Ironheart Episodes 4 - 6:

[selenak]

I mean, yes, it's for natural sciences and the like, but surely... Anyway, given that the only comicverse appearance of Marvel's Mephisto I had read was him being used by Joe Quesada to retcon Peter and MJ's marriage out of existence in Brand New Day, I had been less than impressed and wasn't keen on him showing up in the MCU. However, after they namedropped him in Agatha All Along, it was just a matter of time, and early on in this show, Riri was carefully positioned in front of a poster for a production of Gounod's Faust. This said, they had me with the Dommamu red herring, so the entity behind Parker's cloak being not Strange's old foe but Mephisto was a bit of a surprise nonetheless. And Sacha Baron Cohen had a great time as the Prince of Darkness in the finale, plus it was a neat twist to let him show up here rather than in the magic themed Marvel shows like Agatha or WandaVision or in the Strange movies, if there will be any others.

Until the finale, Riri had the usual if well executed heroic learning arc when her bad decisions caught up with her in the second half of the season: her leaving the biomesh from "Joe" at the crime scene outed him as Ezekiel Stane and landed him (temporarily) in prison, wrecking his cover existence for good, the death of John meant Parker now wanted to see her dead as well and so did his crew (btw, I was iimpressed that Riri at no point blamed AI!Natalie for it but took full responsibility both when talking to her AI and to other people later), her attempts to protect her mother and Xavier without telling them why only served to alienate them, and then we got the breakdown and finally the opening up to a loved one (in this case, her mother) with the truth followed by her friends old and new assembling to help her create a new suit and go on the offensive against Parker.(Who in parallel and contrast lost his crew when Riri checked up on Riri's pointing out Parker had Rampage killed. I approve of everyone calling it quits then; intelligent villain minionis are all too rare, and it reminds me of how I liked a similar scene in Iron Man 3 when the minions, not being suicidal, called it quits at a similarpoint.) We also got a demonstration of Riri's talent at improvising and inventiveness in the earlier scene where she had to fight Parker's crew without her suits and just by instrumentalizing what she found in a kitchen . Again, this was all well done but also the predictable pattern, with the most unusual (and very sympathetic) thing being that while Zeke was understandably pissed off at Riri, he did NOT suddenly change personality and went full time supervillain but pointedly did not kill her when he could have and covered for her with Parker later, and conversely, Riri later immediately figured out that a) Parker had him under physical control and b) how to disable it, told him of her intention and followed through. Zeke's final line after Riri asked whether they were friends again, that he had unresolved anger issues and lethal superweapon ware in his body now and had no idea where this would go for him, was another refreshingly realistic summation (for now) - not reconciliation but no muwahahha supervillain stuff, either.

(In fact, Zeke Stane ends this particular season with less a body count and criminal record than Riri.)

....but the true curveball, of course, was the ending and Riri instead of rejecting accepting Mephisto's offer to bring back Natalie. (With Mephisto in true devil fashion already doing a twist - Riri was expecting Natalie the AI, and btw, the fact she made a deal with the devil to bring back an A.I. no one but her and the audience who had seen them bond cared about was oddly poignant despite the insanity-, but got Natalie her stepsister.) I'm still not sure how to feel about that. Given that Riri just via Parker had gotten a graphic illustration of what deals with Mephisto did to a person, and that seemingly her entire learning arc until then had been about not running away anymore from her grief and issues but dealing with them. Otoh, it certainly was a jump out of predictablility and meant we have idea what to expect of her next appearancei n the MCU (if she has one), and the thing with grief and messy emotion in general is that you don't just learn once how to deal and then thereafter have no problem anymore but have to work at it again and again.

Anyway, I liked this season/miniseries, though I will say beings with that kind of power level like Mephisto work best in short appearances like this one where they're fun and don't outstay their welcome, and not as a main antagonist with lengthy screentime.

ETA: Also: Ringo would never!

Comments

[landofnowhere]

I'm going to ignore the actual content of your entry and literally answer the question in your cut tag :-) As I understand it, MIT requires that its students take humanities classes, to a greater extent than other STEM-oriented schools in the US, but they have a wide menu of possible classes to take. So while I'm sure that they do in fact have multiple classes that teach both Marlowe and Goethe, or the Faust legend more generally, I wouldn't expect a random MIT student to know much about Faust beyond cultural osmosis. (The odds are somewhat better for students at other elite US colleges, but not that much better; actually I think the version of the Faust story I'd most likely expect people to know is The Master and Margarita, but that's skewed by knowing a bunch of native Russian speakers.)

[reverancepavane]

This is true, although the technical arts such as photography and film-maling tend to be preferred. It depend how late you arrive to which HASS classes you manage to get into. There are also specialist classes dealing with history of science and interaction of science with society which are quite popular. And literature is generally limited to more mainstream topics like American Literature and Shakespeare.

