Victor is in trouble......again.
What, exactly, does one do when your father is bleeding out in the basement after having tried to kill you in a completely psychotic incident, only then to be stopped and shot in the chest by your mother? You call Jonah, of course.
Not right away — it takes him awhile to arrive. First, you call the rest of the PRIDE.
Episode 8 of Marvel’s Runaways, entitled “Tsunami,” takes a look at what happens next after the chaotic ending to the previous episode as Victor is now in critical condition. This episode is much more PRIDE-heavy than it is Runaways, but it's still got some great stuff.
The Wilders are the first to show up, busting in with guns drawn. Janet explains everything that just happened and, before they do anything else, they make the decision to send Chase upstairs. Chase is super confused about everything, especially why his mom called the Wilders (who she refers to as her “closest friends”) instead of an ambulance, but he does as he’s told.
The rest of the PRIDE start to show up after Janet sends types out “tsunami” in their group-text — code word for ‘we’re in deep sh*t.’
The Yorkes are going to be late (when aren’t they though?), however, as they’re dropping Molly off at Graciela’s. Molly is still pretty upset about the whole thing, but the episode does occasionally cut back to her and Graciela bonding — meaning she isn’t having the worst time in the world.
But Chase is having the worst time in the world. He’s broken into his father’s liquor cabinet, looking for some way to process what just happened. First, he calls Gert (huh?), who doesn’t answer. Next, of course, is Karolina. He explains the whole situation to her before hanging up. Karolina then calls Nico and tells her the whole thing, and the two get ready to head over to the Steins.
The kicker is that Leslie was listening in on the conversation between Karolina and Nico. The rest of the PRIDE has shown up at the Stein’s basement (even the Yorkes), but they’ve decided they don’t want to invite Leslie. She’s too close to Jonah, and the last thing in the world they need right now is for Jonah to see how badly they’ve messed up once again.
In the meantime, Dale and Stacey have done their best to patch up Victor. They’ve stopped the bleeding, despite the fact that they aren’t real doctors, but they can’t bring him back to consciousness. Now he’s in a coma.
Which means it's the perfect time for Leslie to make her appearance. They’re all bracing for the worst but, to their surprise, she doesn’t want to call Jonah either. She has a different idea instead.
Enter Frank and his healing gloves that Jonah gave him in the last episode. Granted, Frank still doesn’t understand their full power or how they even work, but it’s the best chance that they’ve got right now.
This means that Frank is actually being brought into the PRIDE now — something he thinks he’s excited about? He’s still not really sure what they do, and a warning from Karolina that the PRIDE is full of bad people doesn’t really reassure him. But all Frank’s really been looking for in this show is acceptance into somewhere and now he may finally have it.
Of course, that illusion doesn’t last too long, as Frank fails to bring Victor back. Sure, he wakes up for a solid five seconds and makes some gasping noises, but he slips right back into his coma.
The PRIDE is feeling pretty hopeless — a feeling that doesn’t leave when Jonah shows up, unannounced. Turns out Tina made the call, as she felt they were out of options and needed to pull the trigger.
Jonah is surprisingly calm, though. Granted, he’s not happy about all the blunders the PRIDE has been making as of late, but he has a solution for how to bring Victor back. All they have to do is use the black box that’s been giving him life all these years, and it’ll wake him right up.
However, if you’ve been watching the previous episodes, you know what this means. In order for the device to work, there needs to be a human sacrifice. And Jonah wastes no time in pointing out that Janet should be that sacrifice, as this was all her mess to begin with.
Janet tries to defend herself, saying it was self-defense and all that. She then turns the blame on other people — Dale for starters, as she says he does nothing for the PRIDE — which begins a game of ‘he should do it, no she should!’ Names are thrown out (Frank is an option that everyone seemed relatively okay with) and the whole thing eventually ends in a gun standout, to which Jonah unassumingly tells them to hurry up and pick someone.
Finally, after all that drama, we return to Janet being the chosen one. First, she gets a moment along with Robert and then asks for one with Chase. When she turns to go find him, Robert makes a last minute move and grabs a fistigon. He strips down and says he’ll be the one to do it, for the name of love and all that.
Tina isn’t crazy about that whole idea, and so — in a completely rash and idiotic decision — she whips out the Staff of One and destroys the box. This is bad.
It’s really bad because Jonah is still standing right there, watching the whole thing. He’s pretty disappointed and we’ll likely see the full ramifications of the PRIDE’s actions in the next episode, but for now, they stick Victor in a different box and plan to conserve his energy until they figure out what to do next.
The Runaways, for the most part, have stayed out of this whole event. They’ve been dealing with some of their own drama here and there. Alex finally tells Nico how he knew Tina’s password: he and Amy had been pretty close before she died and, through some kind of computer hacking, he learned that Tina had been tracking Amy’s computer (suggesting Tina is responsible for her death).
This leads Nico to search through Amy’s room once again, to see if this could possibly be true. This time she really finds something — a hidden cell-phone. Nico plugs it in to see what it could possibly contain.
We’re not going to figure it out in this week, however (you got us again Runaways). Instead, we’re getting more dinosaur action. Janet checks on Chase and all that, but after she leaves Gert, Karolina and the dinosaur emerge from the shadows. They all have to leave right now because Alex has some kind of good news he wants to share.
That good news is that the evidence against their parents has finished downloading and is ready to upload. At least, Alex thought this was good news. Some of the Runaways — Chase, specifically — has been having second thoughts about turning their parents in. If the PRIDE goes away, Victor will never heal. The whole thing turns into a giant shouting and wrestling match, which ends with Chase winning the fight (duh) and smashing the laptop on the ground. Now they all have nothing. Smooth move ex-lax.
Then we cut back to Molly, who may actually have something after all. Graciela hands her a letter that her parents wrote — a simple note that only says “Find Elian” with a key attached. Elian is the name of Molly’s stuffed elephant, one she once misplaced at a train station. Molly makes the connection immediately and decides to slip out that night to investigate. She finds a locker, to which the key can open, which contains an old VCR tape. She picks it off and heads home, leaving us with our cliffhanger.
There are only two episodes left of Season one! Check out of the new Runaways on Hulu later today, and read our previous Runaways recaps in the meantime.