Meet Riri Williams. She’s a teenage tech genius who can build Iron Man-style armored suits in her dorm room. She’s also arrogant, makes dumb decisions, and willingly partners with a gang of thieves. The new Marvel series Ironheart introduces a hero who is far from perfect, raising the question: Is she one of the most flawed characters in the MCU?
💰 A Questionable Path
After being introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, we find Riri back at MIT, but not for long. She gets expelled after running a cash-for-plagiarism service and causing a few lab explosions. Back home in Chicago, she’s recruited by a crew of thieves led by the superpowered Parker Robbins, aka The Hood. Riri agrees to be their tech expert, justifying it as a way to fund her life-saving work, but she soon discovers her new boss is far more dangerous than she realized.
🤖 Haunted by the Past
The series packs a lot of backstory into its six episodes. We learn that Riri lost her best friend Natalie in a drive-by shooting. This trauma leads her to accidentally create NATALIE, an AI interface that looks and acts exactly like her dead best friend, serving as her constant companion and conscience. This emotional core adds weight to her journey, but the show struggles to balance its many subplots.
😈 A Deal with the Devil?
While The Hood is the initial villain, he’s a bit dreary and never feels like a major threat. Things get much more interesting with the arrival of the villain-behind-the-villain: the manipulative and brilliantly unnerving Mephisto, played by Sacha Baron Cohen. The show’s final moments suggest that even after all her trials, Riri is still making very bad choices, setting her up for a complicated and morally ambiguous future in the MCU.
Bibliography:
Norton, Jonathan. “Ironheart.” SFX, issue 394, Future plc, August 2025, p. 76.
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