After five episodes of setup, trauma, and potential, Ironheart Episode 6 promised to bring it all together. Audiences wanted a hero moment, a twist, a payoff. Instead we got a deal with the devil, a disappearing crew, a wasted villain, and a finale so shallow that even Mephisto looked bored.
The finale erased everything that made the show worth watching in the first place. So obviously there’s going to be spoilers, and if you couldn’t tell, yes, I’m spoiling the entire thing, because I have to save you from this.
What’s up, my know-it-alls. This is the back half of Ironheart, and the front half, if you remember, I liked. I liked it a lot. And episodes four and five aren’t bad. They really aren’t. I kind of dug where they were going with it. I was able to keep up. There are some shortcomings here and there that I think are more bad writing in terms of how the characters are handled, but at the end of the day I didn’t have a major problem with a lot of that. It’s when you get to Episode 6 that the whole thing falls on its face. Horribly.
She Learns Nothing
The biggest issue I have in the whole thing is that she learns nothing.
What was it all for? Why did we do this? I would genuinely love to know from someone at Marvel what the intent was here. I’ve seen a lot of people online saying the ending is so brave, they took such a gamble on the ending. The ending was horrible. What are you talking about? You don’t have room to experiment anymore, MCU. You don’t. Give us a safe bet. Meaning she should have just had her hero arc.
Fans wanted a hero moment. You wanted some sort of redemption arc. You wanted character development that went somewhere. Instead they gave us the same empty, lifeless drivel, and at the end of the day none of it meant anything.
I find myself more and more asking what the future of the MCU looks like, because frankly, I just don’t care anymore. I know I’m a professional know-it-all, and apparently I’m also a shill, according to everybody in the comments, so thank every one of you. I’m a guy who has his own opinions. I’m staking my claim in the geekosphere, and the things that built this niche are drying up. We have things coming up that I hope are going to be exciting, and I’m down for them. But this show was bad. It was just bad.
The White Castle Fight
Things I thought were character arcs, things I thought were about character and responsibility, all of it runs into the encounter where the whole team comes after her at White Castle.
Start with the blatant product placement, also known as product integration if you’re in the industry. The difference is that integration works the thing into the story. Their battleground was White Castle.
Nerdrotic made a really interesting observation, that it fed into some of the worst stereotypes when it comes to women of color fighting in fast food places. And I’m like, yeah. Yeah, it did. It really, really did. It’s funny, because I kept trying to ask myself why I was, not uncomfortable, but sort of befuddled. What is this? What are we doing?
Then there’s who loses. The two strong girls we’ve watched beat up grown men and security officers get their clocks cleaned by a little girl as if it’s a Jurassic Park movie. She’s hitting them with cabinet doors and shoving food in their faces. It’s a very weird way to get around them. Clown, the one who throws the bombs, gets beat by her own type of stuff. Again, very strange. And Ezekiel Stane is the fastest turnaround I’ve ever seen in my life.
Credit Where Credit’s Due
I give credit where credit’s due. Things that are good, I’m going to say are good.
There’s a lot of folks who have a problem with the storytelling parts. That’s storytelling. Those are the parts of the story you need, because those are the parts that give you character development and make you care when things happen. So anybody complaining that we got a snoozefest of her and her mom working things out, bro, that’s literally how characters interact. That’s how characters grow and develop. That’s how we make it so that we care down the road.
The revelation that her mom’s sage-burning friend was actually someone who studied at Kamar-Taj? Great. Cool. Nice little tie into the MCU. No problem. I love it.
People also had issues with the contracts the Hood was having them sign, and my whole thing with the contracts was, it isn’t that bad. That’s the thing you’re getting hung up on in a superhero show? Not the flying girl in the suit, no, that’s fine, but the contracts? The complaint is that contracts signed under duress aren’t enforceable. If you’re running a criminal enterprise, or involved in stuff that could get you in trouble, yeah, they kind of are, because that’s sort of the point. They were being blackmailed over other underhanded things they were doing.
But I don’t even care to talk about those things. The things that worked, worked in the face of an ending that made me hate the entire series. I’m serious. I’m so disappointed at the lost opportunity, because they did everything else well, relatively speaking, except stick the landing, which is the thing you need to do. It just puttered out.
