Even though I still find myself overwhelmingly a fan of the show, as RUNAWAYS rolls on some cracks are starting to show. Namely the more time spent with fleshing out the parents coupled with the main characters not actually, you know, running away has taken away some of the show's bite.
Alex was indeed kidnapped by an old acquaintance of his dad’s, a friend Geoffrey Wilder asked to take the wrap for a murder he committed so he could get out of prison, marry his lawyer, who would become Alex’s mother, and go into business with a mysterious benefactor named Jonah (played by Julian McMahon) who wanted to buy a strip of land off him that he had inherited from a dead uncle. His friend Darius agreed to it because Geoffrey promised he was on to a good thing and would take care of his family, a promise he never made good on, presumably due to his getting mixed up with The Pride. Alex being forced to find out the hard way that his dad was a real piece of shit, was somewhat undercut by the very premise of the show being that he discovered he was part of some kind of murder cult back in the first episode. But what really made the whole thing feel weird though was that after Geoffrey managed to get Alex back, no weight was really given to the fact that his son was now well aware of the kind of criminal past he had hoped to leave behind. Even seeing his son, whom he’d presumably hoped would never have to set foot in that world, use the gun he stolen from his desk to shoot some kid working for Darius, Geoffrey just sent Alex home on a bus. A bus! Geoffrey had Pride business to attend to it would seem, seeing as the wounded kid Alex just shot could act a last minute sacrifice.
He’s not the only parent to go through this. The Yorkes bio-engineered dinosaur, as yet still unnamed, is no longer a secret to Gert and Molly. Tina Minoru caught Nico with the Staff of One and instead of being angry, she was happy she had discovered the heirloom’s power, her icy exterior seeming to melt, creating a mildly warming mother-daughter moment. Chase had his own bonding session with his dad over the creations of his Fistigons, Victor even going so far as to dig an old invention he could never get to work out of storage in the hopes he and Chase could finish it together. When his “time machine” — that used gravity to bend light waves to see glimpse of the future as opposed to full on time travel — didn’t work, a frustrated Victor broke down and finally confessed to Chase that he was dying due to a tumour in his brain. The visions, episodes and lapses of memory now making sense, it all lead to lending one of the more vicious, feared and violently abusive parental characters a softer edge, so much so that later on Chase found himself defending his dad to the others, something I don't think you'd ever see in the comics.
The highlight of the episode was of course the small action set piece where the girls, and Chase when he decided to answer his phone, turned up to save Alex, all using their respective abilities for the first time in front one another; except Gert, as presumably the budget for a part CG part animatronic dinosaur is going to understandably limit her appearances. Whilst the action was a tad clunky, the creators of RUNAWAYS being more experienced in the genre of teen drama than superhero action, it felt so good to see them all working together like that for the first time. Also, no more secrets between the kids, meaning that the show is progressing along somewhat to the point where the show may begin to fulfill some of the promise of my favourite Marvel comic.
In a basic twist yet effective, when the kids decided to confront their parents, it turned out The Pride had moved their ritual to the Church of Gibborim — why don't they always do it there? — where they finally managed to complete the ritual and drain the life out of the young guy Geoffrey captured earlier that night into the mysterious flaky guy. With the other members of the Pride shooed away, Leslie entered her meditation room to find the mysterious man to have been fully regenerated, into none other than the mysterious Jonah, in a neat little twist that means we can at least stop assuming Leslie had a very inappropriate relationship with her father. As Leslie's poor husband, who had ventured out into the desert to spend hours in some kind of Church of Gibborim sweat lodge, received word that he had failed the final test to “go Ultra”, Jonah and Leslie embraced as lovers. Jonah even revealed that he regretted that he had never met “her” and really wanted to, seemingly confirming that he is Karolina’s true father in another twist that keeps comic fans like me on our toes.
Who exactly Jonah is, what his condition is that he requires the absorption of a human life once a year to sustain him, the circumstances in which he fathered a child with Leslie and his connection the rest of The Pride and The Church of Gibborim are still to be explored. But perhaps it has something to do with the image seen on Victor’s time machine, a brief image glimpsed when Victor and Chase weren't looking, of Los Angeles being razed to the ground.
Written by Nick Whitney, RUNAWAYS Beat Writer
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