‘Ironheart’ Episode 2 Recap: Tunnel Vision

I’ve got the heist movie blue balls blues. The second episode of Ironheart sees young genius Riri Williams go on her first-ever criminal caper, using her flying iron suit to put a billionaire in her place. But if you were expecting a painstaking, pulse-pounding step-by-step journey through what amounts to a heist — a team uses its particular sets of skills to break into someplace highly secure and pull off a high-stakes, high-reward operation that leaves them much richer at the end — you’re gonna be disappointed. What we get instead is exciting enough, I guess: some tough guys beat up a bunch of jabroni security guards while Riri’s CGI suit flies through a Tron tunnel. But heists are so exciting to execute properly that anything less feels disappointing.

With Eric André’s tech expert Stuart out of the picture, Riri meets the rest of Parker’s team. Cousin John is the driver and knife expert who recruited Riri; Parker credits his cousin (seems safe to assume he doesn’t mean it literally) with saving him when he was younger. Slug is a glammed-up hacker from the lawless Marvel Universe nation of Madripoor, whom Parker helped scoop out of the country just ahead of gangsters after their head. Clown (Sonia Denis) is a pyrotechnician Parker and John connected with when she was in the process of torching her unfaithful boyfriend’s car, Waiting to Exhale–style. The Blood Siblings, Jeri (Zoe Terakes) and Roz (Shakira Barrera), are mixed martial artists banned from the sport for unnecessary brutality, drawn from the underground fighting circuit. 

Riri also learns the nature of the plan. Using their combined skills, Parker and his crew aim to shut down something called TNL. It’s an Elon Musk/Boring Company–esque boondoggle, in which a billionaire named Sheila Zarate (Zhaleh) is building subterranean sci-fi highways underneath the city — for the exclusive use of the wealthy, of course, and at the expense of poor neighborhoods. Robbins, who wears a hood if you’ll recall, winds up forcing Sheila to sign over partial ownership of her company, granting the team access to virtually unlimited funds. If it’s not justice per se, it’s better than nothing.

Of course, this means we’ve got yet another MCU project where the bad guys are rebels against an unjust system who are nevertheless Taking It Too Far, a villain archetype Disney enjoys more than alien warlords. When it comes to the unaccountably rich and powerful, the MCU loves telling you the cure is worse than the disease.

First, however, Riri needs to finish repairing her suit of armor. For this she turns to Joe McGillicuddy (Alden “Young Han Solo” Ehrenreich), a mild-mannered suburban collector of MCU-ish sci-fi weaponry and technology. “Mild-mannered” may be understating it: Like Jack Black playing a Rick Moranis character, we watch him get pushed around by a pretty neighbor with an incontinent dog, drop groceries, and proudly point out his missile silo’s LIVE LAUGH LOVE sign. But despite the culture clash — he assumes instantly that she’s “underprivileged youth,” she can’t understand why a white man would ever allow himself to be pushed around the way Joe does when he’s effectively been born in a suit of armor — the pair bond over their nerdishness and their mutual love of Alanis Morissette. 

Even though she repairs her superhero suit with Joe’s stuff, Riri nearly screws up the operation. Actually, scratch that: N.A.T.A.L.I.E., the sentient AI Riri accidentally created by mapping her own brainwaves, nearly screws up the operation. (It stands for “Neuro-Autonomous Technical Assistant and Laboratory Intelligence Entity,” but only as a bit.) Deeply uncomfortable with this strange simulation of her dead friend, Riri offloads her from the suit to a laptop and leaves for the mission. She doesn’t want N.A.T.A.L.I.E. to talk to anyone — not her mom, not her romantic interest Xavier (who takes her to a concert by Saba, a favorite son of Chicago).

But Riri doesn’t count on N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s resourcefulness. After first (re)introducing herself to Riri’s mom — who wants Riri to make a similar AI of her late husband Gary — N.A.T.A.L.I.E. then beams herself into the suit at exactly the wrong moment. The interruption causes Riri to careen of course, dropping a crucial piece of equipment she was holding. N.A.T.A.L.I.E. comes up with an alternative just in time to keep Riri from getting squashed like a bug by the TNL machinery.

But she glitches out completely after the mission, when a nervous security guard with a gun confronts her and Riri at street level. It’s a classic cop interaction, with the guy holding the gun making himself more and more scared and hysterical simply because the person he’s pointing his gun at isn’t instantly obeying his every command. But due to the nature of her death, guns are N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s kryptonite, or what the color yellow was to Green Lantern back in the old days: a killer weakness, a fatal flaw. Gosh, I wonder if this will come up again now that we know Parker Robbins’s weapon of choice is a gun.

And not just any gun, either. Unless I’m badly mistaken, Parker fires from a moving car at a long distance, and the bullet somehow curves in midair to graze Riri’s suit and hit the guard right in the shoulder, incapacitating him but not killing him. At a guess, I’m thinking this literal magic bullet is connected to Parker’s sinister hood, and to the painful supernatural skin condition that Cousin John’s tattoos are intended to conceal from prying eyes.

Ironheart is only six episodes long, and already it feels like it. There’s enough material in this episode for, conservatively, at least two episodes: the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. business (which also includes Riri’s mom plaintively asking if she can make an AI of her stepdad), the Joe McGillicuddy stuff, the meet-the-crew-stuff, and the TNL heist. Instead they’re all compressed into under 50 minutes, and the heist stuff is basically truncated to the Blood Siblings beating some people up and Riri yelling at a computer program while her suit bounces off tunnel walls. We get this whole elaborate explanation of what everyone does and how they’re gonna do it, and then, except for N.A.T.A.L.I.E. briefly screwing things up, it’s pretty much done. I was hoping for more.

The show’s portrayal of AI, meanwhile, strikes me as grossly irresponsible. Again, I get that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “AI” means J.A.R.V.I.S. and the Vision, not the thing Amazon has announced is going to help them fire people or the thing the Trump regime is using to decide which vitally important medical programs to shitcan. But that is what AI is in the real world. 

In the real world, AI is designed by rich people, on purpose, to make people stupider and poorer, the end, full stop. People who use it for other purposes boil their own brains, convincing themselves they’re talking to a new girlfriend or a dead relative when what they’re actually talking to is a magic 8-ball, a mechanical Turk, a fucking Clippy. (Ironheart riffed on this last bit in the first episode, when Riri’s suit used an AI that acted like a talking pencil.) You either reckon with that reality when you’re writing your show or you don’t. Personally, I can’t enjoy watching people talk to dead friends using this bullshit technology when I know people are doing this to themselves for real. AI is the Anti-Life Equation.

On the other hand, creating a superhero whose weakness is the sight of a gun feels like a proper reflection of the real world. Gun violence, a cause to which the ruling political party in America is dedicated like a worshipful acolyte, is frequently a foundational trauma for superheroes, from Bruce Wayne on down. Making it a continued, kryptonite-style chink in the armor (no pun intended) for Riri and N.A.T.A.L.I.E. feels like a natural evolution, and a thematically appropriate one given the historical focus on gun violence in Chicago in particular. I’ll take what I can get.

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.