the town: moths to a flame
the return to riverdale in season 5
Synopsis:
We are officially in a new era of Riverdale.
Seven years after high school graduation, the town of Riverdale has completely fallen apart. Our core four: Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and Archie have all left the town behind and lost touch. One year after graduation, Jughead is the only one who returns to Pop’s diner as the four promised to do. And six years on, when Archie returns from a tour of duty in the army, he calls up his old friends for help, bringing our cast back together to revisit the people and places we’ve gotten to know over the past four seasons, but with surprising changes, secrets, and new problems coming from the outside world and lives the characters have experienced during the seven year gap in the show’s timeline.
SoDale
Riverdale is no longer the small town it once was, and in the years since the gang left, things have fallen apart, and all of Riverdale’s resources and businesses have been redirected to SoDale, the building project Hiram started back in season 2, which is on the verge of surpassing and overtaking Riverdale. With the total control he has gained over the region, Hiram is even able to disincorporate Riverdale to further sabotage it, and to further his true aim of recovering the palladium hidden in the land where Riverdale is built. In his campaign to gain complete control of the town and its lands, he takes charge of gangs, commits a lot of arson, sets off explosions(including one at his private prison, causing a mass prison break), and does everything he can to destroy Riverdale and take control of its hidden wealth.
Many characters who stayed in Riverdale have taken on new positions in town. Toni works as a social worker, Kevin is a teacher at Riverdale High, and as more characters return to the town, they also become teachers1 and engage in various projects to try to revitalise the town. La Bonne Nuit, Veronica’s speakeasy, has been taken over by the Serpents and operates as the new Whyte Wyrm. Riverdale High is on the brink of being closed, and the town itself is barely holding together, allowing it to be disincorporated as a town early in the season. It's not until the season’s end that the characters are able to reinvigorate Riverdale and bring the community together to vote to incorporate again, under a new local government.
The Lonely Highway
Betty is finishing her training to become an FBI agent when we catch up with her this season. She has a cat, an FBI agent boyfriend, and an unhealthy work-life balance prefaced by her obsession with the Trash Bag Killer(TBK), a serial killer under investigation, who previously kidnapped her and held her captive in the bottom of a well(it’s all very Silence of the Lambs.) She returns to Riverdale to do some work at the FBI field office set up by Charles, (which has apparently just been abandoned for the past seven years and the FBI didn’t care about that?) and investigates a series of disappearances along the Lonely Highway, a stretch of road which has become largely abandoned in favour of a new road created by the SoDale construction. When her older sister, Polly, goes missing, Betty explores the highway and the nearby Swedlow Swamp, and begins to uncover the bodies of several people who had gone missing over the years, having been abducted by an unknown person or persons. Betty goes rogue from the FBI to investigate the disappearances and track down her sister, going undercover to try and make contact with the trucker who she believes is behind the Lonely Highway killings. Eventually, she finds and manages to capture a truck driver named Martin who she suspects of being Polly’s killer, but he dies before she can complete her interrogation. This plotline gets incredibly gruesome and dark, eventually leading Betty to a family of serial killers, the Starkweathers, who have been kidnapping and murdering people in the swamp for decades. At the end of the season, (and in spite of not obeying any orders or doing her job this season, and also she briefly works part time as a shop teacher at Riverdale High?) Betty completes her FBI training period and is officially made an agent.
This is a season that really brings back all of the darkest parts of the Smith/Cooper family. The relationships between Polly, Betty, and Alice are troubled and dysfunctional, the twins are growing up in a toxic environment and acting out, Hal’s legacy continues to exert its force on Betty and her family even eight years after his death, and even Charles and Chic make a reappearance during the prison break, returning to poison and destroy the family. Meanwhile, Betty and Archie also finally explore their relationship after moving back to Riverdale, and by the end of the season they decide to date. In the season finale’s cliffhanger, it is revealed that supervillain Hiram Lodge has planted a bomb underneath Archie’s bed.
Urban Legends
Jughead is once again Telling Himself Stories in Order to Live.
