Marvel's Ironheart Resurrects The Most Horrifying Feature Of 1990s Technology

This article contains spoilers for "Ironheart" season 1, episode 1 — "Take Me Home."

"Ironheart" closes the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 5, and arrives into a troubled Marvel TV landscape. This is a time of Kevin Feige admitting things went sideways after "Avengers: Endgame," and as such, not the ideal time for a new MCU series to drop. That's a shame, because Chinaka Hodge's Disney+ show is an absolute breath of fresh air that combines Marvel's high-octane sci-fi antics with a deep sense of community and humanity.   

"Ironheart" episode 1 ("Take Me Home") quickly establishes that the show is only a "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" spin-off in the sense that it features Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) and briefly references her "internship abroad." This is not a show full of vibranium and vast resources — on the contrary, the very first moments see Riri kicked out of MIT after the latest in a series of dangerous incidents her trial-and-failure methods have caused. Unperturbed, Riri attempts to leave with her power armor, which she views as her property despite its MIT labeling ... only to promptly crash and burn, forcing her to start her gadgeteer genius aspirations effectively from scratch. 

All of this is excellent material for a season that will bring Riri back to her roots and truly introduce her to the fans. For people who owned and/or operated a PC in the late 1990s, the exact way Riri ends up crashing her fancy MIT-stamped armor also features an extremely relatable Easter egg: The AI assistant of the Ironheart armor — an animated pencil called TRVOR (voiced by James J.A. Houle) — is clearly a thinly concealed riff on Clippy, the much-maligned Microsoft Office desktop assistant that debuted in 1996. 

Clippy — real name Clippit — was a shape-shifting paperclip that appeared in the role of a virtual Microsoft Office assistant in the office suite's '97 and 2003 incarnations. Its function was to help users with the various Office programs' array of functions, which was a noble idea on paper. The problem, as countless users soon discovered, was that Clippy's design was unnerving and it just wouldn't stop popping up to offer repetitive advice in overly familiar tones. The paperclip ended up going the way of the dodo, but it had ample time to etch itself in the minds of a generation of Office users. 

TRVOR's tenure isn't quite as long as Clippy's, as it only appears during Riri's flight from Cambridge, Massachussetts, to Chicago, Illinois. However, it more than manages to establish itself as a fitting expy to the hated Office virtual assistant — with splashes of modern speech recognition-based digital assistants and AI technology thrown in. Within seconds of appearing, TRVOR frustrates Riri by not recognizing her voice and demanding her student ID, failing to understand commands, and generally doing its cheery best to "helpfully" make Riri's user experience worse. When Riri's student access is revoked mid-flight, it bluntly shuts down the armor's systems, causing her to crash in a heavily populated area and risking casualties. 

Combine all of this with TRVOR's Clippy-style animations and constant presence in the corners of Riri's field of view, and it's very easy to see what a power armor operated by a modern iteration of the Microsoft virtual assistant would be. What's more, TRVOR is explicitly a MIT AI assistant, which implies that every single student has to endure its presence whenever they log on to the university's systems. 

TRVOR may be annoying, but the MIT AI assistant does actually serve an important purpose on "Ironheart". At the very end of "Take Me Home," Riri attempts to make a home-brewed AI interface for the armor she's rebuilding by scanning her own brain waves. As a result of this method, the AI manifests as Natalie (Lyric Ross), Riri's close friend — which, based on Riri's first reaction, is going to cause plenty of complications down the line.

The fact that we've already seen TRVOR manifest as a visual entity helps "Ironheart" to easily establish the idea that, unlike Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr.) or Peter Parker's (Tom Holland) disembodied voice assistants, Riri's armor AI comes with a distinct visual component. While this might seem jarring to the MCU fans, it's perfectly in line with the source material. In the comics, Riri's first such AI assistant was created by and resembles none other than Tony, and she later upgrades to the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. assistant the show seems to focus on.  

Episodes 1-3 of "Ironheart" are available on Disney+, with three more episodes set for release on Tuesday, July 1.