalie to run diagnostics on the suit, but instead, Natalie has completely taken over the suit in a bid for Riri’s attention. She makes it clear that she doesn’t trust Parker, and though Riri might insist she’s just here for the job and the money, Natalie still feels her friend in too deep. Natalie is also far too self-aware for an AI and resents being treated like a “genie,” rather than like Riri’s best friend, and tells her she wants to go out like the old days — and no, being reminded that she’s code, and not a person is not a deterrent. Riri eventually caves, realizing Natalie won’t help her upgrade the suit otherwise, and upgrades Natalie so she’ll be able to project without being tethered to the suit.
Luckily, Natalie doesn’t have anything elaborate in mind for their day out, with the two of them just heading to the planetarium to sit in the park. Despite constantly reminding Natalie that she’s just an AI, it looks like those lines are starting to blur for Riri, especially as Natalie tells her that she remembers quite a bit about being alive. Their day out is interrupted when Joe texts Riri asking her to come over earlier than planned — which is to say immediately — and Riri tells Natalie that for all that Joe is neurotic and his plans are sloppy, he’s got some good ideas tucked in there. Rather than rush right to Joe’s, the two of them make a last stop at Gary’s garage. Riri is already wrestling with what he would have thought of her suit, and the jobs she’s carrying out with it, but Natalie hopes seeing the shop will give Riri much-needed perspective. Instead, all it gives her is a panic attack as memories of that night come rushing back. Natalie guides her through the panic attack with a breathing exercise that apparently only the real Natalie knew to use, and maybe it’s just that she really needs her best friend right now, but Riri doesn’t fight against the idea like she might have before.
She heads home, without Natalie projecting this time, to find two cops at the door, there to ask her about Stu, who was found dead that morning. They’ve come to speak to her since she was the last person to call him, but she tells them a half-truth, that they met at a job interview and exchanged information, and her attempt to reach out failed. This is luckily enough for the cops, and they leave just in time for Riri to spiral again, as she believes Parker and the crew are responsible for Stu’s death. Realizing they know too much about her, Riri decides she needs to get her hands on the hood. While Natalie is opposed to the idea, Riri decides to cut off a piece of the hood that night when they meet up for the Heirlum heist. Her not being able to bring the suit poses a problem, until she remembers that one of Joe’s designs involves a bio-mesh skin that covers bionic enhancements. And he’s conveniently left her with the blueprints.
At Parker’s hideout, John tells him they need to consider backing out of Heirlum entirely, given that he can’t find any weaknesses in the CEO. Parker is confident, however, that they’ll find the needed leverage, and a news report on the city’s recent criminal activity only strengthens his resolve, even as John tells him that having Riri and her suit on the team is making him overconfident. And speaking of Riri, she finally makes it over to Joe’s place to find it in disarray after an attempt to create a link between himself and a computer chip went horribly awry and left his arm split open. While helping him patch up, she shares her idea of enhancing the bio-mesh skin with cloaking capabilities, which Joe disapproves of on ethical grounds alone, not to mention the fact that his designs can easily be traced back to him.
While looking for peroxide, Riri finds a Ziploc bag of what appears to be flour but is actually Joe’s father, stashed in a kitchen storage container, which she drops in surprise. Joe isn’t all that shaken up about some of the ashes spilling, since he and his father weren’t close, but Riri is shaken up when she sees the bag is labeled “Obadiah S.” As in, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), one-time mentor to Tony Stark, and the MCU’s first-ever villain. I knew the name Joe McGillicuddy sounded fake. Joe tells her that his real name is Ezekiel Stane and that Obadiah was his father.
He tells her that the story Stark Industries gave the public, that Obadiah died in a plane crash, is untrue, and that his father actually died trying to kill Tony Stark. Joe — Ezekiel? Zeke? I’ll stick with Joe for now — doesn’t want to be anything like his father, whom he describes as a supervillain, and seeing Riri in her suit, pushing the boundaries of ethics for whatever reason, is a step too far. He doesn’t want any part of what Riri is up to. She apologizes for bringing it up, and Joe asks her why she really built the iron suit. She confesses that Gary was a fan of Tony Stark, and fixed broken things just because he could — herself included — so she now does the same. She tells Joe that he doesn’t need to let who his father was define who he is now, and he softens enough to give her the bio-mesh skin, on the condition that whatever she does to it won’t bounce back on him.
