the town: stranger than fiction - part 1
re-viewing season 4 of riverdale
“Are we just doomed to be haunted by this town for the rest of our lives?”
Riverdale Season 4
I initially started watching Riverdale around the end of season 4 airing, and it was the first season that I felt like I really got into when finding my way into the world of Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica. Alongside season 3, this is a season that has always felt to me like the golden era of Riverdale, and it is a super weird one, full of the twists and turns that make this beautiful, terrible show so special. It provides a fitting ending to the first half(ish) of the show, a bittersweet farewell to its high school era.
Before we get into the story, let’s quickly address something that has troubled me over the past few seasons.
The milkshakes. I am willing to suspend my disbelief a lot as a Riverdale viewer, but there is simply no way that these characters are all able to constantly drink those milkshakes. Are they feeling okay? Is no one in Riverdale lactose intolerant? Does Pop’s have dairy free or vegan options? Why does Riverdale not represent the need for an oat milk alternative? In cast interviews, actors have revealed that the milkshakes used on set (for production purposes, usually these are glasses of greek yoghurt and food colouring) are undrinkable and gross. So why do they always look so good? The milkshake motif is starting to haunt me. I had a dream last night that I was learning the secret to making beautiful, Riverdale style, camera ready milkshakes, and I’m truly starting to worry about the impact of this programme on my psyche.1
Synopsis:
This season is paced a bit differently than previous arcs, so for this synopsis I’ve decided to break it down into approximately seven different plotlines(there’s a lot going on), most of which are primarily associated with a main character. I am including all 19 episodes of season 4 in this recap, along with the first three, pre time-skip episodes of season 5. I went back and forth about this a lot, as those last three episodes are not technically part of this season, but the 19 episodes that make up season 4 feel a bit incomplete without them, as they were originally intended to be part of the season before the schedule was amended due to the start of the covid-19 pandemic. This is another densely packed season, so let’s dive in to the strange fictions of Riverdale season 4.
The Farm & the FBI
While season 3’s Farm storyline left many questions unanswered, season 4 picks up by revealing what happened to the members who disappeared and the ultimate fate of the cult and its enigmatic leader, Edgar Evernever. Betty is now working with FBI agent Charles Smith. As Alice Smith and F.P. Jones’ son, Charles is actually the half brother of Polly and Betty, and Jughead and Jellybean. Betty and Jughead are still dating at this point and no one really comments on how weird their family is, even after Alice and Betty move back to their house in Riverdale which had previously been sold to the Jones family, resulting in the two families living together like a creepy, mystery investigating Brady Bunch. With Charles’ help, Betty works to track down her mother and the rest of The Farm. Charles reveals to Betty and Jughead that Alice was working with him from inside the group, but that she has dropped out of contact. Betty finds out that Kevin is still in communication with his Farm boyfriend Fangs, and uses this to get information on her mother. They find out that The Farm has relocated to a motel, where Edgar has become an even more controlling and now tyrannical leader, obsessed with finding spies in the organisation, and planning his next great escape in order to evade the FBI catching up to them. Like infamous cult leaders before him, his persecution complex and fear of outside intervention in his religious movement leads him to become violent and obsessive, and he intends to have his followers ‘ascend’ by having Evelyn drive them off a cliff in a dramatic murder-suicide plan. Unlike those before him, Edgar’s own plan to escape comes in the form of building a rocket ship which he intends to fly off in while wearing an incredible Evel Knievel-esque jumpsuit.
When Betty and others infiltrate The Farm’s new compound, they uncover these plans, and Betty and her mother work together to try to get the congregation off of the compound before they can come to fruition. Many of the members, including former high school principal Weatherbee, have been tortured in Edgar’s attempt to uncover the identity of the spy in the community. Betty is able to rescue the group, and she and Alice confront Edgar, resulting in Alice shooting him before he can escape. Evelyn is arrested, a traumatised Polly goes to a treatment centre, and Alice and others return home to Riverdale.
