Review: Ironheart, “Take Me Home” | Season 1, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of Ironheart, which debuted tonight on Disney+. This review covers the first part of the three-episode premiere. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews—which will follow daily this week, then return on a daily basis for the last three episodes next week—will only be available to paid subscribers. Yearly subscriptions are 10% through 7/1.

When Marvel first launched its grand interconnected universe experiment, it started with a simple idea. You’d meet heroes in their own solo properties and then watch them come together in big crossover events like The Avengers. Somewhere along the way, though, Marvel changed its calculus. It decided it would be better to meet future heroes in a pre-existing property and then launch their full story elsewhere. And while that gamble paid off sometimes (Black Panther and Spider-Man’s debuts in Captain America: Civil War are awfully fun), there’s a pretty big drawback to that approach too.

Take Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams—a character who was introduced three years ago in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Because we’ve already met Riri, her new solo series has to jump into her story midstream, with an opening monologue that references her “internship abroad.” But because this is the first episode of a six-episode series (three episodes drop today, but I’ll be reviewing them one at a time), we also need all the introductory worldbuilding you’d get in a traditional pilot too. In some ways it’s a problem spinoff TV shows have always dealt with. And in other ways, it feels like a conundrum unique to the MCU.

To its credit, I think this episode does a pretty decent job juggling those two conflicting demands. It’s definitely a little clunky to meet Riri in her iron-suit-wearing, MIT student status quo from Wakanda Forever only to immediately expel her, strip her of her suit, and ship her off to Chicago for a fresh start. But you can mostly wrap your head around everything in the course of this 41-minute episode. While you probably wouldn’t introduce Riri this way if the character were brand new to the MCU, the cheat just about works.

Instead, the biggest potential issue with the series revolves around Tony Stark, and I mean that in a couple of different ways. For one thing, because Riri was introduced in Wakanda Forever, it’s a little weird to now re-anchor her story around an Avenger who was only tangentially referenced in that movie as opposed to the Wakandans we saw her with. For another, Tony has been gone from the MCU since 2019’s Endgame, so suddenly returning to questions about his legacy feels a bit random now that we’ve had two whole multiverse sagas in between.

That’s probably because this series was announced in 2020 and filmed in the summer/fall of 2022, back when Tony Stark’s death felt a little more present in the MCU. The show has sat on a shelf as Marvel has rethought its TV strategy, however. And after a few months of additional photography in 2024, it’s now emerging in a less Tony-centric MCU moment. (Although maybe Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom casting makes this all relevant again, who knows.)

It doesn’t help that the MCU has already (annoyingly, in my opinion) positioned Tom Holland’s Peter Parker as Tony’s legacy protégé—right down to the Iron Man-ified Spidey suit he wore for his trio of films. True, Riri is being set up in a different way here. Though she’s inspired by Tony from afar, she has no personal connection to him or access to his resources. And she’s got a genius-level inventor’s intellect well beyond Peter’s more everyday smarts. But in a cinematic universe where so many characters already have a little Iron Man in their DNA (and their supersuits), do we need another Iron Man legacy character in the mix? Even if she did hold that mantle in the comics first?

I’m just not entirely sold on Riri’s Tony Stark fandom the way I was for Kamala Khan and Captain Marvel. It feels lacking in specificity other than her general love of inventing stuff—although we do get a scene that suggests she might just be using the world’s Iron Man obsession to get people to pay attention to her work in a way they wouldn’t without an Avengers connection. Still, it’s at least nice to see a superhero who actually struggles with money for once, since the MCU didn’t take that route with Peter Parker. (“Do you think Tony Stark would be Tony Stark if he wasn’t a billionaire?”) And the idea that Riri wants to design a suit that would shorten the response time of first responders and firefighters at least feels rooted in the specific trauma of her past

Indeed, it’s the stuff centered around Riri herself that works best for me here. That includes the fact that she’s the first MCU character from Chicago, which is a real thrill for me as Episodic Medium’s resident Windy City representative! Riri was whisked away to MIT when she was just 15 years old with a seemingly bright future ahead of her. But after four somewhat aimless years, she’s kicked out for selling completed projects to other students and returns home a much less confident 19-year-old. Thankfully, she at least has a warm South Side community to welcome her back, including her supportive mom Ronnie (Anji White), a cute boy next door named Xavier (Matthew Elam), and fun side characters like elementary school hustler Landon (Harper Anthony) and her mom’s hippie friend Madeline (Abbott Elementary’s Cree Summer).

