Quick question: Is it bad to make deals with the Devil? It’s bad, right? Because I’ve been under the impression that that sort of thing is generally frowned upon. Is it enough to stop curious proto-humans, mad magicians, and a plurality of American voters? No. But you’d think it’d get through to Riri Williams, super-genius superhero, especially after she nearly gets killed by the last guy to strike such a bargain.
A flashback reveals how it all went down. Turns out the hood’s original owner was not Doctor Strange’s flame-headed nemesis Dormammu at all, but a different villain on the level of the Devil: Mephisto, the Marvel Universe’s stand-in for Satan. Played here by Sacha Baron Cohen, who flips back and forth between looking and sounding like a sleazy American record producer or a sexy British sophisticate, Mephisto cuts the traditional deal with Parker. In exchange for something so minor that Parker “won’t even miss it,” Mephisto will make him dirty rotten filthy stinking rich.
Well, we’ve seen how that goes. Parker winds up leaving his father’s palatial estate almost as soon as he takes it over, feeling more at home in his pizzeria lair. He drags his enslaved bionic weapon, Zeke Stane, along with him.
Naturally, Riri shows up, and a pair of fights ensue. In the first, an unwilling Zeke fights halfheartedly with Riri until she figures out that if she knees him in his un-bionic groin, it’ll cause a system overload that will enable her to override Parker’s programming.
In the second, Riri nearly gets her ass handed to her again. Having refreshed his bargain with Mephisto to gain even more power, the Hood tears into Riri’s armor like a werewolf. But he’s duped when she sets off an explosion and triggers a hologram that makes her look defenseless. She sneaks up on the distracted Hood and yanks off the infamous garment. Parker is left writing in pain, but alive — and well enough to seek out the help of Zelma Stanton in the episode’s post-credits stinger.
As for Riri, though? Here’s where I start to question her judgement. She hasn’t even left the building where she nearly got eaten by a demonically possessed guy in the evil red hood now in her possession when she decides to sit down and chat with the entity that gave it to him. Okay, granted, he doesn’t give her a ton of choice, since he can yank her out of her armor with a wave of his hand, but when has “it’s impossible” stopped Riri before?
First Mephisto appeals to Riri’s ego. Throughout the season, characters have talked about her selfishness and her inability to take responsibility, blaming her problems on others. Mephisto basically tells her she’s right, no one understands her, everyone wants her to stay small, she’s not yet the icon she deserves to be. It’s ChatGPT levels of telling her what she wants to hear.
But what really seals the deal, of course, is N.A.T.A.L.I.E.. Riri has now lost her friend twice: first as a human, then as a computerized simulation of her. It’s Natalie she wants more than anything in the world. A handshake later and the deal is done. Of course, this is Mephisto, so the results aren’t what Riri expects: Instead of getting N.A.T.A.L.I.E. the AI back, she gets Natalie the person, just as she was the day of her death, with no subsequent memories. Riri hugs her reborn friend, revealing the telltale signs of Mephisto infection crawling up her arm.
The big problem with all this is pretty much what you’d expect it to be: Riri has never seemed stupid enough to literally shake hands with the Devil. Nor has she ever deluded herself about what N.A.T.A.L.I.E. really is or was, not even when she came around to treating the simulation, if not like her old friend, then at least like a new one. It doesn’t hold water that she’d risk turning into a berserk demonically powered killing machine forced to do the business of an infernal devil-king in order to revive what amounts to a really good version of Siri. Smart people get scammed all the time, I get it. But to get scammed by the guy whose minion just tried to tear your face off with his claws? That’s not the Riri Williams I know.
It feels like another place where Ironheart’s short six-episode length can really be felt. With more time, maybe we could have gotten Riri to a place where her desperation to revive the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. AI felt raw and real. Maybe turning to the evil cosmic entity responsible for creating the supervillain who’d just tried to kill her would have felt like the desperate act of a heartbroken friend, instead of the impulsive decision of a genius hero who should know better.
The glass-half-full way of looking at it all, though, is that Ironheart is the story of a Marvel superhero permitted to be kind of a fuck-up. She starts the season by getting expelled from MIT after maiming a professor. She ends the season by selling her soul to the Lord of Lies. In between she joins a gang of bank robbers, leaves a defenseless man to die, jams up a friend with legal trouble so bad he becomes a supervillain to cope, and (admittedly this bit was an accident) creates the least ethical form of MCU AI since Ultron.
That’s all kind of interesting, right? As clumsy and rushed as it was to get there, the deal with Mephisto was necessary to undercut the sense that Riri had made everything right with everyone she could, done her good deed for the day, and could soar off into the sunset in her bitchin’ new suit. That would have erased all the work done in the paragraph above in creating a character whose intelligence and impulsivity are constantly either working in concert or at odds. Whether or not the ending works for you depends on whether or not you think her impulsivity is really capable of beating her intelligence that decisively.
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.