Following their successful rescue of The Farm, Charles offers to continue training Betty as a junior FBI agent. Betty and Kevin attend a training where Betty is able to accurately identify serial killers from sets of photos that Charles shows the class, even though it seemed like the point of the lesson was that murderers and non murderers are all people and they can come from anywhere? Apparently, her uncanny ability to recognise serial killers by sight alone can be attributed to having the serial killer genes, as Charles reveals that he has them too. This raises a lot of questions for me, because Betty has solved numerous murders by this point in the show, and known a lot of killers, and yet suddenly she has a special ability to detect murderers? Maybe I’m misunderstanding how the whole serial killer genes thing works, but I think this is partly because the show doesn’t understand it either, and isn’t really interested in making it make sense. This also ties into a developing theme of associating ‘serial killers’ with physical appearance and genetic predisposition that feels slightly eugenics-y and insidious, not to mention an inaccurate, true crime style, pseudoscientific approach to thinking about violent crime.
As part of her FBI training and investigations this season, Betty learns that Polly, Alice, and Betty herself all were given trigger words while under hypnosis with Edgar at The Farm, turning them into violent sleeper agents. Polly, Alice, and Betty are all hypnotised to hurt Betty, which they discover after Evelyn Evernever triggers Polly and causes her to attack a nurse named Betty, and Alice also receives a call and then nearly attacks her daughter. Betty learns that her own trigger word is “tangerine” and that when it is said three times(why does this hypnosis operate by Beetlejuice rules?) she will have to kill her dark self(still not totally sure what this means). Charles works with her to learn techniques to break through the hypnotism, allowing her to face inner demons from her experiences with her serial killer father and her “Dark Betty” persona.
As the season progresses, Betty continues to work closely with Charles on several of the show’s mysteries, including at Halloween when she receives mysterious calls and he helps her tap the phone to track down the source. It is later revealed that he has been tapping everyone’s phones in order to spy on them, and at the end of this arc we learn that not only is he a serial killer responsible for several deaths related to Betty’s investigation, but that he is also dating Chic(the guy who pretended to be him in season 2 and claimed that he murdered Charles and took his identity, and later became the Gargoyle King for Penelope in season 3. Serial killer love wins!) Ultimately, Charles is arrested for murder.
The Stonewall History
Season 4 introduces an elite prep school called Stonewall Prep when Jughead is recruited by one of its teachers, Mr. Chipping, after submitting one of his short stories to a contest. While he is initially reluctant, Jughead agrees to study at Stonewall, bringing him into an elite world of dark academia, complete with the ultra exclusive, small literature class that he attends with Chipping and four other students. His classmates are standoffish and view him as an outsider. Slowly, he becomes more integrated in the group when he undergoes hazing rituals and is eventually inducted into the secret society of Stonewall’s writers, the Quill and Skull.
Donna: You belong now.
Jughead: Belong to what?
Bret: To us, of course.
The class Jughead joins also includes one of his roommates, Bret Weston Wallace(most of the Stonewall characters are given literary inspired names - some much more obvious than others, such as this Bret Easton Ellis inspired name), Donna Sweet(named after author Donna Tartt, whose writing was a central inspiration for this storyline), Joan Berkeley(I think this is an homage to Joan Didion?) and Jonathan (who apparently doesn’t get a last name?? And thus I also don’t know what writer he is named for). Also at Stonewall is another former Riverdale High student, Moose Mason, who transferred after his father took on the Gargoyle King identity back in season 3.
Jughead learns that students of Stonewall Prep have been responsible for the long running, beloved mystery series the Baxter Brothers(inspired by the real world Hardy Boys books, as well as Nancy Drew), with the series being handed down to a series of ghost writers, and the next ghost writer is to be chosen from his class. After winning the short story contest, Jughead is offered the contract for authorship of the next Baxter Brothers instalment, an honour which inspires envy in his classmates. Not long into the year, Moose disappears from the school and joins the army. Chipping unexpectedly commits suicide during a seminar by jumping through a stained glass window, and Donna alleges that she had been having an affair with the teacher before his death. Replacing him is Francis DuPont, Stonewall alumnus and original author of the Baxter Brothers. Jughead discovers that DuPont was classmates with his grandfather, the first Forsythe Pendleton Jones, and Jughead decides to investigate the suspicious circumstances of Chipping’s death and his estranged grandfather’s departure from Stonewall. Jughead suspects that the original Baxter Brothers mystery was actually written by Forsythe, and that DuPont stole the story from him.
