Last week while looking through the list of series I had been targeting to watch, I found there was this Marvel series which seemed interesting and was highly rated. So I decided to give this a try and aiming to finish it fast as it only had 10 episodes in the first season, which I managed to do so. And what was the series about? Well let us find out below.
Brief Story Line
A group of high school students consisted of the very intelligent Alex Wilder (Rhenzy Feliz), the gothic girl who was into wiccan stuff Nico Minoru (Lyrica Okano), the very religious church girl Karolina Dean (Virginia Gardner - 2018's Halloween etc), the feminist & socially awkward Gert Yorkes (Ariela Barer), the popular lacrosse player Chase Stein (Gregg Sulkin - Faking It TV series etc) and the youngest Molly Hernandez (Allegra Acosta) were previously very close friends until a tragedy happened 2 years before.
Their parents though were still very tight as they were part of a high profile Charity group called PRIDE and consisted of Alex' parents the lawyer Catherine (Angel Parker) & real estate businessman Geoffrey (Ryan Sands), Nico's parents the successful CEO Tina (Brittany Ishibashi) & her husband Robert (James Yaegashi), Karolina's parents the Gibborim Church leader Leslie (Annie Wersching - 24 TV Series etc) & former movie star Frank (Kip Pardue - Remember the Titans etc), Gert's parents brilliant Bio engineers Stacey (Brigid Brannagh - Army Wives TV series etc) & Dale (Kevin Weisman - Alias TV series etc) and Chase's parents the genius inventor Victor (James Marsters - Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series etc) & his wife Janet (Ever Carradine). Meanwhile, Molly was an orphan and adopted by the Yorkes.
One night, the group accidentally found out something mysterious had been going on during the usual Pride's event. This finding would forever changed their perception of their parents which ultimately made them decide to fight against Pride and stop their plan. So what were their findings and how would these teenagers cope with their parents' dark secret? Find them all in this unique & very unusual teenage superheroes series.
End of Brief Story Line
Hmmm, this was indeed a very unique and unusual superheroes series. At first I thought this would be a lot similar like another Marvel (in the X-Men universe) series The Gifted where there would be a lot of people and some teenagers showing their mutant abilities and had quite significant action scenes. But it turned out this one was a lot more drama than the actions. The first few episodes were focusing more on the introduction of the characters which were a lot (total 16 persons as the main cast) and it needed some getting used to. It did not help that most of them were unknown to me except for very few cast members like James Marsters, Annie Wersching or Kevin Weisman However, once I got to know all of them and be charmed by the teenagers' youthful attitude & their teenagers' problems, I was quite hooked up by them.
When the mystery started to be revealed little by little and this group of young people with completely different personalites had to join forces by combining their own strength & "capabilities", I began to enjoy the series more. Especially in the fifth episode which I felt was the best. Alas after that the pace slowed down a bit and only picked up real fast towards the ending in the season finale. Its ending was really wonderful and set up for an intriguing second season which had been shown its entire season on Hulu streaming service back in December 2018.
For me the interesting part of the series was not the abilities of Runaways (the nickname they used for their small group where the reason for such name was explained in one of the latter episode), but more towards their internal relationship and the unique premise of fighting against their own parents which created a whole lot of different type of conflicts. This was a highly unusual plot and thus became a favorite of mine. In addition, there was also another mysterious character very close to Pride named Jonah (Julian McMahon - Fantastic Four, Nip/Tuck TV series etc) who was really fascinating. I thought the main attraction was actually this unique story and the wonderful performance of the cast, because the powers were not significantly shown in here plus the special effects to my personal opinion were very average. Oh, there was also the cameo appearance of the late Stan Lee in one of the episodes, so be sure to catch it.
This series was based on Marvel comics titled Runaways created by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona back in year 2003. From the information I gathered from the internet, the series was said to be set in Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), although during the whole 1st season, it was not mentioned at all. And amazingly, the cast in here resembled a lot with the actual Runaways team, at least from what I saw in the comics cover page. So the casting department (and probably the costume department) really did an amazing job in ensuring the series was honoring the comics.
Overall I thought that this was an interesting superhero series. It was quite a slow burner as it took few episodes to get the pace increased and thus require some patience to get to the very interesting part. Due to its unique plot plus the fact that the parents (& their adult problems) took quite a large screen time, I felt it was more like a mystery drama than a superhero series and even though there were super powers involved, they were more like background rather than being the main premise. There were not too much violence shown and this was not as dark & gloomy as other more adult Marvel web series which had been cancelled. In fact, there were also some lighter moments especially involving the romance among these teenagers.
So those looking for a very dark Marvel series or the ones that show a lot of super powers/abilities by the heroes, you might not get them here. But if you are looking for a series focusing on teenagers as the main cast, fighting off their own parents, then this would be a delightful option. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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