‘Ironheart’ Episode 5 Recap: “Karma’s A Glitch”

In the sport of kings known as professional wrestling, there’s a concept called “selling.” Pro wrestling’s combat is staged and its moves are designed to eliminate injury and minimize pain as best as possible, and the wrestling audience knows it, but they’re buying their tickets in order to pretend like they don’t. It’s the wrestlers’ jobs to sell those tickets by selling the impact and power of their opponent’s moves. No one’s gonna care that you got dumped off a 15-foot ladder through a table covered with thumbtacks if you just get right back up again, even though you’re a trained professional who can totally do so if you want. You’ve got to act like you’re in pain and peril. You’ve got to sell. 

Is Ironheart doing a proper job of selling Riri Williams’s danger? With only one episode remaining in its short six-episode season, I’m leaning towards no.

This episode’s plot is straightforward. Riri meets up once again with Zelma, the teenage sorceress with the Buddy Holly glasses. She tells Riri that the entity behind Parker Robbins’s cloak is the dread Dormammu, an extradimensional demon god who’s likely using the Hood — both the garment and the person — as a gateway to our world. 

Before she deals with any of that, though, Riri has more pressing problems: After Slug captures Riri’s errant, N.A.T.A.L.I.E.-piloted suit, the other members of the team show up to kill her. Through a combination of luck, cunning, scientific know-how, and her surprisingly strong hand-to-hand combat skills, Riri reunites with her suit and defeats all comers.

All, that is, except Ezekiel Stane. The newly minted cyborg completely wrecks Riri’s shit, sparing her life — he’s mad at her, he’s not suddenly a psychopath — but destroying her armor. He tells her to get out of town before the Hood finds out he let her go. 

Explosives expert Clown sees Riri running away from the encounter but covers for Zeke with Parker, since she now suspects he was involved in their old tech expert Rampage’s death. When she confronts Parker with her findings, he fires her, attacking Slug in a rage and firing everyone when they try to physically intervene. All the while, his evil cloak’s influence keeps radiating outward across his skin and face.

So Parker does his final big job all by himself — almost. Even though Zeke quits the gang before everyone else gets fired, the Hood pulls him back in, revealing that he’s programmed all of Zeke’s implants so that he can pilot the poor guy like a puppet. Together, they break into that mansion we saw during Parker’s flashback to his early days with Cousin John. Turns out it’s owned by none other than his own father, Arthur (Paul Calderón), a rich asshole who ditched Parker as a kid after his mother’s death. The Hood does his usual Luca Brasi routine and forces his old man to sign over his fortune and his house.

But Riri’s keeping busy all this time too. Even though she alienated everyone in her life in the previous episode, they all come running back to help her in her time of trial: her mom, N.A.T.A.L.I.E., Xavier, Zelma, and an entrepreneurial little kid named Landon (Harper Anthony) who’s been helping her out by lending her the use of his wagon all season long. Together they build Riri a new suit out of a classic car refurbished by her and her late stepfather Gary. Even he gets in on the act in a sense, as N.A.T.A.L.I.E. projects some of Riri’s cherished childhood memories as a hologram for Riri and Ronnie to observe. 

When the time comes to fire up the new black-and-red suit — which is a huge upgrade, aesthetically — the team use Zelma’s magic to power it using that snippet of the Hood’s cape. But magic and science mix like oil and water, and the extradimensional power warps the suit’s circuits, deleting the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. AI before Riri has a chance to download it to her laptop.

Okay, so admittedly, losing your digital clone of your best friend is a significant setback. But it’s just about the only one Riri faces in this episode in any real way. All of her real friends and family forgive her. Zeke roughs up her suit but allows her to escape. Clown betrays the Hood rather than leak the secret that Riri’s still alive. The rest of the gang quits rather than keep working with Parker. The suit gets rebuilt in a couple days using car parts.

It leaves open the question of what Ironheart is about. Family, friends, blah blah, yes, every Marvel thing is about that in some way. But does Riri really need to learn that her self-obsessive genius is harmful to the people around her, or is a brief scare enough before we’re all supposed to go “Awwww, c’mere ya crazy kid, we can’t stay mad at you!” 

I get that this is a Marvel Cinematic Universe production, and the only thing more certain than the fact that the story will continue is that it’ll have a happy ending along the way. That’s baked into the superhero genre, in many ways, and I’m not complaining. I just need Ironheart to convince me there are stakes, the way Daredevil: Born Again and Andor did, despite everything I knew about Daredevil and Star Wars. I need it to sell.

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.