For a few episodes, we delve into the never before mentioned but intense rivalry between Riverdale High and Stonewall Prep. Betty investigates rumours that Stonewall’s football team intentionally harms opposing players, which is proven true when star Bulldog Munroe Moore (known in season 3 as Mad Dog, but the writers finally decided to give him a real name,) becomes the Nancy Kerrigan of high school football in an attempt to sabotage the team, but he plays through the pain and gets recruited to Notre Dame (and immediately written off the show never to be seen again). Following their football defeat, Betty, Veronica, Cheryl, and Toni form a quiz team to face off against the Stonewall champions. They make a great team and end up narrowly defeating Stonewall in the finals, but when Bret uses evidence found in their dressing room to claim that Betty cheated, their win is taken from them and Betty is suspended.
Back in literary mystery world, Jughead struggles to write a draft of a Baxter Brothers story after his first attempt, a mystery inspired by Jason Blossom’s murder, is rejected by the panel. His next draft is based on his experiences at Stonewall (including a self insert character he calls Jarhead,) which details the nefarious social order of the school and the suspicious experiences involving his classmates and teachers. The new novel, much like this season’s plot so far, reads like a really bad rewrite of The Secret History. My notes for this part of the season just said “so much scheming at stonewall. we’re supposed to feel bad for jughead. This is exhausting”.
There are a few points when Jughead and his classmates almost form genuine and interesting relationships - the sharing of secrets when Jughead is inducted into the Quill & Skull, for example, or when Donna and Jughead work together after Jughead challenges Bret to a duel of honour - and I really wish we would have seen more of these relationships, which serve to really deepen the emotional investment in the Stonewall characters and storyline, and to strengthen the intrigue and mystery surrounding them. Mostly, however, these moments get overshadowed by the Stonewall preppies being antagonistic and creepy - trapping Jughead in a coffin so he thinks he’s been buried alive, scaring Betty and Jughead in the dorms wearing masks and carrying hatchets, mocking his writing and trying to push him out of the writing contract, etc. Later, Jonathan accuses Jughead of plagiarism, and, having been sabotaged by Bret and the others collaborating against him, Jughead is unable to refute the claims, and facing expulsion, agrees to leave Stonewall and forfeit the Baxter Brothers contract.
Just before spring break and Jughead’s imminent departure, Donna and Bret invite him to the Ides of March party, a bacchanal in the woods near Stonewall, and suggest that Jughead invite his friends as well. Joan, Donna, Bret, and Jonathan enact a plan they have come up with for a ‘perfect murder,’ hitting Jughead on the head with a rock, drugging Betty and placing the rock in her hands, and then leaving her to be found holding the rock over Jughead’s lifeless body. However, Jughead, anticipates that they’re planning something, and survives with help from Charles and his friends. After doing CPR and following Charles’ instructions, Archie, Betty, and Veronica burn their bloodstained clothes and hide the evidence. A few days later, Jughead is reported missing, and there is a search party, then an investigation into his death. While this is not revealed to the viewer until later on, the investigation is really a set up to try and catch the Stonewall Prep students, and Jughead’s friends, family, and a few others are all in on the scheme. Bret and Donna, meanwhile, become increasingly concerned about whether or not Jughead is really dead, and whether their plan will be discovered, crashing the memorial service for Jughead, harassing Betty and others, and starting rumours that Jughead is still alive, which spread through Riverdale. Alice interviews people about the mystery, and in one interview Cheryl calls Betty and Jughead “Riverdale High’s Hamlet and Ophelia”. This isn’t plot relevant, it’s just a bizarre thing to say! In order to convince everyone that Jughead is really gone, Betty and Archie pretend to have an affair. In the short term, this is a successful gambit, but in the long term, it awakens old feelings between the two, destroying their respective relationships by the end of this arc.
