REVIEW: Ironheart – Season 1, Episode 1, “Take Me Home”

Television Reviews

After months – years, if you didn’t forget it existed before the first trailer – of dread, Ironheart has finally premiered on Disney+. The miniseries (because Marvel isn’t even pretending they’re going to greenlight more of this) will air three of its six episodes tonight and three next Tuesday, shuffling off as quickly as possible, which is a blessing and a curse; while it’ll be nice to be done with Ironheart within two weeks, it’s a lot of reviewing for those of us who write about these shows. If I sound hostile, it’s because the first episode of Ironheart, “Take Me Home,” is like a checklist of all the things everyone assumed this show would be; it has an obnoxious lead character who’s artificially propped up by the supporting cast, poor storytelling, zero excitement, and plenty of denigrating Tony Stark while pretending they aren’t.

Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) gets kicked out of the Stark Fellowship at MIT and returns to Chicago, where she reconnects with her all-but-forgotten family and plans the next step of her journey to build a better Iron Man suit than Tony Stark ever did. Opportunity strikes when a gang of thieves led by a (supposed to be) mysterious figure called the Hood (Anthony Ramos) asks her to join them as their new tech expert.

Let’s get the usual legacy character nonsense out of the way first; within the first five minutes of “Take Me Home,” Riri Williams denigrates Tony Stark twice, first by saying she’s going to be bigger than him, Hank Pym, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates “combined,” then by brushing off his achievements because he’s a billionaire. (“No shade!” Yeah, right.) She also talks about building a better Iron Man suit than Stark did with better AI. There’s even a scene where some crazy street preacher type is ranting about something worse than Thanos coming, and when he says, “Tony’s not going to save us this time,” Riri’s helmet falls at his feet, just in case we didn’t get it. What’s amusing is that Ironheart tries to cover for this attitude by having Riri throw in the odd line about continuing Stark’s work with her own and saying that she “won’t roast Tony Stark” when someone else suggests she’s better than he was. It’s a schizophrenic attitude to the idea of legacy heroes, and I suspect it’s the result of those reshoots, which probably shoved in some dialogue to deny that Marvel is doing what we all knew they would do because they’ve done it everywhere else since Endgame. It puts a sour taste in your mouth right off the bat, as it always does, and it’s baffling that Marvel hasn’t figured out that people don’t like it when you tear down their favorite characters to puff up their replacements.

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Also putting a bad taste in your mouth is Riri Williams herself, who is as annoying, arrogant, selfish, entitled, and dismissive of everyone around her as you probably expected her to be. After an opening scene (the sound mixing and editing of which is so bad that I had to turn the subtitles on to understand what the characters were saying) that’s a flashback to a moment with her deceased best friend, Riri delivers some narration to appraise us of her situation as “Take Me Home” begins. She’s part of the Stark Fellowship at MIT, the one introduced in Captain America: Civil War, and instead of celebrating the opportunity she’s been given, she complains about how it’s not enough, that she doesn’t have the billions of dollars she needs to fund her research like Tony Stark did (I’m sure if he were alive, he’d tell her she’s welcome for the free college and stuff), and she has to do things like sell access to her inventions for more funding. Imagine being able to make money from something you enjoy doing as you attend one of the country’s most prestigious (and expensive) universities for free and then bitching about how unfair that is. However, Riri did something else to make money, too: she sold essays, classwork, and test answers to students from other schools, and MIT found out about it, so she’s out on her ass. The scene where she’s kicked out is hilarious, as there’s a diverse woman telling her what she did was wrong in a reasonable manner while a nerdy white guy is telling her she’s a bad “steward of Tony Stark’s legacy;” I wonder who he’s supposed to represent. And what is Riri’s response to being kicked out of MIT? She steals as much of their equipment as she can before jetting off in her Iron Man suit, a smug smile on her face the whole time, like she’s better than the people she defrauded and is currently robbing. Does Marvel try to make each of its new protagonists more unlikable than the last one?

It doesn’t get any better from there, mostly because not much happens in “Take Me Home.” This episode is all setup, with the usual slow-as-a-snail pacing Marvel puts into its shows early on. Riri is back home, she resents her mother for not keeping her dead stepfather’s garage going (how her mother would be financially capable of doing this appears not to be a concern of Riri’s), and she complains about not having enough money for Iron Man suits, not having the resources of the college she got herself expelled from, and being stuck somewhere “small.” Riri uses the word “small” twice in “Take Me Home,” once in reference to Chicago and once when she accuses the MIT faculty of trying to make her feel small. What a horrible person she is; she appreciates nothing, she demands more of people who’ve given her everything, and she thinks she’s better than everyone and everything around her, including her home town. Usually, when the opening of a story is slow, it’s because they’re trying to get the audience to like the main character, but Marvel is doing the exact opposite, like they’re gloating about having you trapped in front of their show with no escape. (My prediction is that they’ll find out very quickly that no one feels trapped by them anymore.) Meanwhile, a gang of thieves executes a heist at a mansion, but the guy who’s supposed to deactivate the burglar alarm (Eric André; I don’t imagine I have to tell you he’s completely wasted) screws up, so the thieves inside the mansion have to kung fu fight with a couple of security guards. Somehow, they pull off the heist; I say “somehow” because the show just cuts to them handing the money they stole to the Hood without explaining how they accomplished anything. But Eric André almost blew the job, so they need to replace him, and they decide they need Riri Williams because if she can build Iron Man suits, she can totally hack an alarm system.

After this, it’s the stuff you saw in that first trailer. Riri goes to interview for a job with the Hood, gets trapped in an elevator, and instead of demonstrating her scientific know-how – you know, the reason the Hood wants to recruit her – she breaks her way out of the elevator like a super soldier. This scene is unintentionally hilarious in how obviously phony it is and what it’s trying and failing to do. As Riri is trying to pass the Hood’s test, his henchmen are watching her through a security camera in the elevator. Every time she does anything – literally anything – they all say things like, “Whoa, wow, she’s amazing, look at that, she’s incredible!” (The first time this happens is when she breaks the glass around the list of safety protocols, as if it’s some kind of genius move to smash a glass case.) And I get it; they’re trying to make Riri look super awesome by having other characters comment on how super awesome she is because that’s how Marvel tells stories and builds characters now. The problem is that Riri isn’t doing anything particularly smart or impressive; she’s just breaking things, pulling other things, and shoving doors open. She isn’t demonstrating any of her character-specific skills, which, again, are why these people want her on their team. The scene is shallow in every possible way, up to and including the Hood being impressed by Riri. But he offers her a lot of money in exchange for helping them pull three jobs, and she pretends not to be interested before accepting despite knowing they want her to steal and extort others. And in the episode’s final moments, Riri invents a new AI for her Iron Man suit (the previous one having been deactivated by MIT because… she stole it from them), and it’s her deceased best friend. How she did this is unclear, and how she didn’t realize she was doing it is even less clear, but it allows her friend to call her “bish,” which I guess is supposed to be funny.

So, that’s our introduction to Ironheart. Riri Williams is another annoying new hero taking up the mantle of someone she seems to resent (until she randomly doesn’t for five seconds), her supporting cast is full of nothing characters whose names you won’t remember and who exist solely to talk about how great she is, and the villain has no screen presence and feels like a background character from a Power Rangers episode. “Take Me Home” has not given me high hopes for the rest of this series.

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