“Based on the Marvel Comics” the standard line slapped on Marvel Cinematic Universe shows, but it’s nonsense. Let’s get that out of the way right up top. “Marvel Comics” isn’t a writer or an artist, “Marvel Comics” is a branch of the Walt Disney Company, and companies don’t create shit — the people who work for them do. In the case of Ironheart, writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mike Deodato Jr. deserve their flowers, as do Brian K. Vaughan, Kyle Hotz, and Eric Powell, the creators of the mystery man who’s soon to become the main character’s archenemy. It’s their work that Ironheart is based on, and since the show is about a visionary whose greatest desire is to be recognized, that’s worth pointing out.

Reprising her role from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Dominique Thorne stars as Riri Williams, a brilliant young scientist and inventor from Chicago whom, I take it, got mixed up with Black Panther some years before. Her special circumstances — she built an Iron Man–inspired flying suit of armor and fought bad guys with it — led her to being admitted to MIT at the age of 15, to the delight of her friends and family back home.

But that was four years ago, and she’s no longer the charming childhood prodigy. After leaving her professor’s arm in a sling following a lab accident, she’s confronted by the university’s dean, who tells Riri that between disciplinary issues, the expensive damages done to the facility, and her overall lack of progress towards graduation, she’s being expelled. 

Upset but largely undaunted, Riri takes her ball and goes home, i.e. she repossesses her suit of armor and flies it back to Chicago, where she crashlands into her own logo. Man, if I had a nickel!

In classic first-episode fashion, we get rapid-fire introductions and nutshell summaries of the cast of characters she’ll be dealing with in Chicago. Her mom, Ronnie (Anji White), loves and admires her daughter but is understandably not crazy either about her expulsion or her attitude. She has a friend and potential romantic interest named Xavier (Matthew Elam), a handsome musician who gives her a mixtape, and I mean the old-school kind, on a cassette, complete with a Walkman to play it on. (Very smooth.)

But her family circle is incomplete. A flashback reveals that she lost her beloved stepfather Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins) and best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross) when they were killed by stray bullets during a completely unrelated shooting down the street from Gary’s auto repair shop. Riri lashes out at her mother for failing to keep the shop in good shape, but she’s mostly mad at herself for her self-perceived failure to live up to her late loved ones’ expectations for her big bright future.

The way Riri sees it, the thing keeping her from reaching the heights (no pun intended) of her antecedent, Tony Stark/Iron Man, is her lack of his monetary resources. Grant money — this was filmed before Donald Trump and Elon Musk deliberately and illegally began destroying the concept of grants — was a big reason why was sticking around at MIT, and now that’s completely cut off as well.

This is where a mystery man named John (Manny Montana) steps in. Approaching Riri at a pawn shop, he pitches her on coming to work for a guy who, unlike fancy schools and big corporations, has a true appreciation for genius.

He’s got a funny way of showing it. When Riri shows up to the empty pizzeria where her mysterious potential employer is based, she walks into a booby-trapped elevator that begins filling with poison gas. The job interview is simply getting out alive.

Riri passes, and meets Parker (Anthony Ramos), the handsome and smooth-talking ringleader of a very cosmopolitan gang of thieves. Familiar faces include Drag Race alum Shea Couleé as Slug, who goes on heists with elaborately manicured fingernails, and Eric André as a hacker nerd who calls himself Rampage, much to the derision of his colleagues. 

Though she’s understandably outraged by the elevator gimmick, she’s intrigued by Parker’s promise that their jobs are strictly nonviolent — and won over by the big box of cash he pulls out to show her he’s talking real money here. Parker needs her for three jobs, which should give her all the funds she needs to get her ideas back off the ground. (Again, no pun intended.) 

The only catch is she’ll have to repair her suit, like, overnight, but characters like Riri are nothing if not resourceful. She rebuilds a cybernetic suit of armor so that it can withstand the pressures of flight and creates a new AI system for it during one all-nighter, which makes staying up to watch and review Daredevil: Born Again live every Tuesday night because Disney has a very goofy screener access policy feel a lot less impressive in retrospect.

