Victor seems to have been made a different man by whatever treatment Jonah gave him, leaving Janet with some difficult choices. Geoffrey and Catherine know that Molly saw something, but how much and whether the other kids – including Alex – know is a mystery to them. Frank has his own agenda and Leslie tries her best to keep PRIDE from falling apart in light of recent revelations.

A lot happens in this instalment of Runaways. A hell of a lot, and it’s all important. This is one of those episodes of TV that will likely benefit from a rewatch to take everything in.

The cold open gives us a potted history of Victor and Janet’s courtship, Chase’s birth and childhood, giving us an even more complex picture of Victor than we already had. This of course stands in contrast to who Victor has become after Jonah’s ministrations last week. Cheerful, full of energy and joy and apparently blissfully unaware of the revelation of Robert’s affair with Janet, he seems excited most of all to go to the ‘Open House’ (think: parent’s evening) for the school the kids all attend.

That Open House gives the episode a framework in which all sorts of things can be resolved – it’s another circumstance where the kids are forced to be around their parents, re-emphasising the difficulties they all face, and it gives Leslie an opportunity to try to fix the increasing fractures caused by the marital infidelities of Robert and Janet, which have undermined her value in Jonah’s eyes.

Elsewhere, it gives the Wilders a chance to speak to the Yorkes about Mollie, and how best they might contain the ‘situation’ her potential knowledge might cause for them all. The solution reached isn’t necessarily one that they’re happy about, but again we are given a hint that the work PRIDE does isn’t necessarily the straightforward evil agenda that it might have first appeared. It’s apparent that the Yorkes deeply care for Molly, and that they consider the trauma that they’re going to have to put her through a better outcome than the alternative.

The kids themselves meanwhile, are beginning to grow further apart once again. Aside from their growing paranoia that their parents may be onto them, there are natural fractures as well – Gert is still not happy with Karolina taking up Chase’s attentions, especially in light of what she suspects, Nico is pushing for an answer to a question Alex seems curiously reticent to address and Molly is feeling increasingly isolated from all of them.

Where the show works here is that it gives is believable relationships on both sides – the kids fall out, bicker and come back together in the way that real kids do, without the usual ‘high school’ clichés so beloved of much modern fiction. At the same time, the parents – ostensibly the villains of the piece – are real and complex human beings as well. In the case of the Steins, it is particularly obvious that Victor is a physically and psychologically abusive parent and spouse, but there is a three-dimensional quality to the character meaning he isn’t merely a cackling bad guy but an obviously damaged human being. Nor does this take away from his culpability for what he has done, rather it makes it more real and even less forgivable.

And that’s Runaways in a nutshell – for all the glowing, flying, superstrength, super smarts and trained dinosaurs, it’s a grounded, human drama with compelling characters engaged in relatable scenarios.

Verdict: This show just keeps getting better. Gripping, tense drama with complex emotional characters and dense plotting. 9/10

Greg D. Smith