Finally having collected the evidence they needed, Betty and an alive Jughead, who has been hiding out in the bunker in the woods, confront Joan, Bret, Donna, and Francis DuPont, unveiling the truth behind the attempted murder of Jughead and the secret history of the Baxter Brothers series. All four of his classmates worked together to plan the ‘perfect murder’ and to frame Betty for Jughead’s death. Their goal was to claim the Baxter Brothers ghostwriter contract, which had a secret requirement - the ghostwriter had to not only write about a perfect murder plot, but commit one themselves. The rumored Stonewall Four - previous Stonewall students who went missing mysteriously - all can be connected to new ghostwriters taking over the series. This suggests that they were all murdered by the previous writers, including Mr. Chipping, who was struggling with guilt over the murder he committed, and recruiting Moose and Jughead, who were being set up as potential murder victims for the next writer.
Additionally, Jughead is able to confirm that the original Baxter Brothers story was written by Forsythe, but when he was expelled from Stonewall, DuPont forced him to sign the story over to him, allowing him to start the successful series of mystery novels. After Forsythe left, the rest of their class - Jane Dallas Brown(I’m assuming that this name is a literary reference, too, but I’m not sure to whom? Please leave a comment if you have any ideas?), Charles Chickens(a play on Charles Dickens??), and Theodore Weisel(a reference to Elie Weisel? I’m assuming?) all died under suspicious circumstances, murdered by Francis DuPont to cover up the true origins of his writing career.
Just like fellow ghostwriter Mr. Chipping before him, DuPont jumps out of the classroom window to escape punishment. Joan’s diplomatic immunity protects her from facing charges, Jonathan has mysteriously disappeared and it is implied that his classmates may have killed him, and Bret is arrested for his crimes, while Donna escapes prosecution by claiming to have been an unwilling participant in the whole scheme, and even successfully wins the contract to relaunch the Baxter Brothers/Tracy True franchise. Betty confronts her one final time and it is revealed that Donna’s grandmother was Jane Dallas Brown, the original writer of the Tracy True mysteries, which were also stolen by DuPont. Under threat of releasing this new evidence of Donna’s motive to take down DuPont, Betty coerces Donna into abandoning her goal of writing the next Tracy True story.
After escaping justice, Joan is the first of the group to be killed by Charles in the ‘preppy murders,’ shortly followed by Bret. Donna is the next target, but Betty and Jughead successfully uncover the truth that Charles is a serial killer, that he has been spying on them, and that he was responsible for killing both Joan and Bret.
Thistlehouse
At one point during this season, Cheryl Blossom claims that her house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I cannot claim any architectural expertise but… no it was not.
After leaving The Farm, Cheryl, Toni, the twins, and the exhumed body of Jason Blossom have all moved back to Thistlehouse, a return to classic Blossom family drama. Cheryl keeps her brother’s body in the family chapel and talks to him, and is very upset when anyone else tries to enter the house for fear of this secret being discovered. This becomes a real problem as Cheryl and Toni try to juggle the responsibilities of the house and the family with the fact that they’re both teenagers in high school, especially because they are now basically co-parenting Juniper and Dagwood, Cheryl’s niece and nephew, after their rescue from The Farm. There’s a whole subplot where they go through all the parenthood tropes that you would see on a sitcom with new parents, as they try to balance their busy lives, and take care of the twins with limited help from Nana Rose. But, again, they are not in fact parents. They are in high school. The whole thing feels very out of place.
An old doll dressed in a little sailor outfit appears in the house and seems to move around on its own, causing them to believe the doll is haunted, and Nana Rose reveals that she thinks the doll is possessed by the spirit of Julian, the triplet that Cheryl allegedly absorbed in the womb. Toni understandably finds living in a house with her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s two dead brothers unpleasant (Cheryl when Toni confronts her about this: “I was gaslighting you before!”). Eventually, with help from Archie and the gang, they are able to give Jason a proper funeral and sendoff, which is actually really sweet, and Julian is exorcised when the truth behind the supposed haunted doll is revealed. As usual, Penelope Blossom was behind it - as Cheryl says, it was a plan of “prolonged gaslighting in hopes of driving me cuckoo bananas” whereby after season 3’s murder filled G&G campaign, Penelope hid in the walls of the house to avoid capture.
