Ironheart, Season 1, Episode 4: Bad Magic
We're starting off with the second half of Ironheart, and it's really a massive distraction. Let's start off with the titular 'bad magic'.
So around half of this episode is devoted to Riri finding out that her mom's friend's daughter Zelma Stanton is actually a Kamar-Taj school dropout, and we spend a chunk of the episode having Riri be a typical 'magic doesn't exist, what do you mean' science hero, before going through a lot of the motions of someone discovering magic for the first time. The problem is... it's not particularly exciting, and feels particularly disingenuous considering that Riri Williams lives in a post-Thanos world, where Doctor Strange and Thor are public heroes. Oh, and the fact that Riri already acknowledged that The Hood's somewhat unexplained by science... it would be something if a huge part of this series or Riri's personality is about her trying to figure out magic through science or something, but this isn't the first time where I brainstormed something far more interesting than what Ironheart is actually trying to tell.
Another problem, and I recognize that this has lesser budget (but really?) than a movie is that the magic that Zelma shows off essentially is just a simple set change, with a couple of magic circles here and there. The infodump is also painfully shoehorned into the show. Did Riri ever suspect that Zelma is a magician? Zelma most certainly wasn't a character that existed in the earlier episodes; and it would've been really something if she has been introduced to use earlier. Instead, Riri literally stumbles into her store and into the magical solution out of chance. A literal, horribly-written deus ex machina.
I rag about other recent Marvel shows for their bad editing and writing, like Echo and She-Hulk, but at least those have some kind of internal plot consistency, you know?
And for all of this terribly-shoehorned exposition that they thought we really needed to have, all it amounts to a vague shrug of 'oh, man, that shit's evil'. Which... yeah, no shit, show writers.
Again, it's really frustrating that just casually watching this show I could already brainstorm like several different ways where this could be done better. Have Zelma show up earlier. Have the magic user be one of the Hoodlums, maybe someone who sympathizes with Riri and actually make the Hoodlums actual characters instead of a casting checklist. Have the magic discovery be tied to the mystery around Natalie. Have Riri Williams, who is a super-genius in the Marvel superhero universe, figure it out herself.
The other chunk of the episode has Parker Robbins brood and have flashbacks about how close he is to John King and whatnot, but I don't know... as the audience, I kind of needed to maybe see a bit more of John to really care about him? It's a bit disingenuous to show the sob story flashback after John died like it, and without any really strong present-day scenes other than maybe one or two arguments with Parker in episode 3. The Hood himself just spends most of the episode brooding and scheming, not really saying or doing anything interesting...
...until he breaks Zeke Stane, probably one of the few genuinely interesting characters, out of jail. The Hood and Ezekiel Stane teaming up is cool in theory, I guess, if I wasn't rooting so much at least for Zeke. Who, by the way, did end up in jail because of Riri's colossal cock-up and Riri just leaves him there without so much of an apology. The Hood and Slug do some supervillain power-up procedures for Zeke to upgrade him, which I hope will lead to something interesting.
And honestly, at this point in time, I really do think that one of the biggest problem is Riri Williams as a protagonist. This is less of a rag on the actress Dominique Thorne, but more on the writers. I've spoken a bit in the previous couple of episode reviews about how unlikable and how messy the writing around Riri is, and how it fails to really give her an understandable motivation.
Not all heroes need to be perfect. No, far from it. Fallible protagonists are great. Fallible protagonists are better! Characters like Punisher, Daredevil, Deadpool, Batman, and the titular Iron Man that Ironheart's trying to be a legacy to... they're all flawed in different ways. But it's the fact that they kept being heroes in spite of their flaws, rising above them, is what makes them so beloved. These stories need to do a good balance of showing the cocky confidence and tempering them with either showing the characters' motivations, struggles, or achievements. I could go into more specific details, but that would belabour the point.
Riri... doesn't do any of these. And as the audience, when Mama Williams, Xavier and Zeke, in different parts of the episode, confront Riri and bring up how shit she acts towards people, I just nod by head rigorously in agreement. Riri has been shown to be impulsive and selfish without any of the contriteness or remorse that comes with making bad decisions. Again, it's okay for characters to make bad decisions! It's how these characters react to them that makes them likable or not.
Couple in to the fact that we don't really get a sense of why Riri does what she does, beyond a very vague 'oh no, my stepdad and best friend were killed in a garage' tragedy, really hurts her as a protagonist. You'd think the dead family/friend card is the easiest to morph into a motivation. Spider-Man, Batman, Punisher and many others play with that as an origin story, but as it is, Ironheart as a show removes much of the nuance of these kinds of more complex characters and just, as always, has her pinball around the show and not really do anything.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- Zelma Stanton is a supporting character in Doctor Strange comics who was helped by the doctor and later became his librarian. As far as I can find out, Zelma and Ironheart aren't associated in the comics.
- MCU!Zelma notes that she is associated with Doctor Strange and Kamar-Taj. Zelma's mother 'dropped out' of Kamar-Taj, which is just as well considering it became a war-zone in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness.
- In the episode, Zelma's lair has 'brain maggots'. The case that introduced the comics version of Zelma to Dr. Strange is connected to the Mind Maggots, which infested her.
- Riri lists Wakandan, Kree, Stark and Pym as four of the power source types she compared the Hood's energies to.
- Shuri and Riri's participation in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is brought up during the discussion of what Riri should do. (As an aside, I don't really buy that Shuri wouldn't at least investigate what's going on since she and Riri parted ways in a friendly manner, and the show doesn't make a good argument as to why the impulsive Riri or NATALIE doesn't actually try to contact Shuri).
- Zelma and her mom briefly brings up 'witchcraft' as a specific breed of magic, referencing all the witch-y magic associated with WandaVision and Agatha All Along.
No comments:
Post a Comment