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.

Umm... Did We Already Watch This?

One of the unanticipated artifacts of the streaming era, for me at least, is the way viewing stretches out in unpredictable and usually unwelcome directions. Several times now, I've started watching a show only to find that before I get to the end the rights have moved to another platform.

Since I'm usually subscribed to more than one streaming service at a time, if I'm lucky it's no more trouble than remembering where the show I was in the middle of watching has gone. Lucifer jumped from Amazon Prime to Netflix but since I was subscribing to both at the time, that wasn't much of a problem.

More often, though, the move is to a service I'm not using, which means making a choice between paying a further subscription just to keep watching or dropping the show, at least for the time being, in the hope it might eventually resurface on a service to which I have access. Or, if I really want to carry on watching, as happened in the case of Roswell New Mexico, using a VPN to find it on a platform outside my designated geographical territory.

There is sometimes another possibility, of course. In some ways it's my preferred option. That's to buy the damn thing on DVD. I'd add "Or on Blu-Ray" but I still don't own a Blu-Ray player. Every time I come close I remember I really don't care that much about the supposed visual fidelity and anyway isn't the whole physical format about to drop into the trash-bin of history?

Probably not, as it turns out. Back in the mid-teens, I was telling everyone who'd listen how the future wasn't just digital, it was virtual. No-one growing up in the 21st century would want to tie themselves down to a whole load of physical clutter, not when they could carry the entire history of cinema, literature and music in their pockets. 

Yeah. About that. Turns out I could not have been more wrong. Gen-Z flippin' love physical media. I don't have to read articles about it online. I can see it happening every day I go to work. Teens and twenty-somethings are all over the store, handling everything. They love to touch. 

They're the consumers driving the huge boom in exclusive editions, buying multiple variants of the same book just to have them all. They're the ones buying expensive hardbacks and gosh-wowing over the sprayed edges. 

 

It reminds me a little of the comic-book boom of the nineties, when publishers thought they could sell the same comic many times over just by issuing versions with different covers and packaging them in sealed plastic bags. The thing about that nasty little episode, though, was that most of the interest was fueled by greed. Comic fans believed if they bought all six different covers of the latest issue and never opened the sealed packages, all of them would increase in value as fast as the Flash could run.

Didn't happen. In fact, it didn't happen so much that the entire industry almost collapsed. It certainly drove me away from the hobby and from what I read afterwards, I was very much not the only one. 

This seems different. I hear so many conversations between customers as I move through the shop and not a single one has ever mentioned buying anything as an investment. They're all crazy in love with having something that looks great, that was written by someone whose writing they enjoy or which features characters they adore. There's a big collecting aspect to it, for sure, but mostly the drive seems to revolve around the sheer, physical, tactile, visual pleasure of seeing and touching something gorgeous.

Also, there's the permanence thing. A lot more people today seem to be aware that virtual ownership is ephemeral. A streaming subscription gives you unlimited access to what's on the stream but you have no say over what that is or how long it's going to be there. Even digital purchases only last as long as the service behind them and the hardware on which they run.

And it's a lot easier and more impressive to take a picture of yourself holding a book or a vinyl album to post on Instagram. It's harder to do the same with an eBook or a song you just found on Spotify. You can share your digital discoveries easily enough but bragging requires pictures.

Because, somewhat to my own surprise,  I am not utterly constrained by my previous belief systems, I, too, have modified my expectations concerning the digital future. I was pretty excited by it a decade ago, when the idea of being able to junk all my physical crap and replace it with orders of magnitude more convenient virtual crap seemed like an imminent reality.

Now I prefer to have hard copies of anything I really want to be sure I can come back to whenever I feel  like it. (The uncomfortable truth, that I probably never will come back to any of it, is something I prefer not to think about.) My problem is that, more often than you might expect, there is no physical media available for the stuff I want to keep.

Runaways is a good example. The show, produced by Marvel and originally released as a Hulu-exclusive, has, as far as I can tell, never been released in a physical format. I watched the first season some time ago, although I can't now remember which platform that was on. According to the production history on Wikipedia, it looks like it would have had to have been Disney+, to which I did subscribe for a while, but I thought I saw it earlier than that.

Wherever and wherever it was, I didn't finish the whole thing before it disappeared. Either I stopped subbing or it left the service. I'd be lying if I said I'd been pining to see the rest ever since but I did check if there was a box set I could buy. There was not. 

I hadn't thought about the show for a long while until a few weeks ago I spotted it in my Recommends on Prime. I was unexpectedly excited by the prospect of catching up with the show, most of whose characters I only vaguely remembered as "quite annoying". 

My never-reliable memory told me I'd seen the first two seasons so I started watching from the start of Season 3. I had no idea what the hell was going on. Sure, it'd been a while, but usually things like characters and plot come back to me very quickly, given a nudge. This time, nothing at all.

