That Disney is shuttering Marvel TV with such little fanfare and folding any future television adventures into the Kevin Feige-run division set to extend the MCU on Disney+ is pretty much all that needs to be said about the legacy that Marvel TV will leave behind. After the cancelations of the Marvel Netflix shows, the mercy killing of Inhumans and the exceptionally dull Cloak & Dagger, Runaways is the next to last out the door, leaving Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with the dubious honor of turning out the lights before they leave.
Much like its Netflix counterparts, Runaways struggled to stay propulsive and compelling throughout much of its run, due in part to overlong episodes and episode counts. If any show could benefit from being cut down to six half-hour episodes, it would be this one. Though reducing the amount of time the series took from viewers’ lives would be considered a win, it would still leave the series with a group of mostly flat characters and a go-nowhere plot that somehow failed to capitalize on translating a tremendously successful and entertaining comic book to television.
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That the show repeatedly missed what should have been an easy slam dunk puts Runaways in a peculiar position at the start of season 3. For starters, series creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage are challenged with bringing two plots to a close with the ongoing struggle between the not-so superpowered teens and their kinda evil parents who’re in league with some aliens that are basically living lava lamps, and introducing the sorceress Morgan le Fay (Elizabeth Hurley) as a way of putting Nico Minoru (Lyrica Okano) — ostensibly the group’s most powerful character — on center stage.
For once, Runaways has a surfeit of story to tell, something that should help make the final season more propulsive and interesting. And yet it’s not long before the first episode begins to drag as it positions Nico, Alex (Rhenzy Feliz), Karolina (Virginia Gardner), Gert (Ariela Barer), Chase (Gregg Sulkin), and Molly (Allegra Acosta) in such a way they might put an end to the lackadaisical alien invasion once and for all.
To the show’s credit, Schwartz and Savage have managed to steer the series far beyond the story told by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, rendering any potential ending far different from the one in the comics. That may well keep anyone who’s still watching on their toes, but it also gives the series an out with regard to its evil parents who have, from the series premiere on, inadvertently been the most consistently interesting thing about the show. In order to do that, Runaways removes the notion of choice from Victor (James Marsters), as well as Stacey (Brigid Brannagh), and Tina (Brittany Ishibashi), all of whom have become hosts for the alien invaders, thereby rendering some of their actions this season not entirely of their doing.
It also positions the members of Pride less as evil masterminds and more like pawns in a much larger scheme run by much more powerful entities. While that doesn’t absolve the members of their past wrongdoing, it does give the show a little bit of wiggle room with regard to a potential redemptive arc for at least some of the parents.
But resolving the prolonged conflict with the Pride is only part of the final season’s ambitions as the introduction of le Fay comes in the first episode, as Nico is searching for the seemingly lost Karolina. Hurley manages to be engaging as le Fay, even if the show is only interested in seeing her repeatedly make grand entrances and wave her hands around like Elizabeth Olsen does in her role as Wanda Maximoff. In doing so, Runaways generates a tacit connection to both Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange, but the division between Marvel TV and Marvel Cinematic Universe being what it is, the connections only go as far as providing enough content to be considered minimally adequate fan service and to fuel the variety of explainer posts that keep the lights on for so much of the internet.
In essence, le Fay is positioned less as a traditional physical antagonist for the teens — though there is some of that — than she is meant to create division between the characters, providing some late-game insight into the teen heroes’ personalities and the decisions they make that will not only alter their lives but those of the people closest to them. It’s a stark contrast to the one-for-all-all-for-one ethos of the series in the first two seasons, but, much like the show’s previous storytelling efforts, le Fay’s machinations largely fall flat amidst extraordinarily long and exhausting episodes. The lack of energy in the final season undercuts much of the dramatic potential in the later episodes, when the life-and-death stakes reach a high point that will inevitably and almost immediately be undone.
Runaways likely won’t be remembered in the same breath as the Marvel Netflix shows or even Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., though it was a markedly better attempt at creating a viable TV superhero universe than Inhumans or Cloak & Dagger. In the end, the Runaways will best be remembered as perhaps the most middle-of-the-road TV series Marvel had to offer.
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Runaways season 3 will be available in its entirety on Hulu on December 13.
