the town: the cult of riverdale - part 1
re-viewing riverdale season 3
Welcome back to Riverdale! This week, I’m writing about the third season - this will be part one of two, with more of a deep dive into one of the show’s best seasons coming next week.
Synopsis:
I’ve written before that I believe season 3 is about as close as we get to the platonic ideal of Riverdale. It is an incredible representation of all the best and worst of the show. Before we begin, I must say that this summary is overly long, as this season is absurdly complicated. So much incredible plot is packed into the season that it’s hard to know where to start summarising. Fortunately, each of the core four is given their own clear plot line at the beginning of the season, so let’s follow those four paths:
First, in the aftermath of his arrest at the end of last season, Archie is tried for murder in the first episode. Inadvisably, his mother, Mary Andrews acts as his lawyer, and while she’s a great lawyer, this seems like a huge conflict of interest? The trial ends with him being found guilty and sent to juvenile detention. For the next several episodes, he gets caught up in Serpents vs. Ghoulies violence and is then recruited to fight in a secret underground boxing ring run by the corrupt warden and guards of the Leopold and Loeb detention centre(this name is an incredible reference, not just to the infamous murderers, but to the fact that they were actually characters in the play written by showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa widely believed to have been the prelude to Riverdale). With help from Veronica, Betty, Jughead, Kevin, Reggie, and fellow prisoner Mad Dog, he is able to successfully escape, but because he and his family are still under threat from Hiram, he and Jughead leave Riverdale, and then Archie sets off alone to Canada, where he spends time in the wilderness working as some sort of forest ranger? Before being attacked by a grizzly bear, barely surviving, and finally returning back to Riverdale. Then, in the wake of like, seven incredible traumas back to back, Archie struggles to study for the SAT, and it’s like, wait, what are the stakes of Riverdale storylines?
He spends most of the rest of the season fighting people while footage of his fight/whatever action scene he gets involved in is intercut with either Josie or Veronica singing a song. This happens a LOT this season, my favourite examples probably being Archie’s first big boxing match with Randy Ranson while Josie sings “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” by Tina Turner, and Veronica’s cover of Beyonce’s “Daddy Lessons” that plays over Archie’s fight against Hiram. (Sure, Veronica, that seems like the perfect song choice for trying to entrap your dad by having him publicly fight your boyfriend for money!) At the end of the season, Archie is running his own gym, and ends the school year making a vow to his friends to have a perfect senior year with them, ominous foreshadowing of the epic highs and lows they still have ahead of them.
Back in Riverdale, Betty has also just gone through a bunch of incredibly traumatic experiences, and now has to deal with the growing influence and presence of The Farm in her hometown, the culty group that her sister Polly joined at the end of season 1, and which has now captivated her mother Alice as well. Everyone desperately wants Betty to join The Farm, but she is sceptical from the start, which is only heightened when things become increasingly out of control throughout the season. Alice nearly dies during her baptism when she is held under water to the point that she needs CPR, more and more of Betty’s friends and other Riverdale residents join the group, Alice steals Betty’s college fund to donate to the Farm and even sells their house, and she tells the Farm the family’s deepest secrets, including the murder they covered up back in season 2, giving them easy and everlasting blackmail material against everyone involved! Betty is sent to and held captive at the Sisters of Quiet Mercy convent, where the patients are being used as test subjects for experimental drugs which cause hallucinations and seizures. Later, with nowhere else to turn after her serial killer father is seemingly killed in a prison transfer accident(although he actually has escaped and returned to Riverdale as the Black Hood), Betty moves in to The Farm compound (located in the Sisters of Quiet Mercy after the convent/conversion therapy/home for unwed mothers/suspicious treatment centre for teens was shut down following the reveal that they were doing all this illegal stuff, and testing unregulated psychedelic drugs on minors), and discovers that its charismatic leader, Edgar Evernever, has been manipulating, blackmailing, and hypnotising members of the group, that Evelyn, who has been pretending to be Edgar’s daughter and a fellow Riverdale High student is actually his thirty-something wife, and, finally, that the Farm has been harvesting organs from its members under the guise of healing their spiritual pain. After uncovering The Farm’s darkest secrets, Betty is captured, and Edgar and others attempt to lobotomise her before she barely escapes. This cult does just about every cultish thing you can think of - it’s part Scientology, part People’s Temple(the group associated with Jonestown), and part Heaven’s Gate, alongside an amalgam of other tropes associated with hippie communes and fringe religious groups. And just when Betty’s long, incredibly dangerous investigation of The Farm seems to finally be coming to an end, they all disappear, having ‘ascended’, leaving Kevin Keller behind and the question of what happened to the others, including Alice and Polly Cooper, a mystery until the following season.
Veronica, meanwhile, just cannot seem to disentangle herself from the criminal world of her father despite her decision to no longer work with him. She opens a speakeasy in the basement of Pop’s, which she operates with help from Reggie. The whole thing has a Baz Luhrmann The Great Gatsby sort of pseudo 1920s aesthetic, including cabaret-esque musical performances from Josie McCoy. Her business is constantly being threatened by different gangs and gangsters, and she has to come up with schemes to keep herself and her establishment afloat. At one point during the season she finds out that her parents, Hermione and Hiram, are getting divorced, and she’s suddenly really invested in their family and how great they are, which is genuinely confusing parly after all their past wrongdoing, and also because a few episodes later she puts together a scheme that gets both of her parents arrested.
