Marvel's Runaways S02E04 Review: Secretception

Marvel's Runaways, Season 2, Episode 4: Old School

Well, that was certainly a very packed episode! Considering how one of my bigger gripes with Runaways' first season was the utterly slow pace of the first half, it's genuinely interesting how this fourth episode really ended up feeling pretty damn eventful. From Karolina basically breaking off from the group (albeit under the guise of working as a Disney Princess or whatever) to meet up with Jonah, to the pretty-obviously-up-to-no-good Topher integrating himself into the group, to the Yorkes doing a tissue extraction of whatever alien Cthulhu is down the mysterious hole, to the Runaways themselves staging a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as they try to steal a plot device from Atlas Academy... throw in a whole bunch of emotional conflict between the Wilder couple, between Molly and the rest of the team, a potential one between Gert and Chase, plus the whole conflict between Nico and Topher, and there's a whole lot of ground covered in this single episode.

And honestly, for an episode that seems to just be content at introducing Topher and have the entire episode be about how the core Runaways six (or, well, five, with Karolina out of the way) deal with him, it's surprising just how eventful things ended up being. Topher himself is honestly telegraphed to be pretty damn slimy, although part of it might be me already being exposed to his comic-book counterpart in the original Runaways run. It is interesting to see that in this version of the story, it is Molly that ended up being the biggest supporter of Topher. I mean, runaway kids have to stick with each other, right? Plus they're of the same ethnicity, they have similar glowing-eye powers, and Topher's all nice and all, providing them with random free food and even offering the crack theory that he might be a blood relative to Molly... but of course, the episode never really makes it a huge secret that Topher is one shifty and suspicious motherfucker, continually trying to flirt with Nico and trying to basically worm out information about the group and what they're "holding". And eventually, at the end of the episode, Nico, pretending to be taken in by Topher's charm, ends up revealing that he's something more... sinister. He gets high on a drug that makes his eyes glow yellow.

While on one hand I do applaud the show for not letting this storyline drag on for too long, I kinda wish that we had seen more signs that Topher might just be a nice guy and a kindred spirit. Oh well. We'll see how this storyline proceeds in subsequent episodes, huh?

Something that's a lot less ambiguous is Jonah and Karolina's relationship. They are parents, and Jonah have shown to at least not want Karolina harmed. Knowing that he's the designated main villain of the show does make me believe that there's going to be a caveat to his help somewhere down the line, but between Jonah vomiting blood in his private office and his desperation to want to meet Karolina later on, plus the eventual scenes between them... it's either Jonah genuinely caring for Karolina (which isn't hard to believe) or him just being a very, very charismatic and good actor (also not hard to believe). Either way, it gives a lot of potential depth to a character that, so far, has just been a gloriously hammy but ultimately relatively generic evil alien mastermind. Sure, he's not the best parent -- there's the trope of a parent whose first instinct to try and bond with their child is shoving money in their face, and there's still the ultimatum of "if you don't follow me now, you'll never get all of the answers", but there's also a tinge and sense of desperation in his acting, that all of this is him knowing that time is running out.

Dale and Stacey Yorkes, meanwhile, go off to the dig site and send in a drone. It's mostly Agents of SHIELD Fitz-Simmons style of hilarious geeky banter between the two, and Dale being on the verge of freaking out is fun, but ultimately this seemingly low-key scene turns out to trigger yet another massive earthquake that both interrupts Karolina and Jonah's parent-child quality meeting, but also the Runaways' heist on Atlas Academy. The Yorkes discover that the biopsied weird white fluid, when exposed to the chemical they're preparing, does undergo necrosis, so they have something that can theoretically kill Jonah... except their escape from the dig site is witnessed by Jonah. Oops! Jonah and Karolina both hover down into the hole at the end of the episode, so we might very well see subterranean alien Cthulhu sooner rather than later.

What else? The Atlas Academy stealth raid mission is pretty fun, and, of course, gets interrupted by the earthquake triggered by the Yorkes' biopsy. We get a couple of interesting scenes here and there -- what was originally meant to be a way for them to test out Topher's loyalty ends up with a race to get the hell out of the school before their parents arrive... which, in turn, is caused by Gert looking for her anxiety medicine, only to be spotted by the nurse. Poor girl. Her condition is worsened by her witnessing Chase coming out of a bathroom stall with a different girl -- one of those popular girl types that immediately dismisses Gert. And I do think that it's an interesting decision for the episode to not actually show the audience that whatever favour that Eiffel asked from Chase isn't... adulterous in nature.

Overall, a pretty interesting episode all around, and the next one is probably going to follow up on many, many interesting ones. Is Topher going to turn on the Runaways so soon? What will Jonah and Karolina find under the ground? Will poor Gert ever get her meds? This second season's definitely going on pretty strong. I'm a big fan.

Random Notes:

• The Geoffrey/Catherine confrontation lasted a lot shorter than I expected it too, actually, after how the first three episodes revolved around the Wilder family so much. Catherine just basically verbally bitch-slaps Geoffrey and tells him to grow up and abandon any sense of being part of a brotherhood with his old life. Pretty harsh, but honestly par the course for this pair. 
• I sort of breeze over it, but the exchange between Topher and Nico, with Topher clearly trying to hit on Nico very hard, is amazingly done. Nico's genuine disinterest, and her eventual feigned interest, are all done amazingly well. Considering how easily Topher managed to seduce Nico in the original run of the comics, it's a nice little change here to see that it's Nico that's playing Topher instead. 
• PRIDE interrogating that random biker goon, and the sheer difference between Geoffrey Wilder's "you want to intimidate ME?!" reaction and Robert's "just take this fifty bucks and tell us what you know" is pretty damn hilarious.  
• #EarthquakeBitches.