How Ironheart's Riri Williams is doing Tony Stark proud

"Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave... with a box of scraps!"

Obadiah Stane's comments in Iron Man reflect just how uniquely talented Tony Stark was. And that's something that Marvel Television's new Disney Plus series Ironheart also deals with, as its titular character looks to carry on that legacy.

And she's not Tony Stark. But she is Riri Williams.

Ironheart has premiered on Disney Plus after a lengthy wait, and I am happy to report that the show absolutely rules. It's bringing all the high-tech heroism into a new, more street-level sphere. Iron Man has always handled these international political threats; it's really cool to see what Ironheart's mini-mech can do in a heist situation. And I love a heist.

More than the structure of the show, what really shines through as a high point in the program is the spirit of the engineer. In Iron Man 3, Tony Stark called himself a mechanic, and he spent each of his three solo films demonstrating his ability to build and create and put in the elbow grease to fix his own hardware. Tony Stark is a grease monkey at heart, and Riri Williams carries that through.

Riri says in the opening monologue of the show that Tony Stark wouldn't be Tony Stark without his billions of dollars, and she's right. Yes, Tony built the Iron Suit Mark 1 in a cave with a box of scraps, but there's a reason that suit fell apart. There's a reason that as soon as Tony had access to his equipment and materials and previously established AI, things got a lot better a lot faster.

But Riri Williams doesn't have those resources. She had to make her finished suit from a shop of scraps.

The scene in the show's first episode in which Riri is hammering metal plates in her apartment made me so happy. She's shaping metal. She's in the guts of the machine. She's innovating and building history in a humble background, just like Tony Stark.

She made her own AI by codifying her brain. That's crazy! And that's exactly what Tony Stark would do!

And the best part is that all of this? That's where the comparison to Tony Stark ends. Riri embodies the spirit of Tony without being an exact double of him; without telling his exact story or even filling Tony's exact role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She's confronting her own problems and forging her own path (forge. Iron pun).

The show was review-bombed before it even premiered because it dared to feature a black, female protagonist, so ignore those so-called "reviews". It's the real reviews that actually matters, the response from the fans who have highlighted how Ironheart is a true gem in the Multiverse Saga and perhaps even one of Marvel's best TV shows. Go forth and watch the show and appreciate what we've been given. And do it with Robert Downey Jr's blessing. We all know he's Ironheart's number one fan.

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