After moving to Iowa for a creative writing programme, he pretty quickly dropped out and moved to New York city. His first novel, The Outcast, was a big success, and surprise, surprise it was based on his experiences and acquaintances in Riverdale, so when he finally returns to town a bunch of people are mad at him. During his time in New York, Jughead struggles financially, and with alcohol and substance abuse. On the night of his book launch party, he gets drunk, leaves Betty a really mean voicemail where he calls her “a cold, fake, duplicitous bitch”, and then falls into a sinkhole and spends a long span of time injured and covered in rats, an experience which he suppresses, leaving him with gaps in his memory. Unable to come up with a follow up to his debut novel, he goes deeper and deeper into debt. Jughead continually promises his editor new pages, but fails to provide anything.
Back in Riverdale, he starts teaching English at the high school to help out, but finds his students uninterested; he also takes on part time work as a waiter at Pop’s, building a friendship with new owner Tabitha Tate after her grandfather’s retirement. Tabitha helps him do research in town to get ideas for his next writing project, leading them to investigate the mystery of Riverdale’s Mothmen. Jughead meets Old Man Dreyfus, who lives by the highway and talks about the members of his mining crew being abducted by the Mothmen. he learns from one of his troubled students2 that the Mothmen might still be abducting people in Riverdale, they learn that others have sighted the Mothmen, including Pop Tate, and they even get their hands on a strange creature that is alleged to be a mothman, preserved in a barrel of maple syrup, thanks to Nana Blossom. Jughead consults a cryptozoologist and plans to have the body studied, but then has his own Mothman experience at Pop’s, resulting in Jughead losing time, and the body disappearing. He struggles to understand the line between the real and the fictional as he digs deeper into the stories of the Mothman found throughout Riverdale, and tries to cope through the stories he tells himself about his own experiences.3
Not long after his first encounter with the Mothmen, and ongoing Mothman hallucinations, Jughead obtains Maple Mushrooms, a psychedelic drug, and hopes that taking them will inspire his writing. He gets Tabitha’s assistance and she agrees to keep an eye on him in the Bunker while he is tripping, as well as cooking the mushrooms into a burger for him, but after a high Jughead calls her a killjoy and “a Betty”, she leaves him alone to write, and when she returns he has disappeared. Tabitha, Jess(Jughead’s ex-girlfriend from New York), and Betty work together to try and track Jughead down, and commiserate over their experiences with him. While Jughead succeeded at completing a manuscript while on mushrooms, it’s complete gibberish, and Jess steals it after drugging Tabitha and Betty. Still high, Jughead left the Bunker and returned to the locations of his unresolved past, trauma which he had been warned was the likely cause of his alien abduction experience and lost time: 1) Sketch Alley where he had spent time homeless as a child and witnessed a lot of violence but was helpless to intervene, and 2) New York, where he blacked out and got rabies in the sewer. The tale he tells of meeting the Rat King, a folkloric figure who lives in the New York sewers and listens to Jughead’s stories, was one he came up with in order to survive, and retold to cope with the memories of his life at that time (how many of his other stories serve this same purpose?)
Jughead returns to Riverdale to try and get back to writing, to stay sober, and to repair his relationships. Out of desperation, he nearly plagiarises a manuscript given to him by a grad student by trying to pass it off as his own, but is unable to go through with it. He and Tabitha start a relationship. Jughead also returns to the Mothman mystery, and while investigating with Betty, realises that the Mothmen and the Lonely Highway murders are connected. They learn that the supposed Mothmen are actually members of the Starkweather family, a group of Blossom castoffs including Martin, Old Man Dreyfus, and the supposed ‘Mothman’ that Jughead obtained from Nana Blossom, and the same people who were behind the Lonely Highway kidnappings and killings.
By the end of the season, Jughead is back to working at Riverdale High and is finally finding his place back in his hometown, finally pursuing his relationship with Tabitha, and restarting the Blue and Gold and arguing for the importance of the free press as the town is reestablished anew.
Family Curse
This season keeps setting up really interesting plotlines for Cheryl, which are either forgotten or go nowhere.
