Okay, bear with me, I just need to flail about Riverdale for a bit.
I am not going to make the case that Riverdale is a good show, because I don’t think it is. But is it an enjoyable show? Heck yes. It reminds me of a quote from Cleolinda’s Twilight essay:
I’m not going to defend [the Twilight books] any more than I’m going to defend Twinkies–you go and get yourself a Twinkie when you have a very specific kind of craving
SUGARRRRR!. If you want gourmet pastry, or even a homemade cake, you know where to get that. If you’re eating a Twinkie, you clearly know what you want and why you’re eating it, and you know that it’s not good to eat very many of them, but… you know… sometimes you just want one.
So yeah. Riverdale is my Twinkie TV. Spoilers below the cut, if you care about such things.
I admit I was concerned going into tonight’s episode, because the last time this show was on it was the 5-episode “Rivervale” arc, where everything took place in a Twilight Zone alternate universe. That freed the writers to rewrite backstories, introduce supernatural elements, and kill off major characters, in the knowledge that a reset button was coming. (Maybe Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa should have written a horror anthology series instead. Between Riverdale and Afterlife with Archie, I have to wonder if he even likes these characters.)
The fifth episode, “The Jughead Paradox”, was… I don’t know how to describe it. It got so weird and meta that I stopped being able to tell if it was any good or not, like it had transcended mere notions of “good” and “bad” TV and become some kind of experimental art object. It kind of blew my mind. But at the end they went back to the main universe, and it seemed like the whole Rivervale arc was a deus ex machina to get Archie and Betty out of the cliffhanger they’d been left on, with a call from alternate-universe Jughead warning them about the bomb under the bed. So I had to wonder how they were going to follow that up. Surely a return to Riverdale as usual would necessarily be an anticlimax.
Nope.
I did not think this show had a shark left to jump, but the writers are completely out of fucks to give and I am HERE FOR IT.
So the thing is, after surviving the bomb, Archie and Betty become superheroes. And I don’t mean like those times Archie took up recreational vigilantism (yes, more than once; man, this show). I mean that Archie is super-strong and invulnerable, Betty has developed some kind of psychic Spidey Sense, and even the dog has super-healing now. Poor Jughead was only deafened, but I’m waiting for that to turn out to be a side effect of some kind of superpower too.
And they’re going to need superpowers, because over in Cheryl’s plot there’s an enemy coming for them. You see, Cheryl is now possessed by the ghost of her ancestor Abigail, who was a witch. Yup. And Abigail cursed Archie’s, Jughead’s, and Betty’s ancestors, who killed her, so now she’s due to follow up with their descendants. The show has feinted at supernatural elements before, but usually explains them away in the end. When Cheryl invoked the curse at the end of last season, there was ambiguity about whether it was real. But this time they’ve really gone for it. Ghosts, witches, curses, they’re all canon now.
By comparison to the rest of this episode, Veronica putting out a hit on her father was almost humdrum. Also Archie started a gang war, and the latest serial killer came back to kill Betty’s creeper ex, but in Riverdale that’s a Tuesday.
So yeah. I might have said in previous seasons that I had no idea what was going to happen next on this show… but now I have literally no idea. Maybe aliens are going to invade! Maybe we’ll have a zombie apocalypse! Maybe Kevin will get a substantial storyline of his own! (No, too farfetched.) Or maybe the CW just noticed that superheroes and Supernatural have done really well for them, and are trying a Hail Mary pass. Who knows where this is going, but I can’t wait to find out. Pass the Twinkies.
As Inclination Leads Me 