Mephisto Finally Arrives in Ironheart, but Riri Williams' Deal With the Devil May Never Be Resolved

Four and a half years after he was first theorised to debut during WandaVision, Mephisto finally entered the MCU at the end of Ironheart. The finale strongly implies that Riri Williams agreed to a deal with the devil. That leaves an obvious question about how she gets out of it, and whether Marvel will ever show us.

In this piece I break down the scene, the small nuances that point to her accepting his offer, what it suggests about an Ironheart season 2, and how it sets Mephisto up for the future of the MCU. I also have some qualms about how Marvel left all of this unresolved, which I will get to below.

Mephisto's Ironheart debut is the payoff of years of MCU dark magic lore

We only get to see Mephisto in human form, but Sacha Baron Cohen is such a great actor that he really does steal the show here. I love his take on how he is playing this character.

What I will say is that this is the culmination of years of established MCU canon. It starts in the original Doctor Strange, where the films explored the Dark Dimension, and where Baron Mordo's view is basically that the bill always comes due. You cannot access dark magic without paying a price. That idea was explored further toward the end of WandaVision, when the series dealt with the Darkhold and how it would ultimately affect the Scarlet Witch. It did in turn lead to her demise in a roundabout sort of way.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness took it further still, presenting several Doctor Strange variants who had caused their own end, or the end of countless lives, because of incursions. Dark magic will always come at a cost, and with this new canon at the back end of Ironheart, Mephisto is really the culmination of all of it.

The Dormammu callback shows how far above him Mephisto sits

That is why Ironheart included all of the Dormammu material. It is there to make you think back to Doctor Strange and the idea of the natural law, and the show even referenced Kaecilius and the scars he paid for using dark magic. It drew that exact connection on purpose.

Then it capped it all off by having Mephisto laugh when Riri Williams immediately assumes he is Dormammu, and tell her that Dormammu is way below him. That moment lets us know just how powerful Mephisto is in the whole hierarchy of evil.

I think Mephisto is meant to be the A tier villain for a major crossover further down the road, in what we had heard would be a huge supernatural setup in the next saga.

Riri Williams' final scene implies she shook Mephisto's hand

The scene itself shows us Mephisto's whole method. He is trying to work out what Riri wants most so he can get her to make an agreement with him. He reads her thoughts and sees that what she wants is the person she lost coming back from the dead. He then gives her visions of what that would be like, and extends his hand, trying to get her to shake it.

At the end of the episode, Riri's shoulder goes up and she extends her hand, but the show does not show her actually shaking his. Instead, it shows her interacting with and hugging the person she lost, as if to say that's what she truly wants and she is embracing it. The handshake is never shown, but it is meant to be implied. For me, those little nuances make you think she definitely agreed to a deal with the devil.

A Disney Plus cliffhanger is no guarantee of an Ironheart season 2

Here is my qualm. Being a Disney Plus show does not mean you are getting a second season, especially recently. In fact, it probably means you are not. Even shows we thought would get a second season have not been able to make it happen. Hawkeye, for example, reportedly had the script basically written and had extended offers to the villains, and still it has not gone ahead.

So even though the very obvious cliffhanger here implies we are getting a season 2 to find out whether Riri made a deal with the devil and where it goes, and the post credits scene seems to imply the same, "I don't think we can count on anything because we know better." We know what is going on behind the scenes. I think there is a better shot than not that we never get a season 2, and never get a resolution for what actually happened here.

Mephisto was being set up for the MCU's supernatural corner

You could also look at it as a silver lining, because this is not the end of Mephisto's story. Even though we did not get to see him in devil form, wielding his powers, and only saw this human take on the character, this is not the last time we will see Mephisto in the MCU.

As I said above, he is being set up for the supernatural corner of the MCU. That started with the dark magic material I have described, and presumably will also include Blade. We may even see him sooner rather than later, because at the time he had also been rumoured to be part of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which I would not rule out either. This is just the tip of the iceberg and just the beginning of Mephisto.

I fear Mephisto may return with no mention of Ironheart's ending

That is exactly why this bothers me. If there is never a resolution to this cliffhanger, and Ironheart season 2 is not greenlit to finish the story, the next time we see Mephisto might have nothing to do with it. We will be left wondering what happened with Ironheart, or he might simply show up with no mention of the show at all.

Riri's story might more likely than not end up getting resolved in Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, and I think there is a good chance we see her again there. But I do not think Marvel is going to make Mephisto part of that story, because there is too much to focus on with Doctor Doom.

Still, there is too much opportunity for Marvel to fall down here. This was actually a pretty good series that got exciting toward the end, and then it left us with a clear cliffhanger for what might be a major villain down the road. I think it would be a real mistake not to wrap it all up. At the time, I was waiting to see whether an Ironheart season 2 announcement was forthcoming. Maybe Marvel Studios had already greenlit it, which would explain why it was fine with the cliffhanger. Or maybe it was content to leave it unanswered, the way it has with several projects during the Multiverse Saga.

My honest take, though, is that we may see Mephisto in Midnight Suns and the MCU may never talk about the ending of this show again. It just feels like that might actually happen. For my part, I really enjoyed Ironheart. I saw every episode and loved it.

Did Mephisto's entrance feel anticlimactic to you, or was Sacha Baron Cohen's human form take on the devil the right way to introduce him?