Since finishing high school, Cheryl has spent most of the time sequestered in Thornhill with Nana Rose Blossom. She has refined her painting skills a lot, and Nana Rose convinces her to start creating duplicates of paintings in order to sell them, a plan which they call Operation Goldfinch4. I was so excited to see where this plot would go, but literally the first time they try to sell one of Cheryl’s fakes, the authenticator, a woman named Minerva Marble, sees through their plan, so it goes absolutely nowhere. However, Minerva and Cheryl have a connection, and Cheryl agrees to show her more of her work. Things are going well for them until a fire breaks out in Thornhill’s maple groves, started by Hiram Lodge’s arsonists, and Nana Rose suggests that Minerva should be sacrificed to the gods to stop the fire, which Minerva isn’t thrilled about! She and Cheryl see each other one more time and visit Cheryl’s gallery, but then Minerva just doesn’t appear in the show again. So: two actually interesting plotlines - Cheryl’s art forgery business, and her new relationship with someone interested in both her art and her - are totally abandoned by the show part way through the season.
Meanwhile rest of the gang tries to get Cheryl to come back and help Riverdale High, but she refuses to return to Riverdale. Toni eventually lures her out by restarting the River Vixens cheer squad, which they co-coach, Cheryl has a super cringe dance off against a teenager, this arrangement does not go well. Jealous of Toni’s new life and everyone else’s accomplishments since high school, Cheryl hosts a key party to sabotage their relationships, which successfully creates lots of conflict and drama in the group.
During the prison break, Penelope Blossom returns to Thornhill, and after she and Cheryl successfully pray the fire threatening the house away, she starts a ministry. The religion preached by Penelope is rooted in Christianity and seems to borrow from the ritual and materiality of Catholicism, and the exuberance and aesthetics of Charismatic Christianity, but its theology replaces the figure of Christ with the spectre of Jason Blossom. When her congregants take communion, they are told to “drink of His sweet water,” language which reflects the ways that the family’s and town’s tragic history has been folded into their religiosity, the blood of Christ becoming the waters of Sweetwater River where Jason went missing.
Cheryl is initially disapproving of her mother’s new religion, but when she sees an opportunity to take power, she works with Kevin to stage a series of miracles and assert herself as a new leader. She and Kevin also use their new religious movement to stage musical numbers for their congregation. This is the second time that Kevin and Cheryl have joined a cult together, and it’s clear that what they should actually do is just join a community theatre.
After Cheryl’s final miracle is performed, where she demonstrates control over a hive of bees, Penelope is ousted as the minister of the church, and warns Kevin to get out too(“When Cheryl made those bees dance to her infernal tune, I got distinct Wickerman vibes.”) Cheryl starts to genuinely believe the stories she and Kevin had invented to make her seem powerful, and to believe in the power of nature and of her brother’s spirits that Penelope had preached previously. This is another plotline I wish we had seen more of, and is one of my favourites from this season, but sort of gets dropped towards the end.
“I’m not saying I’m the first ever living saint, but what if I am? What if I, Cheryl Marjorie Blossom, am the holiest of holies? Wouldn’t that be miraculous?”
When several members of the extended Blossom family threaten Cheryl’s control of Thornhill and the Blossom maple groves, Penelope kills them, and for some reason the show acts like this is a good thing? I find it astonishing that the murder of several family members is completely disconnected from the numerous other acts of killing within the family that the show has been about so far. From the very first season, the legacy of the Blossom family and the generations of violence and destruction that shaped Riverdale were central to the events of the show, starting with Clifford Blossom murdering Jason. Like Clytemnestra before her, Penelope kills her husband, taking blood for blood, and in the seasons since, Cheryl has grappled with the need to usurp or take down her mother as a means of avenging her family, much like Orestes in the myths of the House of Atreus. If the weight of the family curse she bears, and the vengeance and murder that have shaped her entire life, have had such an impact on Cheryl in the show thus far, how is it that this renewal of familial violence is something that is taken so casually, and is viewed as a positive? It seems to totally negate the shape of the Blossom family narratives thus far, and is ultimately pointless in the larger story.