Riri Pulls Double Duty During the Second Heist in ‘Ironheart’
With the skin now in her possession and concealing her laser cutters, which she’ll use to get a piece of the hood, Riri heads to the rendezvous point to meet up with the crew for the Heirlum heist and to strip themselves of any metal that might set off the detector. This means jewelry, knives, you name it. At the job site, Riri hovers over the greenhouses, providing the crew with a birds-eye view of the facility before heading to the watch tower. Or at least, they think she’s headed to the tower. Riri leaves Natalie in charge of the suit and breaks in on her own, using underwater access points to catch up with Parker.
Parker, meanwhile, sneaks up on Hunter Mason in the greenhouse, though the CEO doesn’t seem that surprised to see him. The two begin their negotiations, and Hunter tries to pay Parker off, but Parker tells him the money he’s offering isn’t enough, and that they’d prefer he sign a contract much like the one the TNNL CEO signed. When Hunter refuses, Slug disables the fire detectors in the greenhouse and orders Clown to set them on fire. While they talk, Riri sneaks up below Parker and starts to slice off a corner of the robe, but the detection system picks up on the metal in the laser cutter and the facility goes into shutdown, sealing everyone in wherever they are while spiking the CO2 levels to suffocate them.
Just as Riri has a corner of the hood cut off, Parker disappears in order to sneak behind Hunter and strangle him. The act leaves scars on his face like the ones on his back, though those fade quickly. He disappears again, waiting for security to arrive before attacking them as well, and Riri uses the ensuing chaos to sneak out. She tells Natalie to direct her through the ventilation systems while using the suit to get the rest of the crew to safety. She finds her way out of the vent and runs directly into John, who sees her holding a piece of the hood. Since Parker wasn’t answering John’s calls, he assumes the worst and attacks Riri, after confirming her fear that he was the one who killed Rampage. The two of them fight as Parker and Natalie get the rest of the crew out, but the rising CO2 levels slow them down. Natalie busts in and puts Riri into the suit, and they leave John behind to suffocate in the greenhouse.
Riri catches up to the crew as they prepare to run, and at Parker’s request, does a flyover to see if she can find John. She does see him, or his body rather, immobile in one of the greenhouses. Her night goes from bad to worse as she arrives back at home, and Natalie points out that the biomesh is no longer attached to her arm, and she starts spiraling, both from taking a life for the first time and breaking her promise to Joe. She isn’t the only one spiraling as Parker heads back home, devastated at losing John. He throws the hood and declares to whoever is listening, whoever is controlling that hood, that he is “done.” His grief is met only with a vision of John suffocating to death, followed by a vision of Riri’s suit.
As three individual episodes, I’d say these worked well as an exploration of the different ways grief and ambition can manifest in a person. As a three-episode premiere? I have to wonder why Marvel rushed all three of them out at once. This doesn’t feel like an Andor situation where the three episodes are one tightly packed arc in a season that has several such arcs. This is literally half the series released at once, and is a lot to keep track of. I’m sorry that we won’t get to see week-to-week speculation on the plot, or even that the series won’t have six weeks to find an invested audience. Two weeks for this much story does the show as a whole a disservice, and even in this first half, leaves things feeling rushed, however compelling the story might be. See you next week for the back half of the season!
Ironheart
Ironheart’s first three episodes are a thoughtful exploration of grief with an utterly charming performance from Dominique Thorne.
- Release Date
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June 24, 2025
- Network
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Disney+
- Showrunner
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Chinaka Hodge
- Directors
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Angela Barnes, Sam Bailey
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Dominique Thorne
Riri Williams / Ironheart
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Lyric Ross
Natalie Washington
- Dominique Thorne is, as always, wonderful as Riri.
- The show has a terrifically nuanced way of tackling grief.
- The six-episode season makes it feel like the show is really rushing through the story.