Runaways: “Reunion”

RELATABLE!

So, in the increasingly competitive (sort of) world of cellular service providers, various companies have been bundling streaming services with their plans. The bad news for Sprint is that by the time they got around to it, all that was left was Hulu. The good news for me is, I’m on Sprint and free is the only way I’d every be into Hulu. So now I can watch Runaways!

The premiere is pretty good, for what it is. And what it is is the setup. It has to introduce six different characters, their relationship, the mysterious death that drove them apart, two different emerging superpowers, and of course, the revelation of the show’s premise - that all 12 of their parents are part of a secret, evil cult.

That’s a lot for an hour, and Runaways handles it deftly, for the most part. Yes, all six characters fall mostly into Breakfast Clubby tropes, updated for 2018. A nerd, a jock, a goth, a pretty girl, an activist, and a dancer. But the pretty girl is also part of a Scientologesque religion, the jock used to be a nerd, and everyone else gets some bits that show that they’re at least a bit more than their trope would have you believe.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this, and have my fingers crossed that I can get through the whole thing in the next few weeks, since they just announced that Jessica Jones II drops on March 8.