Marvel's Runaways S03E10 Review: Future Fight

Marvel's Runaways, Season 3, Episode 10: Cheat the Gallows

Well, uh... that's certainly not what I expected the final episode of Runaways to be. Oh, sure, I did expect the sentimental side of things, which would be appropriate for this show, and I even expected Gert coming back to life in a way. But the sudden two-year-time skip? And then the time travel? "Cheat the Gallows" is actually a pretty great episode that closes the story more satisfyingly than what I thought would happen, which would be a rematch with the Gibborim or PRIDE or Morgan or something. This is certainly a lot more satisfying for sure, which is why I'm not writing TV shows and merely reviewing them.

I also think this episode did a particularly smart thing by mostly abandoning the PRIDE characters. Their relevance and what they bring to the table really isn't worth crowding out the main Runaways cast members, and I honestly already feel like they're mostly serving as hangers-on in an already bloated cast throughout this season. Victor, Geoffrey, Leslie and the Yorkeses feel particularly redundant during the Morgan storyline.

But I digress. After a brief opening that takes place at an undetermined amount of time in the future, Chase essentially invents time travel and disappears. Which, if we remember that one abandoned message-from-the-future plot thread from the first season, is something the shot kinda-sorta foreshadowed, but not in a way that ties in to this finale. We then cut to a time period two years after the fight with Morgan... and things have changed. Molly and Alex are the only ones who stays mostly the same, with Molly being an active cheerleading coach in her college, and Alex running Wilder Innovations and is a typical young, up-and-coming company head, and even his dad works for him now. Karolina... has a different girlfriend, which would shock all of the shippers.

Meanwhile, the two that changed the most and dealt with Gert's death the worst is Chase, who has locked himself up in a sci-fi room in the Hostel and trying his best to invent time travel (again, he succeeds), so much that he refuses to accompany Molly in remembering Gert's death. Old Lace, at least, is well taken care off with a lot of squeaky toys. Nico, meanwhile, has abandoned most of her goth-style makeup, and had went off to master her magic for two years in exile, which is why Karolina ended up breaking up with her.

And then Alex tries to kill Nico. Not circa-2022 Alex, but Evil Future!Alex, from the same time period that Time Travelling Future!Chase from the prologue are from. A combination of Nico's true mastery over magic and Future!Chase's arrival causes Alex to bugger off, and then Future!Chase gathers the 2022 versions of everyone, and explains everything that has happened. Except 2022!Chase, because we don't need any more confusion, I guess. But essentially, one of the Runaways attempts to kill Alex in the future by blowing up his office, causing him to survive and seek revenge via time travel in the past, knowing that this day of the anniversary of Gert's death is the only time when everyone hangs out together. Okay, sure.

After a failed attempt to go after Karolina's new girlfriend Julie, Future!Alex jumps back to when the first season of Runaways took place, where everyone is divided, powerless and at their weakest. Technically if Alex wanted to find them at their weakest, like, go hunt down their toddler versions or something, but I digress. This has more emotional impact, after all, and a alternate little rundown of Runaways' first episode is a pretty great way to end this show, while the time travel aspect makes it so that there's some actually fun stakes in all this.

And... a good chunk of it does have to do with comparing the fleshed-out characters at the end of the show with the literal walking stereotypes that they were in the first season. 2022-era Alex and Nico's sheepish witnessing of 2017-era Nico completely ignoring Alex being a klutz with his VHS or whatever is hilarious; 2022!Molly crying behind a tree when she sees her and Gert's past selves interact and realizing what a godsend of an older sister Gert was is amazing; and, of course, Future!Chase ends up breaking his own 'no-interference' clause to defend Gert from a bunch of jerks. Ultimately, a surprising lack of intervention with 2017 happens, and it's just a great little setpiece to remind the audience and the characters of how far these characters have came.

EvilFuture!Alex ends up being chased into a bus and it seems like we're going to have a prickly situation... until 2022!Nico shows up and reminds everyone what 'total master of the magic staff' means, as she very conveniently stuns EvilFuture!Alex, mind-wipes everyone in the 2017 to forget anything weird has happened, and then drag EvilFuture!Alex to the gym. We get rid of 2022!Alex in order to not give the poor CGI team too many scenes to stitch together with multiple versions of the same actor in the same scene, and then after a discussion between the 2022 Runaways, Future!Chase and Future!Alex, we all learn that Future!Chase has his own ultimate objective, which is, of course, to prevent Gert's death. Future!Alex, meanwhile, is angry that they'll potentially wipe out everything that happened to them after the end of Morgan's death, which, as we see at the beginning of the episode, is honestly not all that bad for at least half of the cast. And in a different sort of show, this would be the selfish, irresponsible time-fuckery that needs to be stopped.