There are people who want to argue she’s a gender-bent, race-bent Tony Stark, and she’s not. She’s a mediocre character in the comics. She really is. The intention behind her was always great, but in the comics they flubbed it so badly that you just don’t care. I didn’t, anyway.
A Backstory Saved for the Last Episode
The very last episode starts with a flashback to the Hood’s family life and how he tried to steal from his father. It’s a weird, convoluted background story, and it’s incidental, because like everything else they do over at Disney Plus, it’s revealed at the end. So you get no hint of motivation anywhere else.
You find out his dad kicked him out for vapid, empty reasons we’re just supposed to take on. They tell us stuff and it’s just stupid. Apparently his dad kicked him out because he was a liability. Whatever. Kicked out. Gone. And all of this apparently amounts to him wanting the money for his family. I don’t know.
It’s such a weak show, and it had so much potential, and it just shat in such a big, bad way that I couldn’t get over how badly they did. The story goes nowhere. Ezekiel Stane becoming a cyborg? Yeah, that was cool. The subplot had villain potential. But it lands with zero emotional weight. None that mattered. So it was meh. Double meh.
The Mephisto Reveal
The Mephisto reveal was such trash, and I was looking forward to it.
They wasted Sacha Baron Cohen. I don’t care what your views or opinions are about the man personally, I thought he acted his butt off in that scene. But he’s doing his best with nothing, and that’s what you get. His reveal had zero tension. I think we all knew who he was. There was no real power to it, no real meaning.
I know the idea is to play it like he’s so powerful he doesn’t have to show off. That’s just foolishness. It felt like a checkbox item. See, we teased Mephisto, are you happy now? No. We’re not.
What Happened to the Crew?
No, seriously. The Hood fires his crew. You’d think that moment would have led to them turning to Riri, maybe forming some sort of last-minute alliance, bringing things full circle the way you do when you write something good.
Nope. They’re just dismissed. Forgotten. Cut from the script like they never mattered. And if they didn’t matter enough to do anything with, why do you want me to care about them?
Riri Ends Where She Started
To say they failed Riri’s story arc is an understatement. Riri ends the show exactly where she started. She doesn’t learn. She doesn’t evolve. She doesn’t reflect. She makes a deal with the literal devil with zero tension or conflict and walks away like she just bought a coffee.
There’s no hero moment. Everything everybody calls out about that is real. There’s no act of sacrifice, no moral turning point, no rejection of darkness. She embraces it. She doubles down. In a show meant to be her origin story, that’s unforgivable.
This suffers from the exact same mentality as The Acolyte, though not for the reasons everybody else hated The Acolyte. The narrative breakdown is threads that go nowhere. Dormammu’s cloak: cool idea, no follow through. Natalie, the AI: exhausting, emotionally flat. Mephisto: all setup and no consequences.
The MCU tie-ins are absent too. I’m not a huge fan of the idea of the Young Avengers or any of that nonsense, but you get no Kamala, no Kate, no Young Avengers recruiting, nothing. Things that were implied in other places, I would have expected to show up here.
And the resolution is oddly tone-deaf. The show wants to be serious. It wants to explore trauma, identity, and grief, and then it delivers an ending that actively ignores those themes. It’s like the writers gave up and defaulted to, we’ll just make the show edgy.
The finale actively undoes the goodwill built by the first half of the story. It tells us the character we’ve followed hasn’t really grown, the supporting cast doesn’t matter, and the world we were invited into has no larger purpose in the MCU whatsoever.
The Verdict
Ironheart lands at a 5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
And that’s being generous. It gets that score strictly on the backs of episodes four and five, which had really strong moments and solid structure, and which I thought were somewhat decent in terms of the storytelling that was happening. But Episode 6 drags the entire show down. Everything. A bad ending will always do that, and I just don’t understand what people are thinking when they do this.
Look, I gave the show a fair shot. I defended it. I believed in its potential. I’ve got a post-mortem coming very soon on phase four into phase five, what I liked, what I didn’t, what works and what doesn’t, because ultimately we’ve got to look forward to what’s coming. Fantastic Four is on the horizon, and I don’t know about you, but I ain’t got no confidence right now. The trailers look fine, frankly. I just don’t trust them right now.
When the house burns down in the final act, I’m not going to pretend it was a warm fireplace.
Let me know what you thought of the finale. Did it work for you, or are you like me, just wondering what could have been? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