Cheryl and the writers this season, much like every early 2020s Twitter user, love using the word gaslight. Unlike the average tweet, however, I think that trying to trick someone that a haunted doll is living in their house is a situation that actually warrants usage of the term.
Amidst all of this chaos, a few members of the extended Blossom family: Cricket, Fester, and Bedford, also briefly appear to stay at Thornhill and to try and wrest control of the family business from its teenaged heiress. When Uncle Bedford attacks Cheryl and Toni kills him trying to defend her, she and Cheryl have to hide the body and figure out a way to get Cricket and Fester out of the house, so Cheryl invites them to a dinner where, half way through the meal, she pretends that they’ve baked Sweeney Todd style pies out of his remains, causing her relatives to flee.
Shortly before graduation, and completely out of nowhere, Toni reveals that she has not told her family about her relationship with Cheryl, and that she is afraid to come out, not because her family is homophobic, but because they are Blossomphobic. Toni moves out and they take a break in their relationship. They do still go to prom together and are elected as co-prom queens. Although Toni’s grandmother starts to come around on Cheryl in spite of her hatred of the Blossom family legacy, Cheryl decides to end things with Toni and announces that she will not be attending Highsmith College with her, but staying in Riverdale to try to repair the damage done to the town and its people by her family. It’s kind of a tragic, self sacrificial moment of Cheryl finally deciding to make non-selfish decisions and losing the things that make her happy in the process, but at the same time… no one asked her to do that? And it doesn’t help anyone? It’s a strange ending to this arc for Cheryl and Toni.
The El Royale
While I think Archie has a really important character arc this season following the death of his father in episode 1, most of his plotline this season is very uninteresting to me. After starting up his boxing gym, the El Royale, in season 3, Archie has been continuing to work on it and starts to develop it into a community centre to provide a safe place for the young people of Riverdale’s south side. He offers shelter, resources, and mentorship to kids, and works to get them off the streets and away from drug dealing, as a man named Dodger has been operating out of an arcade in the neighbourhood to recruit kids to work for him. Archie inadvertently starts a war with Dodger’s family, including Darla Dickinson, a woman Betty met in season 2 when she was investigating ‘The Shady Man’ murdered by Chic in the Cooper house. They nearly ruin his community centre Thanksgiving but are stopped by the combined power of Molly Ringwald and an exploding deep fryer turkey, and later Archie returns to his vigilante justice mode to take the family down, etc. Archie’s life is also complicated when his paternal uncle, Frank, returns to Riverdale, bringing with him trouble from the past, but also eventually becoming more of a role model for Archie. Ultimately, Archie renames the community centre in honour of his father, Fred Andrews, and he is able to fulfil his goal of helping South Side kids.
After missing a lot of school the year prior while he was incarcerated, and falling behind his senior year after the passing of his father, Archie doesn’t have the credits he needs to graduate, and is told he will have to repeat his senior year. His mother has been trying to help him get into college, but he loses his spot in the Naval Academy boxing programme to K.O. Kelly, who makes a cameo appearance from Riverdale spinoff Katy Keene(Katy herself also appears in another episode). In the lead up to graduation, the seniors at Riverdale High recover artefacts left behind in a time capsule by a previous class, and Archie is fascinated with an image of four young men preparing to leave for the army. During the graduation ceremony, he has a vision of them, and decides(despite never showing an interest before this) to immediately sign up for the army instead of finishing school or looking for other college options. The episode ends with him leaving for basic training, with one last goodbye with Jughead, Betty, and Veronica, who chase after him in his jalopy to see him off.
The Maple Room
Veronica is not on great terms with her family after getting both of her parents arrested at the end of last season. Hiram is convicted, but he also built and owns the prison, so it doesn’t really impact his life, and he is quickly released. Helping his case is Hermosa, a private investigator who is also Hiram’s oldest daughter, who Veronica previously did not know about. Veronica decides to become independent, and starts her own rum company(as a high school student, below the drinking age.), which takes some trial and error and a lot of pushback from a vindictive Hiram, but results in her developing a special, patented rum blend with help from Cheryl, resulting in the creation of Maple Rum. After difficulties running their operation out of La Bonne Nuit, Cheryl and Veronica make use of the Maple Room, the gentlemen’s club that Penelope started in season 2, and start selling their product to her wealthy former clientele in the new, exclusive club. Toni and even Penelope(wearing a creepy mask) start working in the Maple Rum as well, and Veronica’s solo venture is a success.
