Main cast: Dominique Thorne (Riri Williams/Ironheart), Lyric Ross (NATALIE), Manny Montana (John King), Matthew Elam (Xavier Washington), Anji White (Ronnie Williams), Eric André (Rampage), Sonia Denis (Clown), Shea Couleé (Slug), Zoe Terakes (Jeri Blood), Shakira Barrera (Roz Blood), Anthony Ramos (Parker Robbins), and Alden Ehrenreich (Joe McGillicuddy)
Director: Sam Bailey
Oh, Marvel. Sweetie. Who hurt you? Somewhere between Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and this glittery, half-baked mess, someone in a Disney boardroom must have solemnly declared, “Let’s make a show about a teenage genius who turns to organized crime to fund her superhero hobby! The kids will love it!”
The second episode of Ironheart, hilariously titled Will the Real Natalie Please Stand Up?, continues Riri Williams’ descent into moral and narrative absurdity.
Riri Williams, the new face of Marvel’s future, is a prodigy who got into MIT early because she’s smarter than all of us combined. She then got kicked out but instead of, I don’t know, patenting her cutting-edge inventions, selling them to Stark Industries, or even shilling them on Shark Tank, she decides the best career move is partnering with criminals. Because naturally, when you need startup capital, your first call is to a crime boss nicknamed the Hood.
The show tries very hard to make this sound okay by giving the criminals a sob story about a highway project threatening their neighborhood. Yes, murder, racketeering, and probably a little light arms trafficking are apparently fine as long as you’re fighting urban development.
And then there’s Natalie. Oh Natalie. Riri’s AI-in-progress — who, in a plot twist worthy of a 2006 SyFy Channel original movie — starts to remember being human. Yes, because if there’s one thing we know about AI in 2025, it’s that they frequently stop being code and start emoting like a CW heroine with daddy issues. The episode asks you to accept this with a straight face, like it’s 2015 and nobody owns a smartphone smart enough to tell them this is utter nonsense.
Adding to the hilarity is Alden Ehrenreich, clearly working off his Disney debt after Solo: A Star Wars Story vaporized his leading man prospects. Here, he pops up as a shady arms dealer because of course our teenage heroine needs heavier weapons, and of course she can’t just buy them off the dark web like any other person.
The acting? Look, they try. God bless them. But even Meryl Streep couldn’t salvage a script where the main character witnesses a man get shot in cold blood and then gets back to tinkering with a rocket launcher like it’s a Shop Class 101 project. There’s no world in which this plot makes sense within the MCU, a franchise built on the idea that heroes are supposed to, you know, have a moral compass.
This kind of crime-laden, morally grey antihero story might work in a gritty HBO crime drama. Here? It’s like watching a birthday party clown perform King Lear. Sure, it’s interesting in a car crash sort of way, but mostly you’re just horrified and wondering how much worse it’s going to get.
