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Apologies for being so remiss in keeping track of Riverdale, but personal business took up a lot of my time for the month of November but things are back to normal and I’m ready to dig back into the show. I have been watching though, and I have to admit I’m still a bit on the fence about this season. Now, it’s nowhere near as bad as Season 3. There are no gryphons or gargoyles in sight, thankfully, and the season did kick off with the very moving Luke Perry tribute episode. But, perhaps feeling something had gone completely sideways with the storytelling last season, the show has attemped to get back to its Season 1 roots by focusing on the core group and their normal lives as high school students. The first season had the benefit of being a 13-episode mid-season debut so the storytelling was tight and gripping. Riverdale is a show, as has been proven by both Seasons 2 and 3, that benefits from a shorter season because there’s way too much padding to fill out a full 22-episode season.
And so far this season the storytelling has been meandering all over the place, introducing little plot points in what feels like a ‘let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ almost as if they’re monitoring social media to see what the fans are saying to determine which plotline they follow through with for the rest of the season after next week’s mid-season finale. The one story we know that will carry through is the msytery surrounding what happens to Jughead during Spring Break. That was teased in the Season 3 finale, and we’ve gotten little bits and pieces this season at the end of some episodes with a flash forward scene. We did get a very interesting flash forward this week as Archie, Betty and Veronica were marched into a police line up with Sheriff Jones asking off-camera is these were the people who killed Jughead. Then the shot revealed he was talking to Juggie’s school mates at Stonewall Prep, Bret and Donna. They confirmed the trio was who they saw kill Jughead. Yeah, but we can’t really trust those two to be reliable witnesses.
Another story that’s been simmering on the back burner is the mystery of the VHS tapes. Again, I’m still amused that everyone in Riverdale still has working VHS decks in their homes. But we’re no closer to knowing what’s going on with this story as all we’ve gotten from it are montages of tapes being inserted into decks and anxious folks watching the outside of their homes for hours on end. This time, however, the camera was practically at the front doors of the houses. Which would be physically impossible or else everyone would be tripping over cameras on their sidewalks so I would say the person responsible just zoomed in a bit. But who in Riverdale could be doing this and why? Is every home targeted? That would take a massive amount of equipment and time to shoot up to six hours of video and deliver the tapes to those houses on the same day. So far, I have no theories as to who is doing this.
And there’s also the matter of Charles. You’d think the first thing anyone would do is have him take a DNA test but Alice just welcomed him with open arms and accepted him as her long lost son, the one they thought Chick had murdered before assuming his name. We did get a little surprise when it was revealed that Chick is alive and in jail with Betty paying him a visit to get information on Charles, but it was even more shocking a couple of episodes ago to see Charles visit Chick and talk about how well their plan is working. Oh, and Kevin was right, Charles is gay and still in a relationship with Chick. And as Charles is an FBI agent, let’s just assume he is the one person in Riverdale who has the capacity to actually pull off the video spying on the residents (but you’d think the FBI would have more sophisticated equipment than a bunch of VHS decks and cameras).
And then there is the matter of Cheryl being haunted by the triplet she consumed in the womb who keeps moving a spooky old doll around the house. And, of course, Archie’s attempts at taking up street vigilantism again.
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So with all of these storylines percolating, we got a really good episode this week that gave each of the core characters a moment of clarity that seems to be a bit of course correction for the rest of the season. And it also gave the actors a chance to deliver some really fine performances this week, especially KJ Apa, as well as bring Gina Torres to Riverdale as the previously unseen guidance counselor Mrs. Burble (who, like Principal Honey, has an absurdly lavish office), helping to psychoanalyze the kids and lay some groundwork for the rest of the year.
Betty’s biggest issue is her mother — a plot device that seemed to come out of left field since they seemed to be on really good terms until this week when Alice (now using her maiden name Smith) snooped through Betty’s mail and bedroom, blaming her sexual activity with Jughead for Betty not getting in Yale. After a huge blow-up, Betty paid a visit to Mrs. Burble and Alice coincidentally followed her … how did she even know Mrs. Burble? Wanting just some privacy to vent about her mother, Burble asked if it would be okay for Alice to sit in — Betty said she would even if the answer was no — so they went at it and Betty had a laundry list of issues with Alice that ended with Alice proclaiming she’s trying to protect Betty because she loves her … the most. Awkward. Realizing what she had said, Alice fled the office and left Betty speechless.