Worried about her father’s legacy, Veronica also temporarily changes her surname to Luna, which was Hiram’s family name before he changed it as a teenager. Her chances at attending Barnard College are threatened because of her involvement in the rum business. Hiram has a health scare and starts working out a lot instead of going to the doctor, but then turns out to be fine. By the end of the season, though, Veronica is able to reconcile with her parents, and even work with Hermosa, and plans to start college in the fall with the name Veronica Lodge.
Tickled
I genuinely do not know where to start with this. I still haven’t figured out how or why this is a plotline.
Kevin Keller’s love life has not been great for the past few seasons, and most recently he and Fangs Fogarty broke up after the new religious movement they joined while working together on a high school production of Heathers the Musical stole their kidneys and then Kevin got left behind when Fangs and the others ascended.
In the aftermath of all of that, they still like each other, but Kevin is hesitant to get back together. Instead, he returns to one of Riverdale’s favourite dating apps, grind’em(the other one, weirdly, is Bumble, which they seemed to be advertising for in an earlier season, since it was the only app to have a real world name and not a Riverdale-version name?). He matches with Terry, who takes him to the Five Seasons not to hook up, but to help him film a video, for which he pays well, and invites Kevin to keep working with him.
What kind of video was this, you ask? It was a tickle video. A video of two handsome guys tickling each other. It is not sexual, Kevin and Terry and the show itself keep insisting.
Kevin decides to ask Fangs to collaborate with him on tickle videos(instead of like, asking him on a date or having even a moment of emotional honesty with himself or his partner.), and soon they get Reggie involved and start a rival production to Terry’s when they realise how much money can be made in the tickle porn industry, which snowballs out to the rest of the football team and cheerleading squad. When Terry finds out they’ve struck out on their own, he and his bodyguards threaten to break their fingers (so they can never tickle again! Obviously.) if they don’t cease. Not long later, Principal Honey threatens them all with expulsion unless they stop making videos.
I can’t figure out what purpose this plot serves in the Riverdale story. It is made somewhat relevant when it ultimately ties into the season long video tapes arc, leading into the final mystery that bridges the end of season 4 and the beginning of season 5, and ending the high school era of Riverdale. But mostly, all that can be said is summed up by Kevin’s matter of fact explanation when pitching the whole scheme to Reggie: “We make tickle videos for a guy called Terry.” What more can be said?
Voyeurs and Auteurs
Finally, we end this part of the show with another actually important storyline - the ominous mystery of videotapes being left at the homes of Riverdale residents. The videos consist primarily of extended, eerie footage of people’s homes, and later video tapes begin to appear that even show the inside of homes, such as when the Voyeur sneaks into the Cooper/Smith/Jones house and films while the inhabitants are sleeping. Tapes are delivered slowly and infrequently, but as the school year draws to a close, ‘the Voyeur’, as everyone has come to refer to the mysterious person behind the tapes, gets bolder, and starts to create videos which replicate terrible occurrences in Riverdale’s history. In one, a group of people wearing Archie Comics inspired masks in order to represent Jughead, Betty, Archie and Veronica stand in the woods in the dark. The figure in the Betty mask smacks the Jughead figure with a rock, and the group appears to beat him to death, an eerie recreation of the exact murder plot the group was accused of when Jughead was believed dead. Fred Andrew’s shooting by the Black Hood is reenacted in a video tape left at Archie’s house. Another tape recreates the death of Jason Blossom, and when Jughead’s investigation leads him to a video store called Blue Velvet, he learns that they have a collection of snuff films in a back room, including the real footage of Jason being killed by Clifford, as well as other videos of Riverdale tragedy and horror. In order to learn more about the Voyeur - or as Jughead starts to call them, the Auteur- and their connection to the store, Betty ends up selling the home video footage of her father as a child being trained to be a serial killer that he showed her at the end of season 2 to the store. This gets them invited to an exclusive screening party which they suspect the Auteur will attend. This VIP event for people who want to watch snuff films is predictably terrible, but Betty and Jughead find and chase after the Auteur before losing them in the crowd, and Jughead discovers that his younger sister, Jellybean, is also attending the party. The Auteur’s next tape shows a group of Riverdale high students murdering their school principal, replicating a short story that Jughead has written. Another tape appears at the high school prom which shows masked figures murdering David, the owner of the Blue Velvet video store. David goes missing and evidence suggests that he was the Auteur, however it turns out that Charles was the one who killed him, and he wasn’t the Auteur either. The real Auteur was actually Jellybean Jones, who enlisted the help of her friends from the community centre to play parts in her increasingly elaborate productions, and even was assisted by David in directing and producing the tapes. After being dropped into the world of Riverdale when she moved there in season 3, and struggling to cope with Jughead leaving, first for Stonewall, and soon for college, Jellybean lashed out by creating the videos and becoming the Auteur.
