the town: american hauntings - part 1
recapping riverdale's supernatural sixth season
Riverdale Season 6
There is no escaping our ghosts. The past always bleeds through.
This week in my newsletter, I am recapping the major plots and weirdest storylines of Riverdale season 6, from episode 6 up to the finale, episode 22. If you’re new to my re-views or want to go back to a previous season, please have a look through my archives, where I’ve written about the first five seasons of Riverdale, as well as a separate post on episodes 1-5 of this season.
When we return to Riverdale after the Rivervale arc, it is not the same as when we left it. The timeline has been changed by the events that saved Rivervale, and strange new forces are seeping into the world, introducing magic and the supernatural into the familiar world of small town drama and mystery. This season is really enjoyable from start to finish, densely packed with new conflicts and strange plotlines. It plays in new genre space, drawing heavily from comic books and superheroes, the work of Stephen King and other horror tropes, and ideas about magic and witchcraft that draw from many literary traditions but also bring it closely into conversation with the Riverdale adjacent Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, reuniting the Archie Comics world with that of Sabrina the Teenage Witch on screen.
Season six of Riverdale is what transformed me from a sceptical viewer into a genuine fan of the show. If this show ever had rails to begin with, it had gone completely off of them, and never in my life had I seen a television programme do what this season did - and trust me, I (clearly) have terrible taste in television, so I’ve seen some weird TV, but Riverdale is genuinely one of a kind in the world of (to use the lingo of the show’s own writer’s room/characters) cuckoo bananas television.
Synopsis
Riverdale has always been very invested in its Americana influences and reference points. But in this season, we see this distilled into its truest form in a way that I think feels really satisfying and even actually smart. When watching it, I feel like the season can be broken down into four sections. The first would obviously be the Rivervale section, which was an anthology of classic short stories - we had a small town ritual, a ghost story, a witch hunt, a meeting with the devil, and a science fiction, multiverse story. Then, in the second quarter of the season we got to see it focus on superheroes and engage with the style and stories of comic books, both a great American literary genre and the original source for this show. In the third quarter, the show brings in labour history, the fight for unionisation, and the uniquely American hauntings associated with troubled and violent social histories, focusing on stories of class issues and racism. Finally, the last section of the season brings the Christian religious themes that have been threaded through the show into the spotlight, all of the big ideas and stories from the different parts of the season together in a cool way that culminates in the apocalyptic finale episodes.
The Aftermath
Directly following the season 5 cliffhanger, Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper are able to escape the room before the bomb under Archie’s bed explodes, and the house is largely destroyed. Archie is strangely uninjured despite almost being trapped by the rubble, Betty starts to experience strange things while being checked for injuries at the hospital, and Jughead Jones, who was in the garage at the time, has his hearing affected by the explosion in the days following.
Super/natural Powers
While working out at the El Royale boxing gym, Archie realises that he has gotten stronger and “denser” after surviving the explosion, and that he has developed the power of invincibility. His kryptonite - sorry, weakness - is palladium, a precious metal which can be found in the mines underneath Riverdale, exposure to which negates his powers. Betty, meanwhile, begins to suffer severe migraines(leading her to wear sunglasses indoors a lot all season, which is exactly what I used to do when my migraines were really bad. Iconic.) but she also discovers that she can see auras, and specifically sees malicious auras of danger around people with ill intent to cause harm. And while Jughead begins to lose his hearing, he gains a limited form of telepathy, allowing him to hear the loud thoughts(mostly, the things that they are saying out loud.) of the people around him. As they explore their newfound abilities and try to make sense of the new forces taking form in Riverdale, it’s nice to see these three teaming up and working together again after so long as they learn about their new abilities and try to figure out how to use their powers to save their town.
Blossom-ing
Cheryl Blossom tries to undo the curse she inadvertently renewed against Betty, Jughead, and Archie at the end of last season, but due to interference from Nana Rose, fails, and instead her ancestor Abigail Blossom’s spirit is summoned, first possessing Britta Beach and then Cheryl. Abigail plans to use the Toni Topaz to resurrect the spirit of Thomasina Topaz, and tries to complete her goal of destroying the Cooper, Andrews, and Jones family lines, but Betty figures out something is up when she sees Cheryl’s aura. Britta is able to contact Cheryl, who is trapped in a nightmare, and the group works together to perform a ritual. After holding a harrowing exorcism where Abigail is once again burned at the stake, they succeed in returning Cheryl to her body and trapping Abigail’s spirit in the Julian haunted doll, which Cheryl locks up in the family crypt. Following her possession, Cheryl becomes very ill, and learns that she is developing pyrokinetic superpowers. This discovery comes after she accidentally causes a nurse treating her to spontaneously combust; later she learns to harness and control the fire within her, both to keep herself and others safe from its ill effects, but also as a powerful tool which she can use in the fight for Riverdale.
