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Prom night. Most folks know it as either a night of fun (and romance); an archaic high school ritual; or a horror movie with Jamie Lee Curtis. This week’s episode of Riverdale encompassed all three.
Yes, it’s prom season in Riverdale but first we have to tip our hat to Molly Ringwald for stepping back into the series, for now at least, as Mary Andrews, most likely a last minute addition to help ease us into the loss of Luke Perry. Mary comes to Riverdale to stay with Archie while Fred is ‘away on business’, so we’re left to wonder now what fate will befall the senior Andrews before the season ends. For now, Mary is here to be a mom and try to discourage Archie’s desire to become a boxer … which only pushes him to be foolish enough to book two bouts in the same day and basically starve himself to lose six pounds before a match that he shouldn’t have entered in the first place considering he forged Mary’s signature to get in (he probably should have used Fred’s). But by the end, she was on board, preferring to see him to everything properly than take the dangerous path he’d started.
I knew something was up with Jellybean last week and I’m pretty sure she’s more than just an innocent child playing a game. She gave Jughead just enough information about the Gargoyle King’s ‘Gospel’ for him to find it while his dad and the police searched the junkyard for clues into Kurtz’s death. Jellybean told Jughead she saw the Gargoyle King, but something about how she told him and how she didn’t seem to even be aware that she’d been ‘kidnapped’ just feels suspicious. But who is the Gargoyle King? If Jellybean is involved somehow, I’d think she would have to know who it is. But how could she if she hasn’t been in Riverdale until recently? That would certainly point to Gladys but I don’t think that’s a winning hypothesis.
Making the identity of GK even more murky was the big return of another killer in town. As I suspected last week after Veronica told Betty of the accident involving the transport of her father to Hiram’s new prison, we didn’t see the accident, so we had no reason to believe Hal was really dead. But there are six burned bodies at the scene so how could he be alive? The coroner even confirmed from the DNA from a dismembered hand that Hal Cooper was most sincerely dead. Betty doesn’t believe it even though everyone else tries to get her to chillax. Besides, with prom coming she needs to focus on what’s written in the Gospel that when the princess is coronated, the King will appear. What better place to do that than at prom with Betty selected as prom queen, forcing the Gargoyle King to show himself. He wouldn’t break his own rules, right?
Of course, Cheryl could be a roadblock to that happening as she is campaigning for prom queen against the rules of The Farm. Evelyn narcs on her to Edgar and he threatens to take away her visitations with Jason if she doesn’t stop campaigning so she has no choice, whicih give Betty and Jughead the chance to change the theme of prom and rig the vote to make sure Betty gets elected. Putting a team of Serpents and Pretty Poisons at all the doors before the announcement is how they hope to keep the Gargoyle King inside the building. But …
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Betty gets a note that tells her to go to the place of the very first Ascension ceremony and she slips away unnoticed just before she’s to be crowned. When she gets to the rest room and finds the two goblets, she opts to drink from neither and exits the room only to be confronted by … The Black Hood! Yes, Hal is alive and that hand was his, now replaced by a hook. And the Gargoyle King is there too, so Betty runs for her life, stepping over dead and decapitated bodies to get away from her father, and sometimes the physical interactions between the two was extremely violent. Hiding in a broom closet, he finally goes away when Jughead arrives to save Betty but now we’re left to ponder — are The Black Hood and The Gargoyle King working together?
Betty had previously tried to warn Alice that Hal was still alive but she wasn’t taken seriously. At one point, she even thought Edgar had to be the King since The Farm sprung up at about the same time but when she demanded to see if he had runic tattoos on his back, he showed her that he had none. So that eliminates Edgar as the King (and I never thought it was him; he’s always just been a red herring). But now after Betty’s near fatal prom night, she convinces Alice that Hal is in fact alive, and he’s angry enough about Edgar marrying Alice and adopting Polly’s kids to come to exact his revenge. Edgar assures Betty she will be safe at The Farm and she finally agrees to stay.
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The most intriguing thing we saw this week, aside from the resurrection of The Black Hood, came in the preview for the next episode where Ethel tells Jughead who the Gargoyle King is. His reaction, ‘That’s impossible!’, tells us that it’s probably not someone who is already a suspect like Hiram Lodge or even Gladys. Perhaps Jellybean really doesn’t know what’s going on. But that leads us to ponder the reappearance of The Black Hood and why he and the Gargoyle King both showed up at the school, and why Hal knocked Betty down before she could shoot the Gargoyle King. Could the two somehow be working together? Well there is one very strong possibility judging from Jughead’s reaction to Ethel’s revelation: Chic. We never saw what happened to Chic when Betty released him into the wild to fend for his life against the Black Hood. Perhaps knowing that Chic had his own dark side … and now a very big grudge against Betty and Alice … it’s possible that instead of killing him, Hal concocted this plan to resurrect the Gryphons & Gargoyles game to kill as many citizens of Riverdale as possible. And hearing that the King is Chic would certainly elicit that kind of a reaction from Juggie. And if not Chic, Clifford Blossom, whose death has already been questioned, and it makes even more sense that two members of the Blossom family would be working together now that Hal knows about Edgar’s intentions with Polly’s babies. I’m sure whatever Jughead learns will actually be in the final moments of the next episode, leaving the big reveal for the finale in two weeks. Until then, share your theories with us!
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8:00 PM.
What did you think of this episode? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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