Ironheart's First 3 Episodes Drop a Huge Hint Towards the Magical Character Everyone's Waiting to See in the MCU

With the first three episodes of Ironheart now available, fans are more certain than ever that Marvel will finally introduce a long-awaited character before the series is done.

After fan speculation that classic Marvel villain Mephisto might appear in previous magical MCU projects such as Wandavision and Agatha: All Along, his arrival in Ironheart now seems all but assured.

Ironheart's street-level villain The Hood, played by Hamilton's Anthony Ramos, is currently shown to be gathering supernatural powers from an unknown source, at the cost of his body slowly decaying. "It's the price I've got to pay for what he did to me," The Hood says at one point — which fans are taking as a clear nod to some kind of deal with the devil.

Making devilish deals is kind of Mephisto's thing, and if the show needed to spell it out even clearer, look no further than the scene towards the end of the show's second episode, where heroine Riri Williams stands in front of a wall covered in posters for Faust.

Faust, or Doctor Faustus, is a legendary German story of a man who makes a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for temporary pleasures, at the cost of ultimately becoming enslaved. The man interacts with the Devil via a character named Mephistopheles, or in some later adaptations, simply Mephisto.

As hints go, it's about as blatant as it gets — and it has not gone over the heads of MCU fans.

MEPHISTO is DEFINITELY being officially introduced to the MCU…. “Faust” is a German poem about a Doctor who makes a pact with the Devil