Cheryl reunites with her childhood sweetheart, Heather, who is now a librarian in Greendale who teaches her about wicca and witchcraft. Their relationship is so nonsensical to me - all of their conversations are just like, Heather tells Cheryl a fact about magic and then Cheryl will be like “how fascinating i would like to hear more” and then the scene cuts. Like the writers are so uninterested in fleshing out the characters or relationship that the only dialogue they manage to write for them is transitional. There’s also a scene where Heather tells Cheryl about her mother passing away and all Cheryl says is “how gothic!” Normal human relationship.
By the end of the season, Cheryl has become the most powerful person in Riverdale thanks to the help of fellow witches Heather and Sabrina.
Percival
A new, sinister character has also come to town. The descendant of Riverdale founder General Pickens1, Percival Pickens is a mysterious man who quickly gains a foothold in Riverdale through a little charisma and a lot of his ability to manipulate and control others through his words. Percival’s appearance kicks off a number of conflicts between characters that develops into a powerful battle between good and evil waging in Riverdale.
Percival wins over Alice, Fred, and Tom by getting involved with the town council, as well as Kevin, who has started working for the sheriff’s department with his father.2 He also fights to gain and maintain control of the workers of the town, among others.
In his early victories against Riverdale, Percival successfully evicts the unhouses population of sketch alley, even though Archie and the gang successfully come up with a plan to house them in custom built tiny houses; Percival also reignites the conflict between Serpents and Ghoulies, tricking them into violent situations and ruining the reputations of Toni and Fangs as Serpent members. Later, Percival appoints himself mayor and gains more and more control over the town, working to destroy Pop’s and gain more and more power over Riverdale and its inhabitants through a dastardly combination of dark magic and capitalism.
Much later in the season, we finally learn the truth of Percival’s origins. In spite of his claim of ancestral ties to the town, he is a very mysterious figure, with no discernible past. It turns out that this is because he is not from Riverdale at all, but actually from Rivervale, and that he was able to slip through into the Riverdale universe, along with all of the magic introduced this season, at the moment where the universes nearly ex/imploded. His arrival in town coincided with the earliest developments of magic and superpowers, and this is because the supernatural world had bled over from the other universe. Percival is actually an immortal man who came to Rivervale in the 1600s with the earliest European settlers of the land. He and the other colonists built the first version of the town, and he secretly practiced sorcery until he was caught by the townsfolk and sentenced to death. Left to die in the woods, he finally succeeded in summoning the devil(Rivervale’s Mr. Cypher), and made a deal to sell his soul in exchange for immortality. In the centuries since, he has continued to be a force of destruction, enabling the violent settlement of the town of Rivervale, bringing dark supernatural forces into the town, damaging social progress and labour movements throughout the town’s history, etc. Because of the power he continues to amass in the present and his secret immortality, the chances of the Riverdale gang defeating him and saving Riverdale’s soul are slim to none.
The Last Lodge
Following the havoc wreaked by Hiram last season, including the bomb he planted when he left town, a furious Veronica decides to take family matters into her own hands, and orders a hit on her father. When a conversation with her business partner/boyfriend Reggie Mantle inspires her to rethink her decision, she learns that it is too late, and he has been killed.
It’s somewhat disappointing that Hiram dies off screen and that his story ends here, as he played such a central role in the last four seasons of the show. This writing decision definitely feels like it was driven by casting issues more than a planned story. While his death feels quite sudden, I think the memorial service Veronica holds for him is actually weirdly touching, and the reunion of Veronica and her extended family allows her to finally lay old problems to rest, including a nice moment of reconnection with her mother, (which is of course then immediately used to further Hermione’s Real Housewives storyline); as well as to finally have a chance to stand on her own without constantly being in the shadow of her father, which is a nice change after having so many of Veronica’s storylines revolve around Hiram and their relationship.