But Riri gets more than she bargained for when she finishes mapping her brain patterns into the suit’s computer to create a new operating system. Somehow, even without putting the armor on, she can see a digital ghost of her murdered best friend, who’s now known as N.A.T.A.L.I.E. “Who else would I be, bish?” the AI asks its inventor, who promptly passes out.

Strange things are afoot all over Chicago that night, however, Back in his lair, a reluctant John continues working on an elaborate and painful tattoo that covers Parker’s back in a web of venous ink. It seems to have something to do with the strange red cape and hood the guy wears. Since he’s got a pretty stylistically adventurous crew, it doesn’t stand out as weird as it ought to at first, but I’m pretty sure you can hear it growling when he hangs it up for the night, and I can’t imagine that’s a good sign.

But there are some good signs for Ironheart in this premiere. Chicago native Sam Bailey’s brisk, energetic direction is apparent from the start — seriously, “fast rhythm” is a note I wrote in the episode’s first three minutes — and that’s a huge advantage if, like me, you tend to feel that Marvel stuff is tonally staid. Bailey and cinematographer Ante Cheng’s photography of the city, particularly at twilight and at night, feels refreshingly real rather than digitally conjured. At times I took screenshots just to admire the lighting.

Writer-creator Chinaka Hodge and lead actor Dominique Thorne don’t quite surmount the standard “Here’s who I am and here’s who everyone is and here’s how I feel and here’s why I feel that way and here’s what I need” over-explanatory first-episode syndrome, but they do their level best. You can rarely judge a show by its pilot in that regard at any rate, since the structural requirements of a first episode are so much different even than the needs of a second. 

A bigger problem for the script is the sense that it’s out of step with the moment. Riri’s lionization of billionaires and, as they put it in Speed Racer, the unassailable might of money feels real real weird right now. So does the constant invocation of so-called AI as the wave of the future. I get that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, AI means “Paul Bettany” rather than “fascist technology developed by rich men who want to own slaves that steals from writers and artists in an attempt to eliminate freedom of expression and thought,” but at a certain point you have to adjust with the times.

None of this would be so bad if it weren’t for the two most recent Disney+ franchise dramas of note. The last MCU show, Daredevil: Born Again, was an anti-Trump allegory that was as subtle as a crushed skull. Andor, Ironheart’s immediate predecessor, is somehow one of the most politically radical things ever aired on American television, to the point where thousands of people from MSNBC resist libs to honest to god leftists (ask me how I know!) quoted from it unironically while protesting against Trump and his ICE gestapo on No Kings Day. Those are big shoes to fill.

Of course, you can simply sidestep the shoes entirely, and tell a kickass story about a woman of steel who battles a guy in an evil cape. I’d be 100% down with that! Certainly the fight choreography we see in this episode feels promising — it’s not the brutal bonecrunching of the Born Again and its Netflix antecedents, but it’s fluid and physical and fun. Which, when you think about it, is maybe exactly how a superhero story should be.

But Ironheart has something going for it that those other shows don’t: it’s…well, I was gonna say “unapologetically Black,” but it’s the kind of show that recognizes that being unapologetically anything only gets you so far. Every time Riri pipes up with some prepared speech about she’s a special young giant being made to feel small while rousing music swells on the soundrack, someone’s there to undercut the easy catharsis of speechification. I think there’s a very real possibility that by the end of this short six-episode season, Riri may feel very differently about the almighty dollar, too, especially if an obvious evildoer like Parker is speaking up on its behalf. We’ll just have to stay tuned for the next issue — I mean, the next episode — to find out.

In the meantime, though, just seeing Chicago photographed lovingly, while the most powerful man on the planet demonizes and attacks it…just hearing a guy say hello by saying “Hey, Black people,” which feels like a radical statement while books and people are being purged based on their race by the white supremacist government…just seeing Black characters who are straightforwardly portrayed as brilliant without a single concession made to segregationist anti-DEI scaremongering…This is a world people are actively trying to take away from us, even within our imaginations. These things are not nothing. In a way, these things are the only thing.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.