Archie was sent to Mrs. Burble because he fell asleep in class and she dug deep into how Archie is trying to live up to his father’s high standards but sacrificing his own life in the process, putting off college because he feels the need to stay in town to protect Riverdale from people like Dodger. Burble, who seems to know a lot about these students, knew that the cuts on Archie’s knuckles were not from working out at the gym and she also warned him that if he admitted to any illegal activities, like taking the law into his own hands, she would have to report it. The odd thing is he did admit that he’s trying to emulate his comic book heroes. Burble really picked up on how those heroes usually act after suffering a great tragedy and that he needs to work on the anger that fuels his comic book fantasy. That pushed his buttons and he admitted that he knows he’s angry because of all the crap that’s happened to him … and at that moment, that performance, Archie Andrews and KJ Apa actually made me tear up a bit. I think it’s the first time that Archie has felt like a real person, and that moment — courtesy of script writer Tessa Leigh Williams — allowed Archie to finally unburden himself of all the grief and anger he’s felt that was compounded by his father’s death and putting his mother in danger because of his actions with Dodger. Mrs. Burble seemed to push him in the right direction by asking for others to volunteer at the rec center, including her, and setting up a phone line for people in need to call. Archie, who decided to move into the rec center at least temporarily to keep his mother safe (and perhaps reduce the time Molly Ringwald has to be on the show) seemed to be done with trying to be a vigilante but the first call that came in put him back on the streets to avenge someone in need.
Veronica is still having daddy issues, culminating in her acceptance to Harvard … which appears to have been bought and paid for by Hiram. Mrs. Burble points out that Harvard has always been Veronica’s dream and she should be thrilled to have been accepted, but Ronnie states that her issue is that she’ll never know if she was able to get in on her own merits because, just like with everything else, Hiram has controlled every aspect of her life including making her think she owned two businesses, which she operated successfully, to learn that he was still in control. Burble said Veronica’s relationship with her father is the stuff of Greek tragedy and the pair are locked in a dance to the death … not that she’s suggesting murder … but if Veronica expects to be her own woman, she will have to completely cut ties with her father. Which gave her the perfect solution to deal with Hiram as he is about to launch his latest venture, a rum business. Ronnie throws down the gauntlet and tells her father that she will launch her own rum business to compete with him head-to-head … and this is not a prospect he’s very happy about.
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Cheryl was forced to pay a visit to Mrs. Burble by Principal Honey who, due to Cheryl’s excessive absences from school this year, is taking the Vixens away from her, unless he gets a favorable report back from the counselor. Cheryl, walls up, isn’t about to have any of her eggs scrambled but when the subject of Jason comes up, she begins to crack. She admits to Burble that she talks to Jason and thinks he answers back … but Burble doesn’t quite understand that Cheryl has the corpse of her brother propped up in the chapel, not even when she says she talks to taxidermy. And then the walls come tumbling down when Cheryl talks about the triplet and the haunted doll tormenting her. But Burble makes the rational argument that it’s more likely someone else is ‘trolling’ her than it is that she’s being haunted by the ghost of an embryo she may or may not have consumed in the womb. And there’s actually a DNA test for that that Cheryl was more than eager to take advantage of. But even with her breakthrough, Burble was still not ready yet to give the Vixens back to Cheryl. But Cheryl did get the DNA results and … there was no triplet. So that now means that someone is gaslighting her. The question is … who? (And did anyone else think Toni was acting a bit strange, a bit too nonchalant, when Cheryl read the results of the DNA test? I’m hoping the gaslighter is Penelope and not Toni.)
And, finally, through some storytelling gymnastics, Jughead also paid a visit to Mrs. Burble even though he’s no longer a student at Riverdale High. But he needs his transcripts, so while they were being prepared, he might as well have a chat. Like Cheryl, Juggie is all walls but Burble gets enough out of him about how he’s trying to prove his grandfather was screwed out of the Baxter Brothers book series, to the detriment of his education. Again, seeming to know quite a lot about Jughead’s family situation, she pointed out that while Jughead’s father has put a lot on the line to give his son this education, Jughead is spending an inordinate amount of time trying to lionize a man who physically and mentally abused his father. She suggested Jughead try to look through his father’s eyes for a moment and understand how hurt FP is by what his son is doing. And that broke him. He finally realized what a dick he’s been to FP. Burble said if he wants to continue his quest to exonerate his grandfather, he needs to put in the work and get the factual evidence, not just go about randomly assuming he knows what happened. And she got through to him. Jughead got his college applications in order, he completed his Baxter Brother story, and he found a lot of suspicious evidence that people associated with his grandfather and the academy have died under mysterious circumstances. A new mystery in introduced and Betty is completely on board.
This episode hit on a lot of issues that the characters have had and it really was remarkable how Williams managed to put everything in order, lay everything out, resolve some problems like having Betty come home and tell her mother that she loves her the most too, and just lift several burdens off of the show within the space of 44 minutes, while also giving Apa and Cole Sprouse a chance to do some really emotional work (not to mention the great performance from Torres). I hope the writers for the episodes to come are using this episode as a blueprint to formulate the rest of the season, so we’ll see next week if they manage to muck it all up or keep this ship on its new course.
What did you think of this episode? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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