Reggie and Veronica officially open the Babylonium, and they try to go straight for a while, but eventually Veronica decides to make use of her Lodge connections and new employee Heraldo to bring more money and family members into the casino. Reggie and Veronica’s partnerships begin to dissolve, leading Reggie to work more closely with Percival.
Veronica also develops strange powers, which she realises when she accidentally kills Heraldo and learns that she is toxic, literally producing and exuding poison. Yet this dangerous new power also gives her the ability to absorb and detoxify, which she uses to do important things like save her friends from being poisoned by Abigail, and remove the toxins from wormwood so she can distil absinthe. She has basically become a human pharmakon - both healing and poisonous.
Serial Killer Genes
Three seasons on, we are still talking about the MAOA gene sequence (aka the serial killer genes) for some reason!!! Betty tracks the path of the genes in her family - we learn that Hal Cooper had hoped that the genes would be in his family, and Alice, Betty, and Charles all had them; Betty also discovers that Juniper has the genes but Dagwood does not. Betty learns that Charles has moved into Alice’s home as he is terminally ill, but Veronica’s toxic powers are able to cure him and he survives, once again helping Betty in the hunt for TBK. She realises that the serial killer genes somehow impact her ability to see auras, and has to work to untangle her personal blind spots and family drama from her abilities and job.
A new character proves to be invaluable in helping each of our heroes learn about their newfound supernatural abilities. Betty’s new coworker, FBI Agent Jillian Drake(referred to only as Drake) is an expert in unusual and paranormal phenomena. She provides a lot of the insights and explanations our characters need into auras, pyrokinesis, poison powers, and more, and she plays a vital role in helping Betty to better understand the serial killer genes, her newfound ability to detect ill intent and danger through auras, and the truths about the Trash Bag Killer/TBK.
Trash Bags
After becoming an FBI agent at the end of last season, Betty now has the Riverdale field office up and running again. After her coworker Glenn harrasses her at the office one night, she has him reassigned and creates an all female FBI girlboss team instead. Before he can leave town, Glenn is captured by TBK, who holds him captive and starts sending Betty parts of Glenn in trash bags as a reminder of his presence in Riverdale. This is extremely creepy, but the show does not give it any weight at all, so it seems like more of a goofy annoyance to Betty than a horrific threat. Like, she’ll be working on a case and find a trash bag with an arm in it or whatever and just be like “oh cool looks like TBK has my old coworker/ex held captive and is torturing him to send me a message. Anyway,”
Later, Betty uncovers TBK’s real identity and learns that he has been working on one of Archie’s construction crews, but he disappears again before she can make a move. Meanwhile, she works through new discoveries about her father and the ways that his violent secrets permeated her life far more deeply than she had realised. She describes the truth of her family life growing up as “apple pie served over an unmarked grave”, another iteration of the Riverdale motif of the folksy, small town exteriors and aesthetics that make up the show providing a cover for the darkness and horrors of its inhabitants across generations. This reconciliation of her own childhood memories with her career as an adult helps her to create a new profile for TBK.
In order to lure him out, Betty and the gang organise a serial killer convention called Slaughter-Con that will take place at the Babylonium, an event which draws a huge crowd of serial killer fans, creepy people, and even TBK.3 Betty shares the truth behind her kidnapping by TBK, and that she was released because he forced her to do things that made him believe that she was a kindred spirit and could become a serial killer like him. The convention features panels with FBI experts, a tell all interview with Betty, famous among true crime circles for her connection to both the Black Hood and TBK, and performances by Kevin, Betty, and the cast from American Psycho the Musical(based on both the novel and film of the same name, with a book written by Riverdale showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa!!! This is extremely Riverdale!) During the convention, TBK breaks into Betty’s house, killing the FBI agent acting as security, and capturing both Alice and Charles. Betty finds the Trash Bag Killer in her garage, where she had once witnessed her father with a dead body as a child. TBK has set up a romantic dinner to try and finally convince her to join him. She shoots and kills him.
I find this moment really satisfying and also really anticlimactic. On the one hand, seeing Betty finally kill TBK after she has spent so long hunting him and being obsessed over and terrified by the role he plays in her life as a threat to her safety, a reminder of her traumatic past, and an omen of the darkness she still fears is within herself, is strangely cathartic, and its amazing to see her so decisive in this moment when we do not often see our characters able to make the hard choice when faced with terrifying decisions like this(all of the times people have tried to kill Hiram and then wavered and failed in past seasons come to mind). Also, since this all happens during this season’s musical episode(“American Psychos”), the scene where Betty finally takes down TBK is intercut with her performing a really beautiful and emotional cover of “A Girl Before”(which is also one of the best songs from the musical.)