Because of the pacing and production issues which affected this arc, I wish it had been given more time, as the reveal feels rushed and somewhat incomplete. With that being said, I think that this turns out to be one of Riverdale’s most interesting mystery arcs.
First, it gives fascinating insight into the experiences of young people growing up in Riverdale, who have experienced murder investigation, moral panics, serial killers on the loose, the town quarantine, and more, all on top of the socio economic problems that plague the town and have shaped the lives of the community centre kids. By reenacting the tragedies of the town, Jughead points out, the Auteur “is trying to blur the line between fact and fiction.” Lacking agency and trapped in the toxic, tragic cycles of Riverdale, the kids develop their own way of engaging with their world and the narratives that have shaped their lives.
The video tapes themselves point to the curiosity of video as a medium, be it tapes or television, and the way that it replicates and distorts the world. Elsewhere in the show, we see tapes as they represent the dangerous immortality that comes with having your story recorded. At The Farm, the tapes Edgar stores are his insurance, a way of retelling the stories of his followers that ensures his eternal control over their pasts and futures. The tapes hidden in the Quill and Skull’s room at Stonewall replicate this, with Bret collecting the secrets and hidden lives of his classmates, exposing their personal selves to the world by capturing them on tape. The tapes created by the Auteur replicate all of Riverdale. They reenact and retell the darkest stories of the town, and in watching the tapes (or watching the show), we are made voyeurs, reveling in the twisted reality that we see on the screen, the eternal replaying of violence and trauma. Jellybean becomes the Voyeur when she starts making the tapes, bearing witness to Riverdale and surveilling it. But she and the cast and crew of Riverdale’s youth soon become Auteurs when they take the narrative into their own hands, replicating the past and present of the town through the reenactment videos they create, and instead of being trapped in the narratives and cycles of Riverdale, they become the performers, producers, and perpetrators.
Graduation
At the end, everyone(with the exception of Archie, although he still walks with his classmates) graduates from high school. I’m willing to overlook the weirdness of them all being the same age2, and also seemingly the only students in their class. This ending is very sweet, and it’s nice to see the cast come together for this celebratory moment. Suddenly, everyone from Mary Andrews to Hiram Lodge is acting like parent of the year as if I haven’t watched most of them behave terribly for the past four seasons, just so the show can have a touching finale. But honestly, it works! I also find the time capsule scene to be very charming, and it’s a nice way to end this arc of the show, and also another reminder of the way that stories repeat and are retold across past, present, and future in Riverdale. No one ever really dies, all of our heroes are in that time capsule, preserved as they were, their stories told again one day.
In part 2, we’ll talk about a few of my favourite episodes from this season, iconic moments in Riverdale history, and more.
On a similarly troubling note, the master doc where I keep my drafts for my Riverdale newsletter has now surpassed 20,000 words, meaning it is officially longer(although admittedly, much more poorly written and researched,) than either my undergrad thesis or my master’s dissertation! Deeply concerning.
In season 1, we learn that Cheryl and Jason are twins and that Jason and Polly are classmates, making all three the same age. Polly is Betty’s older sister. But Cheryl and Betty are also the same age. This feels like the set up to a riddle or a logic puzzle, but there isn’t a solution?