Ironheart, Season 1, Episode 5: Karma's A Glitch
I'll take what I can get. This episode is probably one of the few all-right or good ones from this show; since it contains the 'grounding moment' I wanted from Riri and the Hood. It just comes a bit too late as it's the penultimate episode and we spend a huge chunk of it with action scenes.
The episode starts off with Riri talking to Zelma and kind of still showing her cynical attitude about all of the magic... which I thought was rather poor continuity considering the whole point of the previous episode was her panic attack as she realizes how over in her head she is. Zelma gives us the working theory that the Hood draws his powers from Dormammu of Doctor Strange fame, and just using Hood as a way to get summoned to Earth. (Oh, to have Dormammu back! To have a show where we have characters investigate Dormammu instead of this Riri nonsense).
Unfortunately, action scenes happen! The Hoodlums show up. By the way, without the Hood, who is the character with the biggest bone to pick with Riri. It's never explained.
The Hoodlums attack one by one, and it's... it's an all right action scene if you've got a CW superhero TV show budget. For the ginormous amounts of money that Marvel pours into these shows, though? It's a bit iffy. In one of the few genuinely 'oh, she's an inventor!' moment, Riri actually uses the forcefield bubble to trap the Twins, and then fights Clown unarmoured kinda similarly to Iron Man 3. And then she dons the Ironheart armour and flips off Slug who drives a truck to run her over. Slug then runs the fuck away and out of the show, which is a genuinely funny scene and probably the only actual chuckle I got from this show.
The last fighter to show up is Ezekiel Stane, upgraded with his biological implants that makes him a superhuman. It mostly translates to lightning blasts from his fingers and the ability to tank Riri's repulsor blasts. Zeke is here for... revenge for Riri causing him to get arrested and tossing him into prison? Sure. It's not explained super-clearly, but considering how bad the show has been with explaining characters' motivations, I'll take what I can get.
Zeke rips Riri's suit apart piece by piece, but mid-villain-rant Riri begs for mercy and Zeke has a change of heart. He's not evil like the Hoodlums, and just like Riri, he's just suckered in due to them finding him at a vulnerable state of mind. I like that! That's not a bad interaction! Executed rather poorly, sure, but it's something, at least.
Riri then spends the rest of the episode in a heart-to-heart with her mother and the rest of her allies. Mama Williams is genuinely likable, which really does help to sell this scene. Mama Williams demands that Riri talk to her, shuts her 'we gotta do this because I say so' attitude, and demands that she sit down and explain her motivations to her mother (and the audience, dangnabit). It's only at this point, at the penultimate stage of the show, that Riri breaks down that she really wants to just protect her family.
(The show doesn't do a good job showcasing this in the last four episodes, by the way -- you can make a character have a prickly relationship with their family members while still secretly wanting to protect them, but while the characters can hide it from each other the narrative needs to make it clear to the audience for this to matter.)
(Echo, as badly as I reviewed it, at least did a decent job at highlighting that part of the titular character)
NATALIE then plays some video of Riri's dead stepdad, giving a motivational message of how Riri's obsessed with the bad stuff that she forgets the good stuff. Which is fair enough, and in a better show that knows how to tie its themes together, this could've been tied to the AI-NATALIE plot that started off interesting but is now just boring.
And then we just have a huge, gigantic halt in pacing as all the other supporting characters (Zelma, Xavier, the random kid from the first episode) also show up and give their support to Riri Williams, which feels utterly unearned. Particularly Xavier, who fought with NATALIE and Riri over the AI thing and the resolution is a random letter he found? Huh?
While all of this is going on, we go back to the Hood's gang. Zeke is an idiot who can't lie (and it's not like he didn't have time to think up of a lie), and the Hood catches on to the fact that they failed in killing Riri Williams. No explanation is given to why Hood didn't join in the lynching. Clown and Slug kind of resolve the 'oh shit, Hood killed Rampage' plotline, and this leads to them and the Blood Twins walking out of the gang and the show.
If I cared more about them, I would've said more. But they've been such ciphers. I had to look up a cast list to remember their names. And the show is really inconsistent on wanting to portray them as hoodlums, or as somewhat-sympathetic, and we flip-flop so much that all I get out of them walking off is a shrug.
The Hood then hacks into Ezekiel Stane's systems, because of course he put in something to control Zeke. This interrupts some cringe comedy as Zeke harasses his neighbour, and Zeke gets trooped over like a puppet. The Hood and Zeke assault a mansion, which turns out, belongs to the Hood's dad. Oh no, the Hood has a rich, abusive, asshole father! The big revelation with absolutely no foreshadowing is that all the nice companies that the Hood (and our main heroine) has been assaulting are all subsidiaries that belonged to the Hood's father.
Parker's actor finally gets to act quite a bit here, which I am happy for... but again, just like Riri, this revelation comes way too little, too late in the show. Which just plain doesn't work at this point. It would be something, again, if we had some foreshadowing to Parker having some kind of depth to his character, but all we've seen from him is brooding, recruiting people, and speaking to demonic voices. So this whole scene, I'm afraid, really just falls flat -- which is a shame, because it's a pretty clear low-hanging fruit as far as supervillain motivations go.
Again, brainstorming for a show that they paid a lot of money to make... there could be something here about the Hood driving away a 'found family' just to gain revenge on a dying old man. We could've had Riri or maybe the Hoodlums discover that the Hood and John King lied to them about the 'evilness' of the rich people they targeted. We could've had actual foreshadowing in Parker's scenes with John about getting revenge for someone, instead of just repeating stuff about the black demon markings that the audience has already seen. But nope.
The rest of the episode has Riri build up a new red and black Ironheart suit, somewhat similar to the version we saw in Wakanda Forever. Except despite, again, Riri's bluster at the beginning of this show about how she's super-smart, she... doesn't have a good power source for it? Despite making an Ironheart armour work in Wakanda Forever? Despite being a super-genius? Zelma also very randomly, after insisting that magic is not to be abused, ends up going 'fuck it' and does a ritual to power it up. Also very randomly, turns out that the magic has a cost, and this cost is the NATALIE AI fading away screaming in fear and panic.
Which is actually quite well done, if the buildup wasn't so contrived. NATALIE is a bit of an annoying character, but seeing her essentially get killed through no fault of her own and be powerless to be saved; and with the discussion moments between Riri and other characters about whether the AI is sentient... there could be something bigger than this instead of shock value. But it is just that -- shock value.
That really is the crux of a lot of the problems of this show. There's no real connective tissue, there's a bunch of big moments without the buildup that it takes to reach there; which ironically is probably true for a lot of AI-written content. I'm really sitting here confused what I'm supposed to take away from this show, something that I didn't really get even out of the other terrible works from Marvel's media.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- Dormammu of Doctor Strange fame is brought up and discussed. In addition to being a nod to the character, the comics version of Hood does actually draw his power from Dormammu.
- Zelma also brings up the events of the Doctor Strange movie, specifically Kaecilius's part in it and his slow corruption via scars as he attempted to summon Dormammu into Earth. Dormammu's realm, the Dark Dimension, is also mentioned.
- Riri's stepdad's muscle car was prominently featured in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
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