Summary
Run Away gets even crazier in “A Different Time”, but the pieces are beginning to fit together quite nicely, and each new answer shines a light on a handful of other mysteries.
Episode 4 marks the midway point of Harlan Coben’s Run Away, and you can tell. Things were getting complicated already, but “A Different Time” just throws in a bunch more subplots and possibilities for good measure. Coben’s story structuring can sometimes feel like a writing challenge, a response to a dare about how much lunacy can possibly be folded into a single narrative, and you really get a sense of that here.
But, perversely, it’s all starting to make a bit more sense. The questions being raised, although they don’t yet have answers, feel right; like you know the answers are going to shed some light on a couple of other things you’ve been wondering about. This is why these shows are so compelling, almost in spite of themselves. They’re like those puzzles you give toddlers to do, where they have to fit a shape in the right hole. That satisfying click of correctness never leaves you. Less of the drooling, though, hopefully.
Something Happened to Paige At Lanford University
If you recall the opening scene of the season, Paige watched some guy in a balaclava viciously assault someone. Now that Wiley Corvel has revealed that Paige actively sought out Aaron, Simon has realised that something happened to Paige at Lanford that drew her to him. But what? Well, as a bit more of a clue, “A Different Time” returns to that assault, so we can see first-hand the young boy being viciously beaten with gym equipment. In the present day, the victim, now with a heavily scarred face, is watching Simon stomp around the campus.
Simon and Ingrid helped Paige move into the halls of residence, so they’re vaguely familiar with her former roommates, Katie and Judy. Simon speaks with Katie first, since apparently Judy is off-campus for the term break. Katie, instantly suspicious, tells Simon that Paige drove to see Aaron and then suddenly started acting like she hated Katie. And this was before the drugs.
Paige also apparently told Katie that she was having “problems at home”. But what does that mean? Whenever Simon thinks back, even their arguments were pretty tame.
PVB Identified
Simon calls Sam at home and gets him to look through Paige’s planner, which contains several entries noted with “PVB”. The acronym doesn’t seem to pertain to any of the clubs, like the Family Tree Club, which Paige had also pencilled in. The PVB entries began on October 9th.
PVB is identified by Paige’s other former roommate, Judy, who hasn’t left campus after all, despite Katie’s earlier claims. PVB stands for “Professor van de Beek”, the guy who ran the Family Tree Club and was helping Paige transfer to studying medicine, like her mother. Judy reveals that Katie has been acting weird since she got into a huge fight with Paige and kicked her out, but when she and Simon go to confront her about this, she’s gone.
The next we see of Katie, it’s at the very end of Run Away Episode 4, when she’s sending the professor an email warning him that Simon is onto him. It doesn’t get delivered, though. But she’s right that Simon is onto him. After trying to track him down and learning he has been on sabbatical since Paige dropped out, Simon bumps into the kid with the scarred face when he’s trying to break into van de Beek’s office. The kid, whose name we’ll learn later, tells Simon that van de Beek was a massive creep, implying that he had relationships with students. Simon jumps to the obvious conclusion and passes the professor’s name on to Elena.
The Ancestry Connection
On the subject of Elena, Alex tells her that Neil wasn’t surprised that Damien was looking up his own ancestry – he, too, was adopted, and was trying to trace his biological family. He was adopted through an agency called “Hope and Growth”, the same one as Damien. That connection is becoming more and more explicit by the moment.
“A Different Time” also reveals why Elena has been following Maria around. She’s her dead husband Joel’s secret daughter, which means he was having a secret affair and had a secret grandchild. Not so secret that Lou didn’t know about it, though, which is why Elena has been keeping her investigation a secret from her.
As predicted, her crossing the line by breaking into Maria’s house, which was caught on camera, backfires considerably during her next visit to the vegan cafe, where Maria has her arrested. This is especially annoying since she was looking at an RIP post for Kevin Gano, another of Ash and Dee Dee’s previous victims, the one whose death they staged as a suicide.
Problems At Home
Isaac confronts Jay about the CCTV footage of him following Ingrid, and the reports of her being agitated and stressed. He’s taken to the station, where he reveals that they used to go out years ago, before she met Simon, so Ingrid might have been worried about the two of them being seen together and people gossiping. He also says that after she left the restaurant he met her at his apartment, though he doesn’t go into detail about why. Isaac thinks it’s pretty obvious they were having an affair, though, even if Ruby isn’t convinced.
This is big news, since it could quite easily constitute one of those “problems at home” that Paige apparently told Katie about. Simon has a flashback to a fall-out with Paige when he accidentally read her messages, which to be fair to him were open on her laptop, and he even mentions it to Yvonne. When he gets home and Isaac is waiting for him, the pieces seem to fall into place.
Was Ingrid having an affair? Did Paige find out about it? Later, Simon asks Yvonne if Paige is really his daughter – he thinks that might have been what she found out which sent her spiralling.
Confronting the Past
The title of Run Away Episode 4, “A Different Time”, comes from a woman named Mrs. O’Hara, whose home Ash and Dee Dee turned up at in the previous episode. Mrs. O’Hara had fostered them both, and while she seems quite fond of Dee Dee, there doesn’t seem to be much love lost between her and Ash.
But Dee Dee is big on self-improvement these days thanks to her association with a religious cult called the Beacon of the Shining Truth, which has its own songs and everything. Ash is sceptical, but she’s adamant about him facing his greatest traumas and moving on from them. And a lot of those traumas are bundled up with Mrs. O’Hara, who, it turns out, used to burn both of them with an iron among other fun disciplinary activities.
Mrs. O’Hara’s justification for this? “It was a different time”. In other words, whatever. Naturally this doesn’t really suffice as an excuse, so Ash shoots her in the face a few times, and he and Dee Dee bury her in the garden. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned.
Cliffhangers
The obligatory cliffhangers at the end of Run Away Episode 4 reveal:
- Cornelius is watching Simon’s house (Ruby earlier got the ballistics back from Luther’s shooting, revealing he was shot with a Takarov, connecting back to Cornelius and his army past), and;
- The boy with the scarred face from Paige’s university has photos of the two of them together, looking pretty romantically inclined.
But the big development involves Ingrid. While Simon is sat at her bedside asking whether Paige is really his daughter, her wound starts bleeding, her machines start blaring, and doctors rush into the room to tend to her.
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