But this is the Runaways. So our 2022-era and Future-era characters teleport back to the events of "The Broken Circle", arriving in the Hostel and hiding here and there to wait and witness what's happening, interfering only to stop Gert's death. Of course, thanks to Evil!Future!Alex being dragged by them to the Morgan battle due to the limited amount of time-jumps, things get just a bit more chaotic. We do get a fun scene between 2022!Nico and Present!Nico, too (and really highlights the difference that goth makeup can make) and it's basically sort of a reminder to not make a mistake regarding Karolina. Okay, sure.

Ultimately the 'minimal change' ends up going sort of haywire, and Future!Chase knocks out his present-day self, borrows the Fistigons, and ends up literally knocking Gert out of the way of the deathblow, but gets stabbed himself for his troubles. What he set out to do ended up happening, though, and all the 2022-era and Future-era characters fade away as their timeline is replaced, and the events that happened for them ended up replaced as, well, Gert survives in this timeline. Not even going to touch how different this take on time-travel-fuckery is from the rest of the MCU and MCU-related shows, time travel is an annoying beast in fiction, really. But in this show's case, it certainly made for a great, impactful conclusion.

And now this new-timeline, permanent present-day versions of the Runaways get to live their lives happy as one big family without a dead gaping hole within their ranks. As one last little hint should somehow Runaways gets renewed or un-cancelled, Alex Wilder finds a little note from Future!Alex or something that somehow didn't get wiped out in the timeline, which might set him up as a future villain in the show (especially also considering Dagger's mind-read and the whole Dark Dimension Catherine thing) but since the show's final shot is basically a perfect scene of the Runaways going off for breakfast together, I think it's deliberately ambiguous if this is just a fragment of the what-could-have-been timeline that this version of Alex Wilder is going to just ignore as a weird, spooky piece of paper.

And ultimately, that's pretty much a great way to wrap this show up. Runaways's third season has been absolutely rocky, and the news about the cancellation probably had them rushing through what I could see as two seasons' worth of storylines in a single one. A lot of characters (particularly the parents) feel redundant, and as I keep mentioning and bemoaning over and over, the Gibborim storyline wasn't handled and concluded particularly well. But hey, as far as show conclusions go? This one was a pretty good one. Unlike some of the other Marvel shows, at least this concluded at a nice point and at a point in the show where it feels like they told just the right amount of stories for this to actually feel like a natural stopping point for these characters.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• In the comics, the Runaways also splintered after Gert's death, and a time-traveling Chase also ended up causing Gert to be resurrected thanks to temporal hijinks. Over its various runs, the comic-book version of the Runaways have also had a couple of arcs where they were displaced in time. 
• The concept of this episode sort of resembles "Runaways Reunion" one of the early arcs of the fifth run of the Runaways comic, where a lot of the characters have moved on and settled down after being shaken up after a series of events and huge battles that also included Gert's death, and ended up re-banding together after Chase time-travels and saves Gert. 
• The "Victor" that Future!Chase muttered about not trusting isn't just a jab at his dad, but actually to a member of the Runaways team that debuted in the second run of the comic book, Victor "Victorious" Mancha, an android created Ultron. Victor's original story in the second run of Runaways is seemingly sort-of adapted into Alex here. A future version of Gert time-travels to warns the Runaways about the terrible Victor that will betray and kill them all, but due to the intervention of this time-travel encounter, the Runaways are able to keep their guard up around Victor and successfully expunge Ultron's influence. 
• While she doesn't really borrow much other than the name, Karolina's new girlfriend Julie is very likely to represent Julie Power or Lightspeed or Power Pack fame, who was also Karolina's temporary girlfriend in the comics after she broke up with Nico. 
• The original run of Runaways had time travelers as one of the villain concepts of the PRIDE members, with the Yorkes-es being time-travelers (hence, the dinosaur).