A Riverdale High student named Britta Beach is introduced to Cheryl by Toni, her social worker, and Cheryl agrees to take her in. Britta is kidnapped by the Mothmen, and the gang are able to rescue her and take down the Starkweathers. Britta continues to live at Thornhill and is mentored by Cheryl.
We learn the truth about the Starkweather family from Nana Rose, who reveals that they were the illegitimate children of her husband, and thus are related to the Blossoms; revealing yet another family with connections to the Blossom name that is consumed by violence and the mythologies that develop around painful family history. Unfortunately, this is pretty disconnected from the overall Blossom plot of the season, Penelope and Cheryl do not get involved, and there is no resolution or reconciliation of any of this.
Also incongruous with all we’ve learned about the Blossom’s family history so far is the introduction of Abigail Blossom in the last episode of the season, when Nana Blossom tells Cheryl the story of her ancestor and convinces her to invoke Abigail’s ancient curse on the town, to renew a blood feud with Archie, Jughead, and Betty, and to go so far as to secede from the town when they don’t issue an apology for the alleged wrongdoing against Abigail during a town hall meeting.
Frankly, this is something that has tended to be an issue in each of the previous series’ finales - in these episodes, new major plot threads or ideas that will become central to the plot of the upcoming season are introduced seemingly out of nowhere. But this one particularly annoys me because it feels like it goes against so much of what we know about the Blossoms and Cheryl in particular, and the fact that she starts the season wanting to atone for the genuine wrongdoings of her family, which violently settled and exploited the land and the town for generations, but then ends the season demanding that the people of Riverdale apologise to her personally for Abigail’s death feels like a frustrating resolution to an arc that never really connected through the season.
One last thing that annoys me about the Blossom family story this season: the continuing obsession with maple syrup has become very grating to me. For a while it was funny - maple snow cones, maple rum, etc. But the constant reinvocation of the maple motif completely ignores the season one reveal that the Blossoms were actually making their money in the drug trade, and that maple syrup was a cute, folksy front for the dark truth of the family, a microcosm of the ‘peppy’ exterior presented by Riverdale that covers the darkness hidden within the town. This has become completely lost in the story, and the maple trees and syrup have moved from being an evocative symbol that stands for the hidden economic and social realities of the town and are now in themselves objects with material significance and magical power.
At the end of the season, the Blossom family plot line has a lot of my favourite arcs and ideas of season 5, but it is also the most disorganised and uneven, and it ultimately feels unsatisfying in its progression of the interesting themes and ideas that always underlie our understandings of Thornhill, this family, and their core legacies in Riverdale.
In the Trenches
We’re introduced to Archie’s military career through a sequence that juxtaposes armed combat and high school football. Classic Archie material: war is a game, or football is war, or something. Archie returns to Riverdale after he is discharged and sets to work trying to help the town. During a string of arsons carried out by the Ghoulies, Archie decides to reinstate the town’s fire department. He also starts working at Riverdale High, coaching the new football team and restarting the RROTC. One of his army comrades, Eric Jackson, comes to live with him and they work together to try to reacclimate to civilian life and adopt a dog named Bingo together. Archie also takes in Jughead later in the season when Jughead has nowhere to go, and his Uncle Frank following the prison break, which Frank helps Archie to protect the town from.
Archie’s feelings for both Betty and Veronica are renewed with their collective return to Riverdale(is it the power of the town that makes them act this way?) Veronica is dealing with her marriage and then divorce, making their relationship difficult, and by the end of the season, Betty and Archie decide they want to try to pursue their relationship.
Throughout the season, we learn about Archie’s time in the army, where he was a sergeant. He was sent on a mission to Uzbekistan5 where he lost most of his men. New evidence emerges that the doomed mission was arranged by corrupt General Taylor, who planned to use Archie as a scapegoat. Honestly, I spent all season trying to figure out what war they were fighting, and the show does not offer many answers. At his graduation in 2020, we learn that the nation is currently at war, which (among other things) suggests that we are viewing an alternate history, where the US is in an ongoing war in the 2020s6. The scenes of battle, which are all homages to war movies, do not feel like contemporary depictions of warfare, especially, when we see Archie and his comrades fighting in trenches, but instead reminded me of a mix of films about the World Wars or even the Vietnam War, which all have rich cinematic history. My main takeaway was that this made no sense and it felt like Archie had been sent back in time to fight in the war rather than across the world.