But on the other hand, it bothers me that this is the last we see or really hear of TBK on the show. He’s been set up for the past season as this huge force of danger, he’s done some really awful stuff both on and off screen, and he has fought so hard to intertwine Betty’s story with his own. But in the end, he’s just some guy. And then he is dead. Sure, this is a much more realistic portrayal of what might happen to a “serial killer”. But this is Riverdale! I don’t want realism! I want shocking, convoluted, confusing plot twists! Long lost family members, buried secrets! Past serial killers on the show from the Black Hood to the Red Dahlia to the Starkweathers have all had complicated backstories and secrets, deep connections to Riverdale and its history and its people. These serial killers have been representative of the cycles of history and the ways that the horrors and sins of the past return again and again, and the haunting, violent force of collective trauma and memory. At times they have been ridiculous and far fetched, certainly, but they play a meaningful role in the larger narratives and themes of Riverdale. TBK is literally just some guy.4
Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe
One of Percival’s main goals in Riverdale is to shut down Pop’s diner, under the guise that he is trying to guide the town into the future, and Pop’s is a mere relic of the past. Early on, he successfully pits Pop’s and the Babylonium against one another, but when Tabitha and Veronica have a sit down and talk about their businesses, goals, and dreams for Riverdale, they instead end up partnering. Percival later announces his plan to bring a new railroad through Riverdale(what year is this?), and reveals that the station will be built on the site where Pop’s currently stands, which he claims ownership of using eminent domain. In order to preserve the diner and its history, Tabitha and Archie come up with a plan to preserve the diner until it can be rebuilt. Archie puts together a union crew to complete the job, in opposition to the non-union labour force being formed by Percival to build his railroad(history repeats itself.) but strange occurrences initially prevent them from taking down the diner - as it turns out, Pop’s is haunted, and the ghosts inhabiting it play a crucial role in the battle between Good and Evil that is being waged in Riverdale by Percival, so Tabitha comes up with a new idea - to uproot and rebuild the diner in its entirety in a new place instead of letting it be destroyed or removed from the town. The new temporary location for Pop’s is within the El Royale/community centre run by Archie, ensuring that the diner, the history it represents, and the ghosts of Riverdale’s past that inhabit it, will be preserved.
The ghosts of Pop’s and Riverdale as a whole prove to be even more important later in the season, as it turns out that the train Percival has been so set on bringing through town is actually a Ghost Train, which will transport his conscripted army of ghosts from the afterlife to Riverdale during the apocalypse, granting him a massive army of the dead with which to fight the ultimate battle for Riverdale’s soul.
Time Travel
Tabitha ALSO turns out to have secret powers! As Percival’s plan to destroy and take over Pop’s is unfolding, an assassin sent by Percival enters the diner and shoots her, activating her ability to jump through time, always within a fixed place in Riverdale, in the radius of Pop’s. The episode “Angels in America” focuses on Tabitha learning about her new abilities and having to fight historical injustices in Riverdale in the 1940s, when the sheriff proposes making Riverdale a sundown town, the late 1960s and the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1990s when white supremacists in Riverdale target Pop’s diner. In doing so, she learns that Percival is trying to wreak havoc on the town throughout its history, and she works against him at several different points, guided by her guardian angel, Raphael, and even uncovers some information about Riverdale’s precarious future. She tries to use her abilities to go back in time and fix previous events, such as the explosion which damaged Jughead’s hearing, but learns that in doing so, she would stop them all from developing superpowers, thus dooming the town to destruction.
As the season progresses, Tabitha grows more and more capable of using her time travel powers, allowing her to create time loops, venture to more distant periods in time, clearly see possible timelines and outcomes, and create time bubbles, whereby time can be stretched infinitely within a small span of real time, which she uses toward the end of the season when everyone has to work together to quickly reconstruct the original Pop’s diner before Percival can kickstart the end times, as well as when she and Jughead go on their perfect date before the final battle, stretching time and jumping forward to the future so that they can experience a whole potential life together within an instant.
