Runaways: Fifteen

December 3, 2017 12:32 PM - Season 1, Episode 4

The parents try to find a solution to PRIDE’s problem, and the kids grapple with a new discovery that yields more questions than answers.

IGN Marvel's Runaways Episode Four: The parents are not all right.

TV Fanatic Marvel's Runaways Episode Four: I'd rather have a cute dinosaur under my control than glow pink and purple like Rainbow Brite.

AV Club Marvel's Runaways Episode Four: I’m starting to worry that the runaways of Marvel’s Runaways are never going to run away.

posted by Squeak Attack (4 comments total)

I binge watched episodes 1-4 and I will admit I would have kept rolling along if Hulu had posted the entire season.

However, with their weekly release schedule, I had more time to think about the season so far and feel pretty disappointed, tbh.

I was hoping with episode one that the slow pace would lead to much more character development but instead I think we are getting very little story and very little character work. If you take away the teens' intergroup relationships, we've actually learned very little about them or their personalities or interests. None of the kids except Chase seem to have had any friends or social circle before Alex called them together. The school stuff is really unconvincing.

Chase actually has the most personality notes - he likes lacrosse, inventing punchy things, and not raping girls. Karolina likes her church and nothing else but ankle booties I guess, but she has an excuse for being one-dimensional because her mom is kinda brainwashy.

Nico likes being goth af to piss off her mom, which is legit teen behavior but does she ever do anything else? Molly wants to know more about her parents which is understandable but doesn't really come up until episode 3 or 4.

Gert has an awareness of the world beyond the end of her nose but sadly the show seems to use her political activism and feminism to just humiliate her and make her look like a hypocrite so yay?

And poor Alex likes nothing and stands for nothing, except weak-sauce Tardis jokes on license plate holders, like, get a life Alex you don't even exist.
posted by Squeak Attack at 10:32 AM on December 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Runaways (at least the Vaughan run of it) was my favorite comic of its time. The show is mostly working for me, although I find myself impatient for some sort of explanation for why they decided to make some of the changes that they did.

(MINOR SPOILERS BELOW)

Why were the specializations of some of the families changed? In the comics the Yorkes family deals in matters related to time travel, not the Steins.
Why were the parents changed so that one parent in (almost) every couple was superhuman and one not? That makes for a pretty significant change to some of the relationships.
Since Marvel’s mutant properties are all tied up with other studios, I imagine that they’ll probably need to invent a new origin for Molly. I’m interested to see what happens here, since mutant pride is a not-insignificant part of comic-Molly’s identity. It’s also a major factor how her parents interact with the Pride. So if Molly isn’t a mutant, where did she get her powers? Was she genetically manipulated by the Yorkes? That would explain reasoning behind the change in their specialty, but then what role did the Hernandez parents play in the Pride?

I’m interested to see what the explanation for these changes is, but I’m also impatient.

Also, this has been bothering me since the as-yet-unnamed dinosaur was first sighted by Molly: If the Yorkes were regularly sending their daughters downstairs to feed the lab animals, did they not think that it was just possible that they might look through the window in the mysterious and forbidden door that was prominently featured in the room? I’m totally baffled by it.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 10:47 AM on December 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Also, this has been bothering me since the as-yet-unnamed dinosaur was first sighted by Molly: If the Yorkes were regularly sending their daughters downstairs to feed the lab animals, did they not think that it was just possible that they might look through the window in the mysterious and forbidden door that was prominently featured in the room? I’m totally baffled by it.

Yeah, me too. Made virtually no sense at all that I could follow.

This episode did little to sway my opinion either way on the show. The Gert stuff is still really troubling, which is sad since Ariela Barer is maybe my favorite actor among the kids so far. The adult cast is great, but they're still fumbling around with setting things up for the most part, so that isn't building all that satisfactorily either. Marsden's scene with Sulkin, talking about the glove he was creating was nice and the show isn't lacking for chemistry in its cast, so I'll keep hoping they develop something more impressive soon or I'll find another show to spend my time on instead. Runaways isn't terrible, but it isn't anything special for me so far either and I gather there are a lot of other good shows out there to choose from nowadays so this somewhat random viewing choice isn't gonna stick just for having gone this far.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:42 AM on December 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was hoping with episode one that the slow pace would lead to much more character development but instead I think we are getting very little story and very little character work.

This has also been my big disappointment so far. Except, well, we actually are getting character work, it's just all for the parents, which is a strange choice.

As for the Yorkeses, it seems like they were planning to fuck off to Mexico with the kids. So maybe they were almost hoping the kids would figure out about the dinosaur? But then also they just seem to be really, really bad at being evil supergeniuses, so that might be the whole explanation there.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:33 AM on December 28, 2017