Marvel’s Runaways - S1E4 - Fifteen

Previously on Marvel’s Runaways, “Destiny”

(Photo by: Greg Lewis/Hulu)

Lost Girls (and Boys)  

We open this episode with the day of Amy’s death. Amy apparently committed suicide and Nico was the one who found her. She was also discovered the day after a ceremony like the one they witnessed in the future. Furthermore, Nico’s mom uses the staff to keep her from calling 911 and then a cop takes a bribe to keep everything quiet. It’s not hard to see why Nico is unforgivingly sure that their parents are the bad guys.

This is also a switch from the comics. In the books, Nico is rather naïve and has hope that her parents aren’t evil while Gert is the unrepentant adult hater.

Nico wants to go to the police with their “evidence” but Alex points out that going to the cops may not work here. Nico’s determined to go anyway but once they get there, she sees that the detective handling Destiny’s case is the same one who covered up her sister’s death, Detective Flores.

Gert and Karolina are working together on Team “There’s Gotta Be Another Explanation” to prove that their parents aren’t as evil as everyone thinks. Karolina thinks they might have witnessed a high-level Gibborim ceremony so she and Gert take some files about level “ultra” from her mom’s computer. Show Gert is interesting because she clearly wants to be accepted and popular, but she also doesn’t want to look like she wants to be accepted. There’s also shades of an unnecessary love triangle between her and Chase and Karolina, even though it’s obvious that Karolina is not interested in Chase (might have something to do with her interest in those two girls kissing back in episode 1).

Chase finally has to deal with his teammates after their attempted rape of Karolina. Chase might be a jock, but he’s smart and he’s a good guy. While everyone on the team wants him to just forget about what happened, he doesn’t want to be associated with guys like that. He also has to tell Karolina and his honesty with her causes her to open up about her lights. We still don’t know what exactly Karolina is, but it wasn’t just a fluke.

Things Fall Apart

The adults, meanwhile, are falling apart. Chase’s dad, Victor, looks a mess. He’s abducted a girl in a white van and has her tied up and screaming. But when he gets to Geoffrey’s house for the ceremony, there’s no one in the van. Either he’s sick or there’s a girl running around LA in her underwear with her hands tied behind her back. Because he continues to fail epically, Victor confesses to PRIDE that his dematerialization box failed. Janet tries to cover for him by saying that she told him to keep it a secret. Since Victor can’t be trusted to fix this alone, Tina sends Robert with him. The affair never comes up, but I can see how Janet likes her men; bumbling and idiotic. These two can’t even abduct a homeless man without ending up in trouble.

The Yorkes are also cracking. They need to find the dinosaur Chase and Gert released so they lie to the girls and blow off the emergency PRIDE meeting. After they spend all day searching and can’t find the dino, Stacy loses it and says they should put their plan to move in action. Unfortunately, Tina is on to them. The Yorkes were planning to bail to a property the Hernandezes had in the Yucatan mountains. I wonder if the Hernandezes didn’t try to run at some point as well and if so, did PRIDE stop them. On the plus side, the dinosaur returns home. Between Molly using her powers to knock it into the ceiling and Gert having some sort of bond with the dinosaur, they’re able to put it away. It is important to note that Gert’s link with the dinosaur was not planned by her parents when they bioengineered it.

Karolina’s mom is panicking. Whoever she’s keeping in that room is getting worse fast and Frank thinks she’s cheating on him, which technically is true if getting into bed with a wrinkly man in a Bane mask and glowing is cheating. Leslie convinces Frank she’s just meditating about him going ultra, but once Alex and Nico crack the file from her computer, they find out that Ultra is just the codename for the ceremony. Leslie has been feeding PRIDE runaways from her church for the past fifteen years. But before the kids have time to process any of this, Alex is taken but someone in an SUV. Is PRIDE on to them or is there a new enemy we haven’t met? 

The reveal of Amy’s suicide was surprising mainly because I thought it was a mystery that would be drawn out over time but it helps explain the personality switch between Nico and Gert from the comics. Of course, Nico would blame their parents for everything given what she’s seen. It’s not hard to find some empathy for the adults. Clearly, they’re not all evil and some even want to get out of this agreement they seem to have made fifteen years ago, but at the same time, no one but the Yorkes seem to be making any moves to be better so there’s only so much you can feel for them. What’s with the dude in the Bane mask? That’s not in the comics at all and it’s an element that really intrigues me. Also, how long can Leslie keep Frank in the dark because as the kids get more in the way of their parents business, the harder it will be for PRIDE to keep their secrets.