A Runaway Success?

Before I forget everything I wanted to say about the show, I guess I'd better deal with Runaways. Or rather Marvel's Runaways as it's officially called. Why it has to have the name of the company bolted onto the front beats me. They don't call it Marvel's Wandavision or Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, do they?

I guess it might be because there's already a better-known Runaways brand in the culture, the all-female proto-punk band put together by Kim Fowley in the '70s, from which the legend that is Joan Jettt emerged. It's hard to imagine a situation where anyone would confuse the two, though, so it made me wonder if there was another comic-book outfit using the name. 

I checked. There isn't.

Leaving the problematic nomenclature aside, how's the show? Pretty good, I'd say. I enjoyed it a lot, anyway. 

Not that it's without flaws. As quite a few of the comments on reddit suggest, it does take its time getting going. For a super-hero show, it's not all that action-packed and I certainly wouldn't call it fast-paced, particularly in the first season.

Ah, the first season. I remember that one. Vaguely. I watched it a few years ago then took a long break until the second and third seasons turned up on a streaming service I was subbing, Amazon Prime. I've talked about the problems that hiatus caused already so I won't go over it again. I'll just say that most of the plot of Season One has come back to me now so I can see how the whole thing fits together.

There may be spoilers from here on in, so it you haven't seen the show and plan to, something I'd recommend if you have any interest either in YA dramas or super-hero shows or better yet both together, you may want to bookmark this post and come back to it after you've finished watching.

Here's how the story arc goes: 

Season One - a bunch of rich kids in their mid-teens find out their parents are serial killers. Yes, all of their parents. The kids try to foil their parents' nefarious plans and then run away from home, giving the series its title and USP. 

Season Two - the kids find a super-hero base to hang out in and spend most of the season trying to stop an alien collapsing the whole of California into the sea. The alien is the one who manipulated their parents into doing all those murders and by now not all of the parents are as on-board with the whole kidnap-and-murder lifestyle as they used to be.

Season Three - the alien is duly foiled but another threat immediately appears and needs some foiling of its own. By the end of the season some of the kids are dead (But not really.) and some of the parents too (For real.) and some of the parents aren't as evil and nefarious as they used to be, or not as far as their children see it, anyway.

There are a couple of problems. First there's the pacing, which is, as I've suggested, variable at best. I enjoyed the first season but it really took its time to get going. It's more of a mystery than an action show at times because it takes the kids a while to figure out what's going on and even longer for them to do anything about it. 

Season Two moves faster, has more action and is probably the most consistent and coherent of the three. There are clear villains and clear threats and almost everything makes sense. Season Three though...

I enjoyed the third season but it does a hard pivot half-way through, turning into what almost feels like a different show entirely. The first two-and-a-half seasons are science fiction but the final half-season is pure fantasy, with magic taking over completely. 

Also, in that last segment the remaining parents unequivocally ally with the runaway teens and become heroes instead of villains, many of them appearing to have had complete personality transplants in the process. By the end, the kids and their parents, for the most part, have reconciled.

I can see how this would piss some viewers off. As far as I can tell, the original comic on which the show is based presented the parents as unambiguously Evil with a Capital E. There was no light and shade at all. Kids = Good. Parents = Bad. If you were on board with that, you're not going to be happy about how the show handles those relationships.

For my part, though, I am already on record as describing those original issues of the comic, written by Brian K. Vaughan, as "execrable" and "one of the worst comics I'd read in fifty years". Since one of the reasons I loathed the comic book so much was the staggering immaturity of the writing, I was very much happier with the increasingly nuanced handling of complex inter-generational relationships as developed over the course of the three seasons of the adaptation.

In fact, that's the strongest aspect of the show. The kids are not wrong about their parents. They did indeed kidnap and kill a teenager a year at the behest of a charismatic cult-leader. All of them knew what they were doing, too, even if they'd been lied to about why. They are, as their children frequently call them, murderers. And all of the parents consistently claiming "But we did it for you! We just wanted to keep you safe!" neither expalins nor excuses the choices they made.

What does both explain and in some part excuse them is knowing they were being manipulated by a body-swapping alien the whole time. Also that at least some of them genuinely bought into the mysticism of that alien's fake church, a tenet of whose religion is that nothing ever really dies. So the kids they killed were just being assimilated into the energy of the universe or some such bullshit.

Seasons Two and Three really ramp up the ambiguity with both kids and parents being used as host bodies by aliens or being enchanted by Morgan le Fay (Yes, that one.) to do her evil will. It's a wonderfully evocative and affecting metaphor for the way children and parents are forced to re-evaluate each other as they age. 

After a while, no-one is really sure who anyone is any more. No-one knows anyone's motives. No-one knows who they can trust. As one character eventually points out, it's only by their actions they can be judged.

I loved all of that and there was a lot of it. By the end I doubt there was a single character on either side of the age gulf left unaffected or unchanged by the experience. There's some real character growth on show here and I found much of it very satisfying.

I also liked nearly all the characters, kids and parents both, although you can't really "like" the parents until they stop behaving like sociopaths, which doesn't happen until well into Season Two. It's an odd YA show in that there are more adult characters as there are teens, what with everyone having two parents and all of those parents having a fully-developed role. For much of Seasons Two and Three, it's also the parents who are, by a wide margin, the more interesting. 

And better acted, too, as evidenced in the many scenes where someone is playing a character being controlled by another character, sometimes pretending to be the original and sometimes revealing their true identity. The adult actors generally pull that difficult trick off more convincingly than their younger counterparts although everyone does a pretty good job of it.

If you're looking for a super-hero show, though, you're going to have to wait a long while before you get one. There are some good set-piece fights in Season Two but it isn't until the whole show pivots mid-Season Three that it turns into a full-on fight-fest. There are some good battles with Morgan and her Dark Dimension lackeys then.

Since I'm on the subject of super-heroics, let me just mention something about the Runaways as a super-hero team. They aren't one. Literally just one of them, Molly, not co-incidentally the youngest, believes they ought to be. No-one else is remotely interested in the idea.

To be a super-hero team, anyway, they'd need powers. What powers do they have?  

Nico has a very powerful magic staff that she doesn't fully know how to use and doesn't always have with her. Chase has a pair of military-grade battle-gloves he calls "Fistigons", which he frequently forgets to bring with him. Gert has a telepathic mind-link with a retro-engineered dinosaur she calls Old Lace, who nearly always has to be left somewhere safe because even in LA you can't go around with a dinosaur and not have people notice. As for Alex, he has no powers whatsoever. He's just great with computers and comesup with all the clever plans. 

The only two who have some super-ability always available are Karolina, the half-human, half-alien hybrid, who can glow, levitate and put on light-shows and Molly, who can become super-strong but also gets super-tired doing it. When most conflicts arrive, the team is woefully under-powered. 

Until the second half of season three, that is, by when they suddenly take it up a notch. Or, more specifically, Nico and Karolina do, with Nico eventually learning not only to master the staff but to do magic without it and Karolina firing force-blasts from her hands. Molly doesn't seem to need a lie down after every fight any more, either.

The show was cancelled after three seasons but it was clearly heading towards more traditional super-hero territory. The whole thing wraps up with a two-part, time-travel finale that I found both thematically and emotionally rewarding. There's a tiny lead-in at the very end that would obviously have been the set-up for a fourth season if there'd been one but it's very easy to dismiss. The whole thing comes to a neat and satisfying conclusion.

Overall, it's not a great show but it's a very good one. I feel like the time I spent watching was time well-spent. Can't ask for much more than that.