Now that season 3 is on its way it’s the best time to rewatch the show, preferably on the DC Universe streaming service if you’re in America as that helps support the show directly and hopefully get us more than just season 3. This Re(af)Watch series is not quite a review, more of an opinion piece about each episode as I rewatch them. Covering all 46 episodes of the show’s first 2 seasons, and maybe more. Continuing on with season 2 episode 14 Runaways
Written by: Kevin Hopps
Directed by: Doug Murphy
Episode synopsis: At Star labs they are testing the Reach Meta-Gene experiment survivors, Tye, Sam,Virgil, Ed and Neut (formerly Neutron), and effectively keeping them prisoners. They decide they’ve had enough of it and break out, except for Neut who sounds the alarm. Nightwing sends Blue Beetle after them since Tye is his friend, hoping he can talk them into coming back. Instead he convinces them to come with him to meet with Green Beetle saying Green might be able to do to them what Green did to him. Unlucky for Blue Star Labs gets attacked by Red Volcano and he’s ordered to go help Star Labs, and the Runaways rush back to help save Ed’s father. They manage to save everyone but Blue’s callous disregard for their lives and the innocent civilians makes them run from him too. As they come back to square one again without a clue what to do Lex Luthor shows up with an offer to help. And at the end it reveals that Blue Beetle is On-Mode, turned by Green last episode, and working for the Reach.
This episode feels nice to get back to just one solid focused plot and not a number of different plots running throughout the episode. It breaks things up a bit and we need to time to get to know our four new heroes. The episode does a good job of not just establishing all of their unique powers, but also their limitations too. We get to see what they can and can’t do in a very natural way, it makes them all look cool and unique but not gods. They won’t be fighting off anyone in the Justice League any time soon. But they also establish that they are getting better at controlling their powers, so this isn’t a catch-all “this is what they will permanently be like.” Much like in season 1 we see our young heroes get better over time.
One thing I particularly liked was that what made them heroes was not stopping the bad guy, or running back to help Blue Beetle fight a bad guy, but just helping people. Ed doesn’t want to fight Red Volcano, he wants to save his father and his friends are there to help him. Likewise when Blue Beetle is so laser focused on stopping Red Volcano at all costs, to the point where he’s destroying Star Labs with people inside of it, all the teens think about is getting everyone out to safety. Heroes save people, beating the bad guy is secondary to that. It’s good to see superhero media acknowledge that rather than just focusing on the hero vs villain conflict.
Blue Beetle’s switch to being On-Mode was subtly played throughout the episode, with him seeming just regular and normal at first and then slowly he starts feeling more and more off. It’s starts with a simple thing of turning off his comms, then wanting to blow off stopping Red Volcano to get the runaways to Green Beetle, to his entire Red Volcano fight. That fight is more indicative of the Scarab being in control, very direct action with maximum force and no attempts to adopt a new strategy when that is clearly not working. Jaime was the one to get the Scarab to use other options that seemed “inefficient” to them, but often worked a lot more than Scarab’s shoot ’em all tactics. To be fair those tactics did end up working here, it also just ended up almost levelling Star Labs and everyone inside. They’ve also probably been told not to use lethal force on people because that’d tarnish Blue Beetle’s hero image and the Reach needs that to continue their charade. Robots are fair game though.
Red Volcano was an interesting twist considering I never thought he’d return after his season 1 episode, but it works quite well here. What exactly The Light did to have him come back is anyone’s guess, either by salvaging and reprogramming the original or having someone like Ivo make a replica. He makes for a good scapegoat to make it look like The Light wasn’t involved, at least to the Reach, as he actively turned on one of The Light, T. O. Morrow, last season and tried to end humanity. That’s not someone that looks like he’s working for The Light. The cover of looking to steal the Amazo parts also lines up with his pro-robot motivations, even as The Light knows full well that the League isn’t going to send all of the Amazo parts to one place. I’d like to think Ivo was the one to build this Red Volcano, I’ve got no real evidence for it I just like the idea of him gloating that he made a better Volcano robot than Morrow did. Plus there is that connection between him and Amazo.
Here’s some character redesign trivia for you, the four runaways are all based on the original superheroes created for the 70s Superfriends cartoon. Tye is Apache Chief, Virgil is taking the place of Black Vulcan (who was only made for Superfriends because they couldn’t use Black Lightning), Sam is Samurai, and Ed is El Dorado. Virgil is of course Static from the Milestone comics, and the Static Shock cartoon, but the rest are original characters made as homages to the Superfriends. Sam is probably the weakest of these characters because she only speaks in unsubtitled Japanese, so she’s not given as much character stuff as the other three. It’s not that they have her do nothing, but all the others have more going on with their characters. As an aside, Ed’s hair is modelled after Spike Spiegel’s from the iconic Anime series Cowboy Bebop, adding another Anime inspiration to this show.
Now I’ve never watched any of the Superfirends, I’ve been told it never even aired in the UK and even if it did I wasn’t alive in the 70s to have watched it. So it’s a bit hard for me to talk about a show I’ve never watched. I can say that the Justice League Unlimited cartoon also made original characters as homages to the same Superfriends characters. Except they had the Wonder Twins instead of El Dorado. Tye’s name Longshadow comes from JLU’s homage to Apache Chief, who was also named Longshadow. It’s not the first time this series has had Superfirends characters show up, Wendy and Marvin from season 1 (and Wendy getting a season 2 appearance) are also from
Superfriends. So maybe at some point in a future season they will have some Wonder Twins equivalents will show up.
While I don’t get the appeal of the Superfriends characters, since I have no nostalgia for them, I liked all of the runaways. They all had wonderful personalities that bounced off each other with great banter. These are clearly four people thrust together by pure chance rather than friends, even if they grow to be friends, so there’s lots of character conflict between them. They don’t hate each other or anything like that, and it’s good to see some conflict without it turning into outright antagonism.
Once again we’ve got some bad father material, so far Black Manta is the only good dad in this season, Roy Harper comes second but also his parenting so far has been him bringing his daughter into an assassins lair. At least Ed’s dad isn’t irredeemable, and while we saw them end in a better spot than when we first saw them they still haven’t fully patched things up. Things like that take longer than 20 minutes.
Little things I liked: Red Volcano coming back and calling everyone meatbags. The bit with Virgil and the Reach drink, it’s funny and also shows how quickly the Reach and Lexcorp have put those things everywhere. Virgil’s very bad plans that aren’t really plans so much as ideas that he hasn’t turned into plans yet. Red Volcano destroying the Zeta Tube, that’s always got to be the first step with anything involving the League. We learn Impulse and Flash are having a team-up rescue tsunami victims, which adds more to the theme of being a hero means saving people.
Quote of the episode:
“Haven’t you been paying attention? I can only teleport myself and only along sight lines. Which makes escaping from a windowless locked hallway somewhat difficult!” Ed Dorado Jr.
I just love the exasperated tone at the end as the camera shows us the windowless locked hallway.
Quote that takes on a new meaning after watching the series:
“Time to sacrifice your victory and save the meatbags like a good hero.” Red Volcano
“You shouldn’t stereotype!” Blue Beetle
More of an episode specific rewatch thing to see all the instances of Blue Beetle acting so On-Mode.