Ironheart traded Wakanda for the streets of Chicago!

Riri Williams builds armour that would have impressed Tony Stark, then runs straight into something no suit she could design was ever built to handle.

What happens when a Marvel show stops pretending its hero can afford to be a hero? Ironheart spends six episodes on that question, and the answer pushes Riri Williams somewhere far darker than a standard suit-up story usually goes.

Chicago, not a lab, is the real setting here!

Riri gets thrown out of MIT and comes home to Chicago with a brilliant design and absolutely no money to build it. Dominique Thorne, returning to the role she introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, plays her as someone whose intelligence has never once been the thing standing in her way. Money is, and the show is refreshingly blunt about that. Enrolling at MIT at fifteen turns out to mean very little once the funding disappears.

That funding problem is what drags her into Parker Robbins' orbit. Anthony Ramos plays him as an easy, charming presence who runs a crew of thieves and offers Riri exactly the resources she needs, which is precisely why she should be worried. Manny Montana turns up as his intermediary John, and the crew around him includes a hacker and a demolitions specialist who feel less like supervillains than people who ran out of better options.

Lyric Ross plays Natalie, and that relationship carries the emotional weight of the whole season. Explaining why would ruin the show's best early turn, so I'll leave it there. It's the strand that separates Ironheart from the standard origin template, and the reason the middle episodes hit harder than the action does.

Did the technology-versus-magic idea actually work?

Ryan Coogler executive produced, with Chinaka Hodge from Snowpiercer creating the series, and their central move is to put Riri's engineering up against forces that don't obey engineering rules at all. Parker's hood isn't tech. Riri spends the season trying to reverse-engineer something that fundamentally refuses to be solved, and the frustration of that is more interesting than any of the fights around it. The series also had an unusually long wait before release, wrapping production in late 2022 and sitting on the shelf for roughly three years before Disney+ finally aired it.

The finale then goes further than most people expected, bringing Mephisto into live-action Marvel for the first time after years of fan speculation. Thorne has said she didn't know that was happening until filming.

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Rotten Tomatoes settled at 86% with critics and closer to 52% with audiences, one of the sharper splits in recent Marvel television. Critics largely responded to the performances and the Chicago setting; a chunk of the audience wanted a more conventional armoured-hero show and didn't get one. It did reach the top of the Disney+ charts in its first weeks, so plenty of people watched it regardless of what the scores suggest.

Queue up the first three episodes before deciding anything, since they arrived together at launch and were built to be watched that way. A month of the subscription runs to roughly what one delivered dinner costs, and if you're catching it from a region where it's awkward to find, a VPN sorts that out without drama.

What happens to Riri now?

Nothing has been announced. Dominique Thorne said flatly ahead of the premiere that she hadn't heard any talk of a renewal, and Marvel has stayed quiet since. She has been more optimistic about Riri appearing in the upcoming Avengers films, which may well be where this story actually continues rather than in a second season of its own.

- The Ezekiel Stane thread is left entirely unresolved.

- Mephisto's deal with Riri is the biggest loose end in the current MCU.

- The show closed out Phase Five, which makes its silence since then odd.

If a young outsider colliding with something supernatural is the appeal, Wednesday runs a similar current through very different territory. https://en.altertv.site has the breakdown of which service holds what, if you're deciding where your money goes this month.

The suit sequences are fine, and the Chicago photography is better than fine. What stayed with me is a genius who keeps being told that being brilliant should be enough, and slowly working out that it isn't.