Marvel's Runaways, Season 1, Episode 10: Hostile
Ah, finally, we get the Runaways running away. This really should've happened in episode 2 or 3, to be honest, and we still could've had them doing all the buildup while incognito and on the run. The entirety of episodes 9 and 10 ends up being just a promise of "hey, we'll actually tell the story and stop setting up in the next season, okay?" We get a short climactic battle between the Runaways and the parents in the beginning, which after a few beam attacks and shooting the raptor (Old Lace!) with tranquilizer darts, ends up with a rainbow light-show battle between Jonah and Karolina, leading to the other Runaways running away.
The rest of the episode is just them forcing Recurring-Gibborim-Church-Dude to help them sneak in, break Karolina out, then decide what to do next... which, of course, is running away and becoming fugitives, as their parents put out a wanted ad for the kids, apparently they're framed for kidnapping Destiny. It's an amazing visual as they run away from the train station with the raptor trailing behind them, but there is a sense of annoyance and false premise since we don't actually get any real payoffs from anything that we've built up throughout the past 10 episodes.
Like, it's interesting that the Wilders, Yorkes-es and Minorus are starting to realize what's going on and trying to get back their lives from Jonah after discovering that Jonah seems to be digging down to some mysterious giant living alien/demon/cthulhu being underneath the ground and not a magic alien "alternative energy source" that'll make them filthy rich, and making an alliance with Leslie Dean is neat... but again, it's more for the future. And Leslie's revelation that she was behind killing the Hernandezes and Amy... and Tina's anguished hatred in that scene... really could've been done better.
And we also get the team-up between Karolina's two daddies, Jonah and Frank Dean, and Frank seems completely okay to be Jonah's new heavy, seduced by promises of power and everything, but Frank himself is such a cardboard cutout that I can't bring myself to care. Someone amongst the parents or kids is also in cahoots with Jonah, and there's a subplot between Alex teaming up with his father's old gangster friend, all of which feel absolutely dull and just another bunch of "ooo ominous foreshadowing" that ended up being more distraction than important plot point.
The scripting is often times awkward here, jumping clumsily from invigorating "no one gets left behind!" speeches almost immediately into "if it was you Chase we'd leave you, yuk yuk yuk" jokes without allowing the badass moments to properly take root. It's only the strength of the actors involved -- child and adult -- that really makes this finale not the trainwreck it would be in script format. We also get a particularly silly bit where Gert seems to send Old Lace away, only for it to immediately return in the final scene, which honestly leads me to question what the point of that whole emotional "see you when I see you" moment was supposed to be.
Overall, though, while I did enjoy myself through Runaways, the problems that plagued the series' earlier episodes ends up returning in such full force in these last two episodes that it's genuinely difficult to really stay positive. And it's frustrating -- they have a very talented cast and a relatively interesting plot, but the last few episodes end up bungling up the pacing and execution and while it's nowhere as horribly bland the way Inhumans is, it really needs to do much more to become the epic superhero story it could've been.
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