Archie is sent back into the trenches when he joins the mining crew searching for palladium in the land near Thornhill, and he struggles to lead the crew in dangerous and uncertain conditions while struggling with his PTSD.
There’s also a joke this season where the writers have a character tease Archie about talking about “the epic highs and lows of high school football,” which raises so many questions for me. When Archie originally said that, it was in Leopold & Loeb, and no other regular characters were present, so they can’t have known he said that. Why would they tease him about it? Did he tell them his own quote after the fact? Or is this something he says on a regular basis, and the audience just happens to have heard his catchphrase in that particular scene? Does Riverdale grant its characters omnipotence over the narrative purely so they can say self-referential one liners?
Pearl & Posh
After leaving Riverdale, Veronica went to college, then moved to New York City. She and her now husband Chad Gecko worked together in the Wall Street Stock Exchange, where Veronica was beginning a very successful career and had gained the reputation of being “The She-Wolf of Wall Street” which she says about a million times during the season even though it’s not that funny of a reference. When she and Chad were on vacation in Marcia’s Vineyard, he flies them back to the city in his helicopter, but there is an accident that nearly kills them both, and after the accident, Veronica wonders if he did it on purpose. Chad forbids her to go back to work, so she starts working at a jewellery store instead, eventually starting a new branch when she moves to Riverdale called Le Petite Bijoutiere in the vacant Blue Velvet storefront. She also starts a company called Pearl and Posh(I hate all these names!) which does kind of legal business, making Veronica more and more like a girlboss version of Hiram. Somehow, Veronica’s business acumen helps her to revive Riverdale’s dying economy, even though jewellery seems like a terrible business idea in a place that is currently so impoverished and lacking in resources that it isn’t even a town anymore. But whatever. She also, like everyone else, works at Riverdale High, teaching economics and trying to get her students to participate in the local economy by creating her own monopoly money currency, which is not successful.
Chad comes to visit Veronica in Riverdale when she suddenly decides to move, and she gets really mad at him about it. She takes him to karaoke night at the Whyte Wyrm and signs up to perform “Shallow” from A Star is Born, then acts shocked when he sings with her. It’s literally a duet! However, duets are only one of the many problems in their marriage, so Veronica decides to divorce her husband, but things prove difficult when she learns that he has been making risky financial decisions in her name. Chad tries to team up with Hiram to take Veronica down, and he also gets involved in a new startup called CopterCab, which is basically like Uber for the uber wealthy. With helicopters. Veronica leaks a story to the Wall Beat Journal about Chad, his bad investments, and the helicopter accident, making him a disgrace and causing him to lose his opportunity with the startup.
“Were you in a helicopter crash that you paid to cover up? …
You can’t be a part of CopterCab if you crashed a helicopter, Chad.”
(The alliteration and rhythm of this line is like music to me.)
After their divorce, Chad breaks into Veronica’s apartment seeking revenge, and she kills him, claiming self defence. This is a huge moment for her, but I also had to add this as a last minute addition to the synopsis because I genuinely completely forgot this happened??
Hiram is run out of town by the people of Riverdale, who have had enough of his cartoonish villainous antics. Veronica and Reggie are once again pursuing their partnership in business (… and more?), ending the season with a plan to start Veronica’s next terrible business venture, a casino in the newly reincorporated Riverdale.
Reflections:
I have very mixed feelings about this season. On the one hand, I find a lot of the episodes memorable because it was the first season that I got to watch as it aired, and it was a really fun season to watch unfold. But it also suffers from a lot of pacing issues, and it has a hard time finding its footing in the new era it positions itself in. Losing the narrative and character structures that anchored the first four seasons now that the characters are adults definitely takes a toll on this season, as does the loss of many of the previous season’s adult characters. While this season delivers lots of iconic moments and introduces really interesting new ideas, it lacks the clear central mystery of previous seasons, and it doesn’t really hold together as a whole, even excluding the first three disconnected episodes as I have done here.