Although your typical STEM student is generally more widely read in the humanities than the reverse.

[I was amused once when a lecturer friend wanted to borrow some of my library for the new course on Power Love and Evil he was going to teach because previous conversations had led him to believe I had the books he needed.]

[lokifan]

actually I think the version of the Faust story I'd most likely expect people to know is The Master and Margarita, but that's skewed by knowing a bunch of native Russian speakers.)


Dunno if this is being English but I'd never heard of The Master and Margarita until my late 20s, whereas Faust is a reference I grew up with. Didn't read Goethe for school or anything but I'd think he & Marlowe have more cultural osmosis?

[landofnowhere]

I imagine that some of this is a US/UK difference! Though to be clear, people do generally understand the phrase "Faustian bargain", but I suspect a lot of educated people in the US don't actually know any details of the Faust story other than "he was a dude from a book who sold his soul to the devil", or maybe a few mord details, but the "deal with the devil" trope is more commonly associated with more modern takes. (When Drew Gilpin Faust was named president of Harvard, there were a lot of jokes about her name, but no specific literary references I remember, because those weren't common knowledge.) Marlowe is mainly taught in classes that specialize in English literature (I read him in a class that focused on Shakespeare and contemporaries), and Goethe is barely read outside of courses that focus on the Great Books.

On the other hand I read The Master and Margarita for the first time when I was 17 on the recommendation of a friend, and then again for a class in college on 20th century Russian culture. And while most people I know haven't read it, pretty much everyone I know who is fluent in Russian has, and it feels like much more of a book that people tell their friends to read than the other versions, because people read them in school.

(Oh, also some people know Faust from Pratchett's Eric, but that's very minor Pratchett, and he's less popular in the US than in the UK.)

[lokifan]

Yeah, it makes sense - Marlowe's probably more commonly known here, if generally via his connection to Shakespeare.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I suspect a lot of educated people in the US don't actually know any details of the Faust story other than "he was a dude from a book who sold his soul to the devil"

*raises hand*

Also, I've never heard of this The Master and Margarita until now!

Marlowe is a name I know, mostly by connection with Shakespeare, but none of his works.

[selenak]

*raises hand*

That's because Goethe's version wasn't written yet in Fritz' lifetime. (Though Lessing did sketch out his own idea for a Faust play in one of his essays; he never wrote it.) I mean, I can't imagine Fritz reading it even if it had been published already, but if for some reason he was present when young Goethe read his fragments to Duchess Anna Amalia and his bff her son Carl August, I think the total lack of the three unities would have appalled him, while he would have grudgingly admitted Mephisto is one of the wittiest characters ever to grace the stage and would have appreciated the anti clerical sallies.

[cahn]

Heh, as you (landofnowhere) know, I'm not MIT, but as someone who also went to an elite US college with a menu of possible classes that were not survey courses -- I will say that although I read Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in college (or maybe slightly after), it was completely independent of my actual college classes. I'd taken Brit Lit in high school and while we didn't read Marlowe, he got namechecked, and I'd come across references here and there (especially of Mephistopheles), and I think Pamela Dean's Tam Lin probably played a role here too in making me curious about Marlowe. The book I have also has Duchess of Malfi, which as you (selenak) know, I have also read -- though that is probably in some part due to Agatha Christie, who used the "Mine eyes dazzle" line in one of her books, and got me curious...

I feel Goethe is much less of a cultural reference in the US (I knew the name but, as selenak knows, I'd never read Goethe before she pointed me towards him), although with one thing and another (well, like, Schubert and Gounoud, for two) I think his version of Faust is probably the primary osmosed one that I had in my head, even before reading him. But I also did take a Brit Lit course and didn't take a Western-civ-lit or world lit class ever, so I may also just not have the right base experiences to have come across Goethe in a class.

Huh, I know a couple of (non-native) Russian speakers from college, but I never talked to them about The Master and Margarita, which I have not read (but which I have intended to read for a while now because it's apparently structurally relevant to a fanfic that I read and enjoyed maybe ten? years ago, which was the first I had heard of it).

[selenak]

Well, as a German, I associate anything Faustian with Goethe, first and foremost. (It's everywhere. Including in school, of course. But I did see Faust I on stage twice before we read it in school.) I didn't even know the Marlowe play existed until the last two years of school (because I did a Leistungskurs in English), wereas I did know about Thomas Mann's novel "Doktor Faustus" (still haven't read it, though). I did not hear about "The Master and Margarita" until I was well into my 20s and alas have not read it yet, either.