Power in a Union
One of the most important stages for the battle of good and evil in Riverdale comes in the form of a labour rights struggle. Archie and his company, Andrews construction, take on a few jobs early in the season including rebuilding Archie’s house and constructing tiny homes. His crew is unionised, and it has a long history on the show/in Riverdale of working to improve the town and revitalise Riverdale’s communities. Percival, as this season’s big bad, works against these projects not only by trying to to buy Archie’s house, driving away Riverdale’s homeless population, and promoting the construction of the new railroad, but also by poaching Archie’s crew and hiring all of Riverdale’s workers for a non-union construction job. While he promises better hours and better pay to get them to sign on, once the railroad project begins, he is controlling and exploits his workers, forcing them to work in poor conditions and taking away their benefits, as well as literally mind controlling them to stay in line and continue working. Archie, Tabitha, and Toni try to start unionisation efforts, creating resources and space for the workers in Pop’s; and when Percival’s manipulative magic forces the crew to work even after their first attempt to strike, the mind control is broken when the group joins together to sing “Bread and Roses”, reminding the workers of their collective power and inspiring them to go on strike and fight for better conditions, even as Percival uses union busting and magical retaliation against them.
Folk Heroes
In order to get some good publicity for the town and the goodwill of the people in their battle against Percival, the gang decide to make use of Archie’s new strength and invulnerability to cement him as a folk hero. They have him declared the world’s strongest man by performing a bunch of showman-like feats of strength. But when he agrees to a boxing match with Percival, Percival hides palladium in his gloves, beating Archie badly.
Jughead’s powers also turn into a useful spectacle when he agrees to do a show with Veronica at the Babylonium as Forsythe the Fantastic. Using his telepathic abilities, he correctly guesses numbers provided by audience members, wowing the casino’s visitors. He continues to use his powers to work with Veronica when he learns that he can even enter the minds of others, stealing a memory from Reggie’s mind so that he no longer has leverage over Veronica. In the visualisation of memory that Jughead enters, memories are stored in the form of Riverdale comic books in the archives of someone’s mind, from which pages or whole issues can be removed. In revenge, Percival psychically attacks Jughead’s mind, opening him up to a barrage of telepathic input. No longer able to control the voices and thoughts he can hear, Jughead retreats to the Bunker. There, he returns to writing short stories, and he has strange visions of characters that we recognise from Rivervale, including La Llorona and cult priestess Cheryl, who are somehow the subjects of his stories come to life. He also realises that his stories are going missing, and when he finally manages to catch the thief red-handed, he finds himself face to face with another Jughead.
Biblical Plagues
Percival uses his powers to unleash Biblical plagues on Riverdale - locusts, rivers of blood, all the classics - ending with his killing of Nana Rose Blossom, the oldest first born child in the town, which causes all of the other first borns - including Archie, Jughead, Toni, and more - to die as well.
Heather calls in a friend from Greendale - Sabrina Spellman - to help, knowing that Sabrina is a powerful necromancer. Sabrina needs a coven to perform the spell, so she recruits fellow witches Heather and Cheryl, along with Veronica, Betty, and Tabitha to assist her. The training montage for the coven of witches is incredible, with Sabrina instructing them to complete a ritual, ending with “step three: we do a little dance.”
Sabrina travels to the Sweet Hereafter to convince Jughead to return to life, but he is completely uninterested, satisfied to stay in Pop’s reading comics and eating hamburgers forever. There’s a weird bit in this episode where she instead brings her old boyfriend who apparently died in Chilling Adventures5 back to life in Jughead’s body, and they go on a date to Cucina Sacasa6, and everyone is super uncomfortable with it. As a backup to her original resurrection plan, Sabrina sends Veronica, Tabitha, and Cheryl to the Sweet Hereafter in her place(temporarily killing them), hoping that their personal connections to the dead will be more convincing.
Betty finds out that she is unable to enter heaven because in the coming Revelations style apocalypse she has been assigned the role of the Harlot of Babylon.7 Later in the season, Polly and Betty have a heart to heart and as a symbolic gesture, Polly washes her sister’s feet and tells her that she is cleansed of her sin and her Badness and whatever, but also that she no longer has the serial killer genes. Now THAT is a Biblical miracle! Gene resequencing via the rite of pedilavium!
The Sweet Hereafter
In the afterlife, the Riverdale witches find Jughead, Toni, Archie, and Dagwood all in imagined heavens. Tabitha struggles to convince Jughead to leave the great Pop’s in the sky behind, knowing that he would have to face his powers and the coming end of the world if he returned.