Favourite Episodes:
Chapter eighty-eight: Citizen Lodge
In a love letter to mafia movies and the gangster genre, this episode reveals the backstory of Hiram Lodge, going back to his childhood in New York, his induction into organised crime as a teenager, and his development into the mob boss seen for the last four seasons of the show. This episode sees the return of Michael Consuelos as young Hiram Lodge/Jaime Luna, who does a great job portraying the younger version of his father, Mark Consuelos’, character. I am a Hiram Lodge hater, but I really enjoy this episode, and think it works surprisingly well as a standalone episode and as the dramatic backstory for one of Riverdale’s most powerful antagonists. The story is compelling, the performances are strong(both Michael Consuelos and Camila Mendez really nail the younger iterations of their characters), and it’s a Riverdale episode that uses its cinephile references and intertextuality really effectively.
Mark Consuelos as Javier Luna and Michael Consuelos as Jaime Luna/Hiram Lodge
Chapter Ninety: The Night Gallery
This episode, directed by Riverdale’s Alice Smith, Madchen Amick, is structured by three paintings created by Cheryl, which depict different characters and their experiences searching for truth in darkness. The episode is a sort of anthology of three short stories, something that Riverdale has done a few times before in anthology style episodes including “Tales from the Darkside” from season 2, or season 4’s “In Treatment”. The first story is about Archie’s experience with a crew of miners looking for palladium on the Blossom family estate, who hallucinate and see frightening visions including Mothmen due to an unknown gas leak in the mine tunnels, all while he also struggles with post traumatic stress from his time in the army. In the second story, Betty locates and captures a suspect in her sister’s murder, who she questions and considers torturing using what she learned from being captured by TBK. However, before she can act on her threats, the suspect chokes to death on his own tongue, leaving Betty without answers and the moral problem of how far she will go for answers. Finally, in the third story we learn about Jughead’s experience with the Rat King. This episode is well structured, and each of the stories is disturbing(the convergence of TBK and the Lonely Highway Killer in Betty’s part of the episode is particularly gruesome and unsettling) and each has an intriguing mystery element.
This is one of my favourite outfits on this show… I am obsessed with this coat.
Chapter Ninety-Four: Next to Normal
This episode is both a genuinely good musical episode and a genuinely moving, thoughtful reckoning with grief? The episode is carried by excellent performances by Madchen Amick and Lili Reinhart as Alice and Betty, as Alice struggles to grieve the deaths of Charles and Polly, retreating into memories and an idealised version of her family life if they were alive. Their song performances are really well done and the main relationship between Alice and Betty in this episode is really tender and emotional. There are a few other plots in this episode, including Tabitha and Jughead’s relationship, which is brought to life through surprisingly nice duets, the less happy relationship between Veronica and Archie, and also Cheryl, who finally ends her toxic relationship with her mother, and agrees to take Britta in. The true weight of Polly’s death is really felt here in a way that often got lost in the chaos and drama of the Lonely Highway arc this season, and it’s a beautiful resolution to those stories.
Polly, Charles, Alice, and Betty in Alice’s ideal imaginary family.
Most Valuable Players:
Tabitha Tate
The Rat King
Josie & the Pussycats, who return for a special episode this season after Mel and Val left in season 2 and Josie left in season 3!
Melody, Josie, and Valerie performing as The Pussycats
Least Valuable Players:
The influx of paid partnerships in this season.