After half an hour of complete confusion I decided to go back to the start of Season 2 and start from there, which was just as well because I hadn't seen any of it before. It turns out I did not watch two seasons the first time around. I only watched the first. 

This post started out as a review of Season 2 of Runaways. That's not where it's going now. I will say that I think it's a very strong show, thematically absorbing, generally well-written and well-acted. As a superhero show it's a lot less superheroic than many and as a show ostensibly centered on teenagers, it has a lot more adult characters and adult-oriented content than you might expect. 

But I'll save a full review for when I've finished the third and final season. I'll be starting that tonight. It shouldn't take long. Towards the end of Season 2 I was enjoying it so much I was watching two episodes a night. Let's hope the final season is as compelling.

What I'm more interested highlighting just now is a more generalized observation on the increasing instability of my viewing options. 

I grew up in the era of broadcast television, before the general availability of any form of recording or time-shifting for home use. Until I was in my mid-20s, if I wanted to watch a TV show I had to make time to see it when it was shown.

If I missed that window, I might be lucky enough to catch it when it was repeated six months or a year later but you could never rely on something even getting a second showing. Many of them weren't even stored away safely by the broadcasters. They were treated as entirely disposable and taped over or thrown out with the trash.

 

What that meant was that if you really liked a show you made a point of being in when it came on. Barring accidents and emergencies, you would see every episode, in order, in one extended sequence that might take months. There'd usually be a week between episodes but most people could remember what happened a week ago pretty clearly. Continuity of narrative was mostly maintained.

Later came video and then DVD, meaning some shows could be owned like books or albums. If there was no official release, you could at least swipe your own copy and with timers you didn't even have to be there to do it. Now you had the choice, whether to follow along at the pace the broadcaster set or wait until the end and then watch it all at once. Or on any schedule you chose, really. You could also rewind to make sense of any bits you couldn't follow or to look at a particular scene in detail.

Later came the Box Set (Binge) era, which still lingers on in some contexts, although its cultural hegemony is over. Box sets got pushed into the background with the advent of the streaming era, when I and I'm sure many others thought we'd reached Peak Viewing Experience.

Everything would always be there. You'd be able to start and stop at will. It'd be like having the Great Library of Alexandria a fingertip's touch away.

That never happened. It felt a bit like it in the early days, when there were fewer streaming platforms and it seemed as if there might eventually be just one streamer to rule them all but, like the imagined end of physical possessions, that turned out to be a fantasy. 

Instead, not only do streaming platforms proliferate but they're all subdividing like amoebas, splitting into "channels", each of which requires a separate subscription. And as if that wasn't annoying enough, they're reverting to the traditional practices of the networks and broadcasters they were supposed to replace, scheduling shows weekly or at even less convenient intervals, presumably in the hope of constraining customers from exercising their increasingly numerous but decreasingly satisfying options.

All of which is well-known and most of which I've already hashed out here, about as often as Old Television put out repeats of the same damn shows. Except that watching Runaways has alerted me to a new phenomenon, which is that sometimes access to shows can be so disrupted I can't even fricken' remember what I've already watched!

It really was a shock to find I hadn't even watched an entire season of a show I thought I'd enjoyed. I could put that down to my ever-less-reliable memory but really I'm not going senile, not quite yet. I never had a great memory but it hasn't gotten substantially worse. I just never expected to have to follow a single series across multiple platforms, let alone over a period of years, in this counter-intuitive and very irritating fashion. 

At least in the broadcast era there were magazines you could buy with the schedules laid out clearly and unequivocally. And the networks announced entire slates of shows in advance for the whole of the Autumn, Winter and Spring. (Summer was all reruns, of course Who sits inside watching TV when the sun's out?) You had to wait but you knew what was coming and when and where.

 

I'm not saying it was better then, It was not better then. It's better now. But I think it might have been better still five or ten years ago, just for a moment. 

The good news, at least for me, is that it might, just possibly, get a bit better again, soon. I mentioned the other day that we in the UK are finally going to be able to watch HBO Max. That's quite exciting but there's been a further development.

In March, Sky, a service I have always shunned, will be offering a package including not just its own offerings but also HBO Max, Disney+, Hayu and Netflix. Supposedly, all of this will be available for £24 a month, which is not unreasonable. That's the base price, though, and I haven't seen the details. I bet it includes ads.

I have frequently paid more than that for multiple streaming services so it seems reasonable, especially when you compare it with subbing to Netflix and HBO Max separately. It won't do much for most of the issues I've been complaining about, namely scheduling nonsense or shows changing or leaving platforms, but it ought at least to reduce some of the churn.

Whether I'm willing to give money to an organization I've scrupulously avoided until now is another question. Decisions, as they say, have consequences although in this case the only consequence would be another compromise to feel morally uncomfortable about.. 

I guess I'll find out in March, when both the Sky package and the direct HBO Max stream become available. I suspect in the end my distaste for Sky will trump my penny-pinching parsimony but I wouldn't - ironically - put money on it.