Let's review Ironheart Episode 01 - Take Me Home

“Determined to complete her newest armored suit, Riri Williams teams up with Parker Robbins.” Is how the episode is described. But let's take a look and see what Ironheart's first episode is all about.

Here there be spoilers:

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The episode starts off so rough. A series of rapid fire flashbacks between Riri and her friend Natalie. The scenes flash so wildly that it forced me to remember the haunting scenes in Stir of Echoes.

From there we get to know Riri and how she's a brilliant girl desperate to make money so she can afford to build things, which gets harder after she gets kicked out of MIT for causing sparks? It's a really weird scene because while Jim Rash is adorable playing his MIT Liason character from Captain America: Civil War, I'm kind of tired of Jim Rash playing the Dean from Community over and over. Dude's got acting chops, let him cook.

They also introduce us to The Hood and his villains which are some of the WORST translations of Marvel characters into the MCU. The Slug is skinny. The Clown goes from an all white mime to a pyrotechnic expert in all black. The Blood Brothers are sisters. Cancer is...a guy.

And The Hood himself is a massive dork. He's got this shoulder length eboy hair cut that, when he wears his trademark hood, makes him look like some sort of affordable porno vampire. I hate it.

Family Dollar Dracula lookin' ass...

Weirdly, the best translation job is Eric André's performance as Rampage which is mostly only accurate because both characters were massive dorks.

And while most villains are showcased doing something terrifying, they're showing teaming up and working together to botch a robbery and leave empty handed.

Long story short, Riri is found by The Hood when he realizes his team desperately needs a new tech person and gets her to work for him with the promise that they won't hurt anyone, which I'm 100% sure will never ever happen.

Along the way, Riri builds a new suit, The Hood is shown getting weird sigils tattoo'd on him, and the episode ends with Riri trying to design a new AI for her suit and falls asleep while wearing a brain metric scanner causing her to mold the AI after her dead friend.

Now, let's get into how this actually is.

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I need y'all to know that I went into this as an Ironheart fan. I love Riri Williams. But this portrayal is weird. She moves back home, her suit gets destroyed, her step dad and best friend gets killed, and at no point does her friend Shuri lend her a hand? Sure.

The acting is bizarre too. Like, a huge amount of people in The Hood's gang, for example, are mostly comedians, community theater actors, and a drag queen and they all have zero acting experience. When they're together they look like like extras until the moment you can tell the director tells them it's time to mean mug or pose.

And, like, The Hood is supposed to be charming, which is weird because he's an absolute trash pile in the comics, but like when Anthony Ramos is playing him he looks like he just woke up, acts like he just woke up, and sounds like he just woke up. This is the sleepiest villain I've ever seen.

It's just weird because everyone in this show feels like extras trying to out act each other. The best is Anji White, who plays Riri's mom and, sadly, she plays EVERY broke but dedicated mother character you've ever seen.

Acting aside, while I get that this is a first episode and we need to lay ground work, the way this show does it is fucking BANANAS. At no point do any of these characters act normal.

The mom finds out Riri's expelled because she, and I'm being serious, "paid off a janitor at MIT to keep an eye on her." That's fucking wild. Especially if they're broke. They never address that either and Riri is never like, "fucking weird, mom!"

Riri's stepdad and best friend died in the spray shots of a gang shooting in a way that makes these gangs the first people in Marvel to be worse shots than the mobsters who killed Punisher's wife and kids.

Riri flew around and crashed into the middle of the city causing massive damage and, never has an problems? She violated airspace laws, she flew around in a city crazy with SHIELD, and every fucking person in the neighborhood watched her fall from the sky. No cops. No SHIELD. Nothing.

The most visible plot armor ever.

There's a montage in which Riri is building her new suit and when trying to create the biometric scan of her brain for the new AI, it causes a power outage...which is fine because for some reason it doesn't effect the laptop and biometric scanning device that caused the power outage.

And when the episode ends, while the concept of dreaming about your dead friend and turning her into your new AI is cool, but wearing the outfit the girl died in? Weird man.

So, again, I know this is just the first episode but man I hope the second one picks up because for a show about a tech girl going up against a magic guy in the MCU this did not feel like ANY of that happened. And if it did, I missed it because whatever was happening with The Hood's tattoos were so fucking vague and never explained.

Compared to the MCU as a whole (which I think is the only fair thing to compare it too) I give it a 5 out of 10 just because the acting was so damn rough and the plot so rushed. But hopefully it clears up.