Okay, so in anticipation of Infinity War, I’ve been re-watching the MCU movies that I have on DVD, including the first Avengers movie. As you may remember, when Thor shows up he ends up having a fight with Iron Man, and at one point he zaps IM with a lightning bolt, which has the effect of supercharging IM’s armor.
Now, wouldn’t you think that Tony, being a pretty bright guy, might take note of that and whenever his armor is getting low on power, or he needs some extra juice for a big repulsor blast and Thor’s around, just say, “Hey, Point Break? Gimmie a zap, would ya?” But it’s like he completely forgot about that. By the time Age of Ultron comes around, there’s no hint of that idea… PLUS, it got me thinking: if Ultron is building Iron Legionesque bodies to house his A.I., wouldn’t they also get supercharged if Thor hits them with lightning?
I’ll have to rewatch it to see if being low on power is a specific problem when they’re fighting Ultron and co., but there certainly was Iron Man trying to slow the descent of Sokovia by flying beneath it and trying to push upward, I’m sure he could have used a boost there. And certainly when you’re fighting an Ultron army, it would never hurt to have a boost there, too.
I don’t think “being low on power” has been an Iron Man plot point since Iron Man 2.
Anyway, I always saw that scene as a bit of a fluke. Like if Thor had zapped him just a little bit more it would have completely fried the entire suit.
The low power thing is actually a major plot device in Iron Man 3; when the house gets attacked his suit doesn’t have flight power, then he passes out while JARVIS is flying the suit to Tennessee and wakes Tony up to tell him that there’s an alarm going off to indicate that the suit’s power is dropping below five percent, then the suit is charging too slowly for Tony’s liking, etc.
Lightning is not exactly a controlled phenomena - the chances of the next bolt frying Tony’s electronics is probably pretty high. If you want to geek on it you could theorize that while it did supercharge the armor it still might have caused some damage that had to be repaired later. Recharge-via-Thor would be a desperation move at best.
We have no idea if Toy could have even used any of that power - all we saw him do is hold it for a few seconds and then shoot it back at Thor. It certainly looked like Tony had to discharge the surplus electricity immediately, or else he’d have been fried. If that’s the case, I don’t think it would be that useful in battle; if Thor’s there to shoot bolts, he might as well shoot them at the enemy, right?
Yeah, wasn’t the supercharge accompanied by an angry red flashing indicator? He survived it… that time. But he was clearly pushing past the margins of what he considered “safe”.
Plus that was the Mark VI suit. He had moved on to VII by the end of the movie, and XLII by the beginning of IM3. So later suits would probably not be able to do the same trick, especially if they weren’t sure Thor would be back.
Did no one else notice how much that lightning bolt from Thor tore up his armor? It ripped him up, and he had to do repairs on the helicarrier. When he got to the city to fight the invasion, the first thing he did was go to Stark Tower and get a new suit, even walking in on Loki to get it.
It supercharged his power supply, but it structurally damaged his suit and it probably didn’t do many of the electronics any favor. Not something you would want to do except as a literal last resort.
EDIT: Broomstick touched on this, but it wasn’t a theory, it actually happened.
I think it was meant as a plot nugget that we assume would would pay off later…but this being Whedon, I think it was purposefully NOT used in order to subvert our expectation.
I thought the “whoops, Thor made him stronger” thing was just an excuse for Iron Man to hold his own against Thor, despite Thor typically being more powerful. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, though.
