MAJOR SPOILERS for Ironheart, including the sixth and final episode, “The Past is the Past.”
Ironheart is here, and it’s a good series, despite what a certain chunk of the MCU fandom will tell you. In fact, I think it’s one of the best-written Marvel shows on Disney+.
The thing about Ironheart, though, is that it’s not a simple tale. It’s the story of a young, genius Black woman who doesn’t have the resources to immediately start her own company and make millions off her inventions. She also doesn’t want to go off and just work for some other tech billionaire in San Francisco or Seattle. Riri Williams wants to work and live in Chicago and invent on her own terms. But in order to do that, she has to pay a price.
Some MCU fans see Riri as a villain protagonist, like Walter White from Breaking Bad or Sweeney Todd from, well, Sweeney Todd. I don’t think that’s really fair. Why? Well, the narrative calls out Riri’s bad behavior, and she herself freaks out over the aftermath of some of her decisions. Villain protagonists like Walt and Sweeney Todd usually don’t feel bad about what they do, and they usually just amass power while getting away with it. Riri’s path isn’t quite so easy.
You see, Riri very much pays for the things that she does. For example, when Riri helps other students at MIT plagiarize their assignments, she gets expelled. When she joins The Hood’s gang of criminals, she calls the group’s previous techie, Stuart/Rampage, and finds out that the Hood and his buddy John killed him. When John tries to kill her after she snips off a piece of the Hood’s cloak, she locks him in a CO2-filled greenhouse and gets him killed. She’s very freaked out by this and this action is what ends up getting her kicked out of the Hood’s gang. When she shows her AI, N.A.T.A.L.I.E., to her friend Xavier (who is her dead BFF Natalie’s brother), he recoils in disgust at what she made.
I would like to point out that the last person in the MCU who made their own Iron Suit, Tony Stark, did many terrible things and very few fans were complaining that he was getting away with stuff. Why? Well, that’s mainly because when Tony Stark attacked and killed people with his Iron Man suit, he was mainly killing nameless Ten Rings terrorists in the desert or other villainous mooks. They weren’t really people in the way that John is a person. You’re upset and angry about what Riri did to John because heroes aren’t supposed to kill named characters unless they’re completely irredeemable villains. And Riri killed a character who was a mixed bag: John was a criminal, yes, but he was also a charming, effective leader who cared about his friend/cousin, Parker Robbins/The Hood. He’s the one that points out how strange it is that Parker revels in their criminal activities by listening to news coverage of them while doing shirtless yoga. It’s harder to write off a character’s death as just part of the plot when they have a name and a face and you like them just a bit.
But that’s part of this whole narrative: Riri makes bad decisions throughout the narrative because she’s a brilliant young person who’s still figuring life out. Ask any former gifted kid what it’s like to figure life out with a big, brilliant brain, and they’ll tell you it’s not easy. Heck, I’m a former bright kid (who didn’t end up in a gifted program due to Catholic schools not recognizing gifted children’s existence), and I understand why Riri screws up so much. Ironheart‘s narrative understands that being smart when you’re child in ways that impresses adults does not actually give you a roadmap for making good decisions in adult life. It also doesn’t resolve your trauma for you or automatically get you a high-paying job. Instead, you’re thrown out into the world with no directions on what to do next, and everyone just expects you to be smart and “do great things,” which can make it hard to ask for help when you need it.
The thing about Riri is that while she feels bad about the consequences of her terrible decisions (like John dying in the greenhouse or N.A.T.A.L.I.E. getting deleted as a price for Riri powering her new Iron Suit with magic from the Dark Dimension), but she doesn’t see how those consequences could come about before she does something. That’s how she ends up losing friends and alienating people (like Ezekiel Stane, who just didn’t want to be like his dad). She’s extremely flawed because she’s brilliant, but young and foolish.
And that’s how she end up sitting in a pizza place booth with Mephisto (Marvel’s version of Satan/Lucifer/Iblis/Mephistopheles/The Devil). Her bad decisions have put her in a place where she is emotionally desperate, particularly for friendship. She makes the deal with Mephisto because she thinks she needs Natalie’s/N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s friendship to make her whole. She doesn’t see that her mom, Xavier, an adorable witch named Zelma, and her oddly entrepreneurial little neighbor, Landon, are all there to support her. Riri could let go of Natalie, let her be a memory, and move on, but she won’t. Which is why she makes the deal to bring her AI, N.A.T.A.L.I.E., back, but instead gets the real Natalie back from the dead.
But I don’t think making a deal with the devil is the end of Riri’s story. And I don’t think she’s irredeemable, either. It feels like we’ve gotten half her story, the first half where she’s fallen down and made a ton of serious mistakes. I hope we get a second season where she picks herself up and starts to learn from those mistakes. I think she can do it. But first, she has to learn that her intentions don’t always equal good impacts on the world around her. After all, the path to Hell…well, it’s in this post’s title, folks.