Veronica finds that Archie’s eternity is being married to Betty with two kids, identical to him and Betty when they were children(and literally played by the actors who play the younger versions of both characters), named Lil Fred and Lil Polly, all living together in a perfect little suburb. This is supposed to be his happily ever after, his heaven, but I have to wonder if we can accept at face value the show’s assertion that the Sweet Hereafter is heaven, when it feels much more like a strange, Stepford Wives esque, creepily perfect suburban simulation. He’s spending eternity with two imaginary children, and a simulated version of his girlfriend, while the real person is still very much alive. That cannot be heaven - it is clearly a trap.
Similarly, in Toni and Fang’s ‘heaven’, Cheryl finds them living with a now Young Adult Anthony(again, their real son, Baby Anthony, is still alive! And an orphan!), having just signed a treaty between the Ghoulies and Serpents, and like a happy version of West Side Story, Young Adult Anthony reveals that he has fallen for a Ghoulie - Twyla Twyst’s son. Cheryl asks them to return to life with her, and like the others, they are resistant, but when Toni realises that the life they are living is imagined and that they are missing their son’s real life, they agree to go back.
Cheryl also meets some familiar faces in the afterlife version of Riverdale when she visits Thornhill - two people who died during the first borns epidemic, Nana Rose and Dagwood, who are living their eternal lives with Polly and Jason, Dagwood’s parents. This is the part of this arc that really troubles me. In all of the previous heavens I’ve described, the dead characters are trapped by the easy happiness offered to them by the idealised world they are finding in their ‘heavens’, but they must return to the real world and to their real problems because the perfection being offered to them is false, and the people that they love most in these imagined worlds are not the real thing. But in Dagwood’s ‘heaven,’ he is reunited with his parents, and we are supposed to believe that they are in fact the real Jason and Polly. I get that this is slightly different from the previous examples because Jason and Polly were both genuinely dead, so it could be their real spirits, but I find it highly suspect, and the show seems very unwilling to acknowledge the weirdness and dubiousness of their reappearance.
After all of these efforts to convince the dead of Riverdale to leave behind the idealised dreams of the Sweet Hereafter fail, Cheryl enacts Sabrina’s backup plan to use her pyrokinetic powers in their truest form, as the powers of the phoenix, meaning that she can resurrect people through fire and they will rise from the ashes. Although she is warned against it, when Cheryl performs the resurrection, she also brings back Jason and Polly.8
With those they lost to the Biblical plagues back in Riverdale, the team set to work finally coming up with a plan to stop Percival from his apocalyptic destruction of Riverdale. As the passing of Bailey’s Comet approaches, Percival grows more powerful, so the group come up with a new plan using Jughead’s powers, which he learns allow him to create portals, to visit their twilight zone sister city, Rivervale.
Return to Rivervale
Jughead and Tabitha travel to Rivervale, a town that now has THREE Jugheads.They uncover the truth about Percival and Riverdale’s magic, both of which originate in Rivervale, and were able to escape into Riverdale when Bunker Jughead warned Betty about the explosion, saving her life but altering the laws of the Riverdale universe. Tabitha also reunites with her guardian angel, Raphael, who tells her that she is Riverdale’s guardian angel.
Shifting Tides
Reggie finally realises that he needs to switch sides when Percival tells him to ceremonially murder Kevin. Reggie tries to escape the Babylonium with his father and Kevin, and Percival announces that he will be executing all three of them(by guillotine! He literally sets up three guillotines on the show floor of the casino!). Jughead helps them escape using his portal powers, but in retaliation, Percival executes his remaining accomplices, Alice, Tom, and Frank.910 Percival also uses his terrible powers to control several of the townspeople to try to kill Archie, Cheryl, Betty, and Veronica (Reggie, Jason, Veronica’s Abuelita, and a gross zombie of Glenn), ending with both Jason and Glenn being killed yet again, and Archie being near fatally stabbed with the mythic Blade of Meggido, then saved by his now super powered dog, Bingo.
Immortality
In order to kill an immortal guy, the first thing you need is another immortal guy. At least, according to the logic of the plot of Riverdale season 6.
Having been the only one to have survived the plague of the first borns, the gang discover that Baby Anthony is immortal. Tabitha uses her control of time to age Baby Anthony into Young Adult Anthony so that he can take part in the epic final battle. This seems like a really unethical thing to do as a guardian angel but I guess all bets are off during the apocalypse?