Hiram’s own schemes throughout the season are pretty bizarre. Last season, he successfully managed to gain control of the town through buying property and getting his wife elected as mayor. Now, he’s planning to build his for profit, private prison, and he’s also developing and distributing a new drug called fizzle rocks. The manufacture of this drug poisons the town’s water supply, causing teen girls to have hallucinations and seizures, and creating an epidemic which gives Hiram an opportunity to quarantine and thus gain complete control over Riverdale. His plans are put on hold when he is hospitalised by an assassination attempt(orchestrated by Hermione), but it's not long before he’s back to his usual, Hiram self - which is to say, blackmailing people, committing weird crimes, and fighting Archie in hand to hand combat in the secret underground boxing ring - which finally leads to his arrest.
Jughead starts the season investigating rumours about a new game being played in Riverdale called Gryphons & Gargoyles, and the deaths of several students with telltale blue lips from drinking blue non brand associated powdered beverage mix(which is to say not kool-aid but I can’t remember what fake name it had) poisoned with cyanide. The game is connected to a new gang in town to rival the Serpents(and the other new gang introduced this season, The Pretty Poisons, an all girl group led by weird new power couple Cheryl and Toni) called the Gargoyles, the trade of new drugs fizzle rocks and G(the G stands for Gargoyle), and a mysterious figure called the Gargoyle King who seems to be masterminding everything and turning the entire town of Riverdale into a game under his control. G&G is traced back to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy, who utilise the game and the fear of the Gargoyle King created by a combination of roleplaying and hallucinogenic drugs to control the residents/patients of the convent. It is also revealed that the main characters’ parents all played G&G in high school, a group called the Midnight Club which included Alice Smith, FP Jones, Fred Andrews, Hermione Lodge, Penelope Blossom, and others, but was disbanded when, during a party referred to as Ascension Night, the school’s principal was found dead. Throughout the season, important figures in the game are tied to Riverdale residents - the nefarious Man in Black is discovered to be Hiram Lodge, while Archie Andrews is given the role of the Red Paladin, a role which greatly endangers him. While several Gargoyle Kings are unmasked during the season, including Tall Boy(former Serpent) and Marcus Mason(Moose’s father and leader of Riverdale’s ROTC programme, who pretends to be the Gargoyle King to try and scare Moose and his boyfriend Kevin straight?), but the true Gargoyle King(or, as Jughead says, the ur-king) is unmasked in the finale episode to have really been former imposter Cooper brother Chic. The game master controlling all of these events is the very same GM from the original Midnight Club, Penelope Blossom. Having captured Betty, Archie, Jughead, and Veronica and making them all wear prom outfits for some reason, Penelope challenges the four to survive a night in the woods filled with challenges and dangers that recall the trials they’ve faced so far, and with the help of the Pretty Poisons and the Serpents, they manage to escape alive, although Hal, who has joined forces with the Gargoyle King following his escape from prison, is killed by Penelope. The season ends with a flash forward to Betty, Veronica, and Archie in the woods at night, burning their clothes and Jughead’s infamous beanie as they appear to be in the middle of covering up a crime…
Favourite Episodes:
Chapter thirty-nine: The Midnight Club
In this episode, Alice tells Betty the story of how she and her high school circle first got into Gryphons & Gargoyles. The story is told mostly in flashback, with our main cast portraying the high school versions of their parents. The story itself is compelling, paying homage to The Breakfast Club and other teen movies of the same era, but also revealing crucial details for a murder mystery playing out in both the past and the present. The episode really shines though, through its conceit - all of the performances are really entertaining and honestly quite convincing, the whole cast doing an excellent job of recreating the mannerisms and characterisations of characters including Alice Smith, Hermione Lodge, and Penelope Blossom, while also bringing nuance and naivite to these younger versions of familiar characters. And honestly, it feels like the whole cast is having a great time during this episode; it always makes watching Riverdale a little more fun when you can tell that you’re really laughing with the show.
Chapter Forty-Four: No Exit
This episode is iconic for all the ridiculous, dramatic events that occur in it, but also because I think it does something really cool in terms of storytelling, paralleling the hero’s journey of Archie’s time in the wilderness, near death experience, and his return to Riverdale, with the fateful events of the G&G game being narrated and game mastered by Jughead.
Chapter forty-six: The Red Dahlia
From its first season, Riverdale was often marketed as a noir story, but it doesn’t often feel like an appropriate descriptor for the multifaceted and absurd tone the show generally takes. This episode, however, really leans into classic noir tropes - Jughead is the hard boiled detective, Veronica the dame who comes to him for help, and various characters explore the dark side of Riverdale as they follow the trails of murders, affairs, drugs, and lies in a very entertaining homage to a genre. “Forget it, Jughead. It’s Riverdale.“
Chapter Fifty-Seven: Survive the Night
This is probably one of the top Riverdale episodes of all time, purely because of how completely ridiculous it is. So much can be said about this episode but I’ll leave it to this incredible tumblr post to summarise:
Season Rankings(so Far):
Season three
Season one
Season two
See you next week for more on the most bizarre moments of season 3, reflections on The Farm and cults, and the most iconic moments in Riverdale history brought to us this season!
