One of the major frustrations with the first season of Marvel’s Runaways was that the title characters never, you know, ran away. The second season solves that problem immediately, opening with teenagers Alex (Rhenzy Feliz), Chase (Gregg Sulkin), Gert (Ariela Barer), Nico (Lyrica Okano), Karolina (Virginia Gardner) and Molly (Allegra Acosta) on the run from their parents, who operate the nefarious Pride organization. As in the first season, Pride isn’t nearly as nefarious on the show as it is in the Runaways comic books, and creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage double down on the semi-sympathetic portrayal of the Pride members in the second season.

The real villain here, as in the first season, is the sinister alien Jonah (Julian McMahon, now a series regular), who enlisted the Pride members for his own ends, promising them power and prestige in exchange for helping him with his mysterious goals. The second season reveals more information about Jonah’s origins and motivations, as well as his connection to Karolina, who learned in the first season that Jonah is her father. With all the members of Pride still active, scheming against Jonah and each other while still searching for their missing kids, the second season is a pretty direct extension of the first, not doing much to expand the series’ world (at least in the first six episodes).

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At least one new face from the Runaways comics by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona shows up in those six episodes, although his presentation and backstory are so different that he’s essentially the same character in name only. Otherwise, Schwartz and Savage continue to focus on the tension between the teenagers and their parents, and despite living more or less on their own, the kids cross paths with their parents in nearly every episode, sometimes in ways that seem contrived just to make sure the characters continue to have face time with each other.

The kids do set up a home base in their signature “hostel” from the comics, a decrepit abandoned mansion buried underneath Los Angeles. They also start behaving more like superheroes, using their powers to combat threats and training to fight together as a team. The show’s fight scenes are still relatively sparse, though, and they’re not particularly impressive when they show up, especially compared to other Marvel shows like Daredevil or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The special effects, too, remain weak and sometimes laughably unconvincing. Karolina’s rainbow glow is meant to evoke awe and beauty, but it too often looks like a demo screensaver for a decades-old computer.

NEXT PAGE: Runaways' Character Work Shines, Though the Stakes Feel Far Too Low

The character work is generally stronger than the production values, and Schwartz and Savage manage their unwieldy cast (encompassing six teen characters and 11 adults) effectively most of the time, finding time for individual subplots with nearly every character. The teen romances that progressed a bit awkwardly in the first season come off more smoothly this time, and both of the group’s main couples (Nico and Karolina, Gert and Chase) have strong chemistry. Poor Alex gets sort of left out in the cold, and his potential romance with a character outside the main group (lasting only a few episodes) is mostly just filler.

In the first season, the teens discovered that their parents were kidnapping runaway teens and sacrificing them to Jonah, giving them a strong motivation to make a clean break (even if it took the entire season to get there). But the more that Schwartz and Savage hedge their bets on letting the parents go full-on evil, the less compelling the conflict is. If their parents are just misguided pawns of an alien manipulator, what’s the point of going to such great lengths to avoid them? In the comics, the Runaways moved on relatively quickly from the Pride to face other adversaries, but the show remains fixated on the parent/child conflict, which ends up dragging the narrative down.

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Even Jonah has his sympathetic moments in the season’s first half, especially as he explores his relationship with Karolina. The result is a show that seems determined to keep lowering its dramatic stakes, having characters assert that apparent threats are actually less dangerous than they seem at first. The interpersonal dynamics can’t quite make up for those shortcomings, although they’ve developed nicely over time, and Schwartz and Savage (along with their writing team) can still come up with fun, lively banter reminiscent of their seminal work on The O.C. and Gossip Girl.

The young actors, too, have grown into their roles, although Acosta still has trouble balancing Molly’s young-girl naïveté with her burgeoning maturity (and the writing doesn’t help her much on that front). The adult actors sometimes feel like they are jockeying for screen time, particularly in their many group scenes, but they shine in less crowded scenes when their children force them to confront their misdeeds. And McMahon has plenty of experience as a sneering villain, delivering threats with the proper amount of menace and condescension.

The first season of Runaways was defined mostly by its promise, as the slowly paced story led up to the premise familiar to comics readers. Through the second season’s first six episodes, the show still seems built mainly on promise, with a similarly slow pace (this season’s story is spread out over 13 episodes, rather than 10) and a lead-up to a climax that gets further and further away. It’s more lighthearted and low-key than other Marvel shows, and the characters are pleasant enough to spend time with. But the spark of excitement that defined Vaughan and Alphona’s comics has yet to make its way to the screen.