You ever hear a line in a movie that just completely sums up a certain type of person for you forever? One such line for me belongs to Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran, the psychic chef who responds to young Danny Torrance’s psychic distress call in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. In need of an excuse to get back to the hotel, Hallorann leaves out the whole “ghosts have possessed an abusive alcoholic who’s now trying to kill his wife and child while they’re all driven insane” bit. Instead, he simply says that the Torrances turned out to be “completely unreliable assholes.” In Jack Torrance’s case, that’s the understatement of the winter.
After this episode of Ironheart (“Bad Magic”), I think it’s fair to ask: Is that what Riri Williams is? In the space of about fifty minutes of TV time, she alienates her partner, her boss, her gang, her mother, her love interest, her digital best friend, and her superhero suit. This leaves her with…well, there’s no one even left in the cast, is there?
The thing is, everyone’s got a good reason for wanting Riri out of their lives. (Some more permanently than others. I’m not excusing that!) Take Joe McGillicuddy, aka Zeke Stane. Riri managed to do exactly what his entire life depended on her not doing, and left behind evidence implicating him in the disastrous raid on the HEIRLUM facility. Joe is arrested and imprisoned, his secret identity is exposed, and worst of all he’s held up as a disgrace to the legacy of his sainted father Obadiah, whom only Zeke knows was a supervillain. That’s rough.
The Hood, meanwhile, learned of Riri’s betrayal last week, thanks to the dark forces fueling his eponymous garment. He plays nice for a while — not particularly well, he’s actually creepy as shit, but he tries — but by the end of the episode he tells the whole crew that Riri killed their beloved friend Cousin John. Their next mission, therefore, will be a hit on Riri. And their secret weapon will be none other than Zeke Stane, whose bionic implants make him ripe for a supervillainous upgrade after the Hood breaks him out of jail.
Things don’t go much better for Riri on the other side of the law. Looking for any information she can get on the obviously magical nature of the Hood’s shroud, Riri acts like she’s suddenly interested in her mother Ronnie’s patchouli-scented mysticism. Ronnie takes the kid to her even more hippy-dippy friend, candy store owner Madeline Stanton (Cree Summer, who’s been acing these kinds of roles since she played Freddie on A Different World). Naturally, this isn’t exactly what Riri had hoped for.
Fortunately, both Maddie and her daughter, a bespectacled teenager named Heather (Tanya Christiansen), are honest-to-gods sorcerers, and after whisking the Williamses to a parallel dimension for research, they declare the Hood’s hood officially very bad shit. Unfortunately, nothing Riri and N.A.T.A.L.I.E. can come up with using Zeke’s still-hidden silo full of tech can even make a dent in the sample they have.
I’ll raise a practical question at this point: Why don’t they just use the laser cutter that proved able to sever the sample from the rest of the cape in the first place to burn the thing? Unfortunately I don’t have an advanced AI to consult on that one. (The episode also includes painfully blatant expository lines like “I need to understand his powers so I can fight back when he inevitably comes for me.” Yes, we gathered that! We’re bright people!) At any rate, Riri’s failure really rattles her…unless the real problem is that the snippet of the Hood’s hood has begun negatively influencing her mind, the way it works on Parker himself.
But the meeting with the mages has unintended fallout. Ronnie is understandably pissed that Riri risked sneaking an evil artifact into her friend’s place of business without even warning her own mother about it first. If her late husband Gary had still been alive, a heartbroken Ronnie says, Riri wouldn’t have hesitated to come to him.
Later, N.A.T.A.L.I.E. takes it upon herself to pilot the suit, wrap her brother Xavier in it, and fly him to meet a spiraling Riri. But when “she” — Xavier insists on “it” — reveals herself to him in all her holographic glory, Xavier is horrified and disgusted. “You had no right to use Natalie as one of your little tech toys,” he tells Riri, echoing countless writers and artists whose life’s work has been stolen by big tech to fuel their ChatGPT and OpenAI plagiarism machines.
“Look at her!” Riri retorts. “She is alive! Sort of!” I’m not sure if we’re supposed to agree with her or not, which remains a big problem with Ironheart: this weird no-man’s-land it exists in where we normally feel sympathetic for sci-fi AI/robots/androids/etc, but can’t escape the term’s meaning in the real world. But Xavier demands that Riri delete N.A.T.A.L.I.E. When it seems as if she just might do it, the furious AI hijacks the suit and flies off, leaving Riri on her own just as Parker’s crew juices up Zeke to prepare for her assassination.
It’s bad timing, but it’s also necessary for this character. Thanks to an almost unnecessarily heartfelt performance by Alden Ehrenreich during their jailhouse meeting, Zeke’s assessment rings loudly as we watch the rest of the episode play out: “You’re just a selfish kid who can’t take any responsibility for herself. You lie, you cheat, you manipulate, you’ll do anything you can to save yourself, even if that means hurting other people in the process.”
This is unfair, in that it completely erases any kind of context or consideration of motive. But if you were in Zeke’s place — or Parker’s, or the crew’s, or Ronnie’s, or Xavier’s, or N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s — would you be inclined to be charitable to her? She’s not a bad person, but in much the same way that she scavenged and scrounged for parts to rebuild her armor, Riri essentially took the people around her and assembled them into a second suit, using them to achieve her own ends. Parker’s not the only person with a superhuman garment that’s draining their humanity, then — but Riri’s the one with a fighting chance of getting hers back.
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.