[landofnowhere]

I forget if I've told you that I signed up for a class on Shakespearean Genres because I looked at the reading list and it had Shakespeare and Marlowe and The Revenger's Tragedy, and I'd just read Tam Lin, so, while it is technically true that I read Marlowe because it was assigned for class, this sort of misses the context :-) (To a large extent I picked my humanities classes based on which reading lists looked fun, including picking the class that assigned The Master and Margarita.)

I suspect there's a generational-ish thing, where between increased immigration from the former Soviet Union and fewer US high schools teaching Russian, my classmates who knew Russian were more likely to be native speakers than yours. But also as noted this is probably specific to my social groups and not as true overall in the US (and OFC people think of Master and Margarita as being many other things in addition to a Faust retelling).

[cahn]

Ha, that's fantastic! Pamela Dean sure is responsible for a lot :)

(I must admit I picked a lot of my cores, including my Shakespeare Lit&Arts A Core, partially based on whether friends were taking the class too (although not wholly; I would have enjoyed the Shakespeare class regardless of whether my college best friend had also taken it). And I didn't take any English/literature classes outside of the Core (in large part because of parental pressure), which I regret now -- I think I would have really enjoyed taking more of them. The one non-core non-stem class I did stand up to my parents to take was the year-long freshman music theory class, which was phenomenal and still ranks as my absolute favorite college class.)

[selenak]

I don't expect Goethe dominance outside of Germany (it is inevitable inside, and in France I guess Gounoud's opera means the association is there as well), but "The Master and Margarita" as a dominant version surprises me; I still haven't read it, alas, though I keep meaning to, I swear.

[lightofdaye]

I was with it until the end but revealing she took the offer... sigh. Yes, less expected but I don't like the deal with the devil as a plot point but mostly, I feel like nearly none of the Marvel miniseries have sequels or direct follow ups. (I'm not sure this is literally true if I sit down and count but it feels that way.) It seems unlike we're getting a S2 Ironheart to actually follow up on this and without that follow up... it's very unsatisfying.

(You're not the only person I've seen come to the conclusion, but I think Natalie's her best friend not stepsister. She and Xavier have the surname Washington. Gary, Ronnie and Riri are all Williamses.)

[selenak]

Follow ups of a Marvel series: well, Ms Marvel had The Marvels, which yes, has Carol as the primary lead, but draws a lot of the show, and for that matter its adult version of Monica Rambeau got first introduced in WandaVision; WandaVision had Agatha All Along (and will have VisionQuest); Hawkeye had Echo (Maya's whole deal in that show depends on having seen her appearance in Hawkeye, I'd say.

I stand corrected on the best friend/ step sister business.

[lightofdaye]

I wrote them all down after posting that and realised that most of them have follow ups in some form. Though, Ms Marvel and Hawkeye could have down with legit second seasons as well as spin-offs. I'd somehow forgotten Echo was a Hawkeye follow up. even though Hawkeye-Echo-Born Again is a nice through line for Kingpin if nothing else.

The big two with nothing that I recall are She-Hulk and Moon Knight and those were the ones standing out to me. Especially since the later had the hook of the Jake alter as Moon knight. I hope Ironheart gets to follow up on Riri and Rir's deal with Mephisto specifically because I'm really unhappy with that ending as The End, so to speak.

(There's apparently rumours of Young Avengers/Champions thing with the young heroes and you'd think Riri would be a shoe-in for at least a cameo in Rhodey's Armour War film but they wouldn't necessarily follow up on the deal even if they had Riri)

[kore]

I was very unspoiled for once and so was VERY surprised when Meohisto did finally show up in the MCU, and also disappointed. I feel Dominique Thorne and Riri deserved better.

[lareinenoire]

Funny story, I *did* teach literature at MIT, and I read both Goethe and Marlowe as an undergraduate in a completely different US university. I was already interested in Marlowe because of the film Shakespeare in Love, which had come out a year or two earlier, so when I stumbled on a course in the German department titled 'The Faust Theme in Literature' when registering for my very first term at university, I immediately signed up. Fortunately for me it was a lower-level class and therefore taught in English. We read a few early chapbooks, Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann. That was the class that introduced me to the existence of The Master and Margarita, which I own but rather shamefully must admit I have not read in full yet (I keep starting it and getting distracted by life). Sadly I didn't get the chance to teach Marlowe at MIT, but I had at least two or three colleagues who did, and I'm sure someone at least attempted to teach Goethe because those are the sorts of people who work in that department. (They were lovely, incidentally; I am bitter about losing that job because of the circumstances, not the people.)

[landofnowhere]

Lol, OK, ignore my blathering, this is the definitive answer!

Adding you since you seem cool and I am always here for Shakespeare nerdery :-D (These days pretty much everything I post is unlocked.)

[lareinenoire]

Aww, thank you! I've added you back since pretty much all my posts are locked these days.