Everyone works together to fight off Percival’s mind controlled forces and then the man himself, and when the group surround him at last, he uses his magic to turn their own abilities against them, turning Archie into a palladium statue and freezing Cheryl, but inside Pop’s he faces his final opponent, Jughead, who challenges him to a game of dominoes to determine the fate of Riverdale. While they play, Percival enters Jughead’s mindscape to try to sabotage him, but it turns out that Jughead had expected him to do that, and while Percival is distracted, he is stabbed by everyone in Rivervale as it is revealed that Jughead had turned the doorway of Pop’s into a portal, tricking Percival into the alternate universe.
Tabitha steps in and takes Percival back in time with her to the 17th century and his original meeting with Mr. Cypher. Having returned him to before the point where he sold his soul for immortal life, he can now die, and Tabitha hands him over to the devil to be dealt with at last.
The Comet
After finally succeeding against Percival and winning the great battle for Riverdale, our friends must face one last challenge - Bailey’s Comet. Percival used the last of his magical abilities to divert the path of the comet, meaning that instead of passing Riverdale, it will crash directly into it. As the comet approaches, an impenetrable magical barrier surrounds the town, trapping everyone inside.
Cheryl resolves to use the last of her power to prevent the comet from killing everyone. She calls upon the spirit of Abigail for help, allowing Thomasina and Abigail reunite(Heather, still Cheryl’s girlfriend at this point, temporarily stores Cheryl and Toni’s souls in a jar, and is forced to realise that Cheryl and Toni are soulmates, which is especially cool considering that Toni got MARRIED a few episodes earlier!). Veronica comes up with a plan to strengthen Cheryl’s phoenix powers by using the powers of all the Riverdalians combined against the comet. Having been previously described as a “human dialysis machine” Veronica’s toxic powers facilitate the transfer of the invincibility, auras, and telekinesis of the other character over to Cheryl. Now possessing all of the collective magic of the Riverdale gang, Cheryl faces the coming comet to stop it from destroying the town. As the comet approaches, we see a montage of everyone in Riverdale waiting for what comes next while they sing a full cast musical number.
The season ends with arguably Riverdale’s most shocking cliff hanger yet - the town is saved, evil is thwarted, Cheryl seems to have stopped the comet, but something strange has happened. The entire cast has been returned to a different Riverdale, a Riverdale of the past in many ways, and this is where they will find themselves for the seventh and final season(EVER) of Riverdale.
Now that's what I call television!!!
A statue of General Pickens was protested against and beheaded during the town’s civil war in season 2.
ACAB includes theatre kids.
This episode/idea feels very inspired by a similar arc in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman(who, by the way, is one of the many writers Jughead compares himself to this season), where characters attend the Cereal Convention.
And I still think the “trash bag” gimmick is stupid!!
I have to confess I never made it past a few episodes of the show and so do not know the lore. It will take some serious audience demand to get me to start writing a Sabrina newsletter.
Riverdale’s Italian restaurant introduced in season 5, named after showrunner Roberto Aguirre Sacasa.
This is, by the way, a fairly unusual way to translate this Biblical figure’s title, who would much more commonly be referred to as the Whore of Babylon or even Babylon the Great. It is not by any means incorrect but it always struck me as an odd choice to use this title in the show, or even this character at all when the rest of the eschatology of this season’s apocalyptic tidings are not given this sort of specificity in their Christian and Biblical references.
Sabrina specifically stipulates that Cheryl can only perform this resurrection because the group still have the bodies of those they lost, so their spirits will be able to return to their Earthly forms, but that is not true of either Jason, who was cremated in season 4, or Polly who was buried in season 5, so it seems impossible even by the show’s own rules of witchcraft for them to return to life, yet return they do.
But don’t worry, Cheryl resurrects them(Although this gets complicated when Percival returns only their headless bodies to their families, which is both very gross and incredibly cruel? (I know he represents the forces of Evil in this season but, like, come on!)
There’s a really nice scene where Alice, Betty, and Polly get to finally reunite, but it’s also very strange because Charles is not mentioned at all, and he is not there despite having been living with Alice earlier in the season, and I have to assume that he died as the first born child of the family(although even this does not make sense, because, lest we forget, he was also Jughead’s half brother too, and yet Jughead died in the plague.) but no one bothered to check up on him! We literally never see this guy again!