Though Ironheart lands on a tone that’s a bit more serious that Ms. Marvel, it shares some of that show’s coming-of-age lightheartedness too. (The crash-and-burn title card felt like it would fit right into that series.) In fact, there’s more comedy here than I was expecting, and not just because Jim Rash is on hand as somehow not the Dean of MIT. Riri quickly gets connected with a misfit crew of criminals that includes comedian Eric André, Drag Race star Shea Couleé, the ever-charming Manny Montana, and some other eclectic young robbers.

So far, they’re working better for me than Anthony Ramos’ mysterious ringleader Parker Robbins a.k.a. “The Hood,” who looks like he accidentally wandered away from the LARPers on Hawkeye. It’s a fine performance, but a goofy as hell costume. While the scene where Riri has to hack a death-trap elevator as an entrance test is fun (there’s big Ocean’s Eleven vibes to the ongoing group commentary), I’m a little worried about whatever is fueling Hood’s weird tattoo procedure and mysterious locked cloak room.

Thankfully, the series has more on its plate than just high-tech hooded crime. After teasing out flashbacks to Riri’s beloved stepdad Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins) and best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross), who were killed in a drive-by shooting, “Take Me Home” ends with a real shocker of a twist. Riri’s attempts to create her own proprietary AI technology for her suit leads her to accidentally recreate a holographic version of her dead best friend—which is, like 10 percent cool and 90 percent absolutely horrifying.

As the world’s biggest Lyric Ross fan (her work on This Is Us was truly tremendous), I’m excited that means she’ll be integrated into the show in a major way. But it’s also a really wild swing that brings Ironheart closer to WandaVision territory than Ms. Marvel. That could wind up being a good thing, if the show can stick the landing. But it’s definitely the riskiest move of a premiere that otherwise plays it pretty safe.

Indeed, given this charming but kind of basic intro to the world of Ironheart, I get why Disney wanted to do a multi-episode drop to give viewers a chance to get hooked. We get a fun call back to the first Iron Man movie as Riri adds some “contingencies” to her suit-making process (his were fire extinguishers, hers are pillows and smelling salts). But when it comes to Riri charting her own path, this is (hopefully) just the beginning.

Stray observations

• Welcome to Ironheart coverage! My reviews of the next two episodes will drop daily through Thursday. Then we’ll do it all again next week, when Disney drops the final three episodes of the season in one go.

• I rewatched Wakanda Forever ahead of this series, and while it doesn’t seem like it’ll be hugely relevant plotwise, I found it much more cohesive on a second viewing so it might be worth revisiting just for that. I’d forgotten how much Thorne is actually in the movie.

• I’d also forgotten that Jim Rash previously popped up in the MCU as an MIT faculty member in Civil War. (Back when the Russo brothers were trying to get all their old Community buds into the MCU.) It’s in the scene just after Tony showily launches a new grant to fund all student projects, which is the “fellowship” that Jim the junkyard owner references.

• Not to be rude, but I’m kind of shocked Anthony Ramos is famous enough to score a “with” credit here.1

• I like when Riri delivers what could earnestly be played as an empowering line (“You want me to be small, but I refuse”) only for Dean Choi to call her out for bullshitting.

• But, like, couldn’t Riri just get a job at Stark Industries? According to Wakanda Forever, she’s the first person on Earth to invent a vibranium-detecting machine. I feel like Pepper Potts would take notice of her résumé!