Everyone is suddenly very conspicuously eating Branded Snacks in this season in a way that they never did before. Most egregiously, this scene where they disrupt a conversation to do a quick Old Navy advertisement:
The Kevin-Fangs-Toni triangle:
Kevin and Fangs are still together after high school, and are planning to coparent a baby with Toni, who is pregnant. When Kevin and Fangs break up because Kevin decides he can’t handle commitment because he’s struggling with internalised homophobia despite having been out for over a decade and being surrounded by an accepting community. Because, we are told, when he was a kid his mother once called him “husky.” Eventually, Fangs and Toni get together and name their baby Baby Anthony, and Toni buys her baby baby jeans from Old Navy, and it's fine, but it's a pretty boring solution to the whole plot line, when the show was initially setting up this much more interesting family dynamic for the trio; and Kevin’s reckonings with his trauma feel really hollow and disappointing after we’ve had four seasons to get to know Kevin and to witness his experiences - remember when he and Fangs were tricked into having their kidneys removed? Or when he and Moose got kidnapped and thought they were going to be ritually killed by the Gargoyle King? But no, according to this season, none of that would be meaningful in understanding his commitment issues. It's definitely for sure because he didn’t like going back to school shopping with his mom.
The Trash Bag Killer(TBK)
I think the most torturous thing about being kidnapped by this guy would just be having to spend time with him. His presence is really grating, and the trash bag gimmick sucks. In season 4 when the Baxter Brothers panel told Jughead his idea for a serial killer called the Fishmonger was too gimmicky and derivative. This is that but genuinely worse.
Iconic Moments in Riverdale History:
Jughead seemingly abducted by aliens. This was the midseason finale, leaving viewers waiting for answers for weeks and wondering whether Riverdale had finally added real aliens to its repertoire. Objectively hilarious
Archie: “The best counterattack is not to fight fire with fire, but to fight fire with a fire department.” Unironically one of my favourite jokes on this show.
The gay serial killer prison break wedding.
Chic and Charles break into Alice’s house and declare that they want to get married. Alice officiates. They threaten the whole family, hold Betty’s kind of boyfriend and coworker Glenn hostage, and force the twins to play a game they call pincushion men, where Charles tries to coach Juniper to stab Glenn with a knife. He thinks the twins might have the serial killer genes, and it’s like, oh my god aren’t their lives hard enough? They’re already redheaded orphaned twins. Their parents were cousins. And now their serial killer uncle is trying to get them to stab their aunt’s boyfriend? And it’s their birthday??? I feel like the twins actually might have the worst lives of anyone in Riverdale, and that is saying a lot.
Alice presiding over Chic and Charles’ wedding, with Betty, Juniper, and Dagwood as witnesses.
“Mother enough! Begone from my temple or I will smite thee. For I am Cheryl Blossom, queen of the bees.”
“You’re not in the United States anymore. You’re in Riverdale.”
Foreshadowing:
The Trash Bag Killer story continues into season 6
This is the first season that we ever hear about Palladium, but it's basically the most important thing for the rest of the show.
The question of Cheryl’s possible magical abilities, first demonstrated this season, will show up a lot more in season 6.
Season Rankings(so Far):
Season 3
Season 4
Season 1
Season 5
Season 2
This reminds me a lot of season 6 of Glee when everyone abandons their dreams to teach high school show choir…
This character’s name, by the way, is Lerman Logan. As far as I can tell, he has absolutely nothing to do with the actor Logan Lerman.
While clearly inspired by the real world urban legends of the Mothman and rat kings, the entities in the show have very little to do with their real counterparts, while still serving similar mythological purposes within the cultural landscape of Riverdale. The Mothmen of Riverdale are not like the creature famously sighted in Point Pleasant, West Virginia that the name is usually associated with, but instead are seemingly alien creatures with red eyes that abduct humans, perhaps in a UFO like craft. They are very similar to what UFOlogists would call “greys”, a popular figure in alien stories. Jughead’s Rat King, meanwhile, is a man who lives among the rats in the sewer and considers himself king of his domain, while the common urban legend of a rat king is that it is a mass of a large number of rats who have become entwined or trapped together to form a larger, grotesque rat entity.
I can only assume this is another Donna Tartt reference?
None of my research supported the idea of US military involvement in Uzbekistan in recent years… if the writers wanted to invent a war why did they choose such a specific and real country?
I say this with the recognition that the real world US is involved in all kinds of military action and imperial violence currently … but I need to be pedantic about this the nation is not technically ‘at war’.