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Riverdale is back after a week off and this week finds very little interaction between the core characters. We do pick up shortly after where the last episode left off with Archie and Jughead trapped inside the Andrews’ burning house … but they weren’t all that trapped as two handy fire extinguishers helped the guy put out the fire. But the incident did light another fire under Archie’s ass to help bring Riverdale back to life — he’s going to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a volunteer firefighter … right after he gets more volunteers and the fire station re-opened. And if he doesn’t already have enough on his plate, his military buddy Eric Jackson (Sommer Carbuccia) has been released from the hospital and is on his way to a home for recovering veterans, so Archie offers him a place to crash on his way there.
But starting a new fire department after Hiram Lodge burned down the last one is no easy task. The old captain isn’t interested in getting involved, and not even Archie’s friends want to volunteer (mainly because none of them know a thing about firefighting). It’s Archie’s RROTC class who step up, thanks to a pep talk from Eric, who related how as a captain in the army, it was Archie who saved his life so they can all trust him as a captain in the fire department. With the original captain wishing to remain in retirement, Veronica calls in a favor from her bestest, now never seen, friend Katy Keene whose roommate Jorge’s ex-boyfriend is an actual New York City firefighter! Welcome to Riverdale, Bernardo Brigsby (Ryan Faucett). Bernardo puts the boys through their paces and all is well until … an actual fire breaks out in the pool hall practically next door to Archie’s gym. Learning there is a man trapped inside, Archie forgets the very first thing he was taught — never run into a burning building alone. His actions force Principal Weatherbee to withdraw the RROTC students from fire duty, but all is not lost. Fangs and Kevin decide they will man up, the old captain steps up too, and Ronnie delivers the one thing a fire department needs: a fire truck. With all of Archie’s good deeds of late, how long before he’s elected mayor of Riverdale? He even steps up to help Eric again, who is packing his things to leave, feeling cast aside after his reservation at the recovery home was cancelled. Telling Archie he feels lost, Archie admits that he feels the same way but being back in Riverdale is giving him purpose so there’s no reason Eric shouldn’t stay so they can both support each other.
With her father offering zero assistance — and why would he? — Veronica comes up with an idea born in the past to help rebuild Riverdale’s economy: print their own money, and circulate it among the businesses still left in town, with Veronica acting as the bank, supplying $50,000 to get things started. She uses this model for her economics class, and they’re all on board, willing to help renovate the old video store into Ronnie’s jewelry store, their payment in Riverdale dollars the means to kickstart the economy. Things are going well until Hiram shows up, insinuating that what she’s doing is illegal. Ronnie also is wondering where Hiram got one of her bills. When her numbers don’t add up — and her numbers always add up — she suspects Hiram has been printing bogus bills and circulating them to crash the economy. But that isn’t quite the case this time. When posing the question to her class as to whether they should add $1,000 or $10,000 to the economy, they all say the latter but she tells them they need to go slow and not flood the economy. Turns out some of the class members took it upon themselves to print up $10,000 and the basically caused a recession. So ‘Daddykins’ is off the hook this time, but the kids now have to finish work on Veronica’s store … for no pay until she can fix the mess they made.
Cheryl has come down off the hill to reclaim the Vixens from Toni, but Toni isn’t having it because she restared the team, she’s funding them, and she’s the coach. Cheryl challenges her to a dance off. ‘I’m pregnant,’ Toni replies. One of the Vixens offers to be Toni’s proxy, and while Cheryl says she isn’t normally one to humiliate a high school student she’ll make an exception this time. The dance off ends with a tie, so Toni and Cheryl agree to be co-coaches … but Cheryl oversteps her bounds and Toni takes the Vixens away from her. Returning to Thornhill, Cheryl is met with a surprise visitor — Minverva Marble, the art dealer who has some ‘surprising’ news: the portrait she bought of Cheryl’s brother is a forgery! Gasp. So before she calls the authorities, she wants to have a little chat with Cheryl first.
Betty is knee deep in the swamp at this point, discovering a body that isn’t Polly or another girl who disappeared. This one is more than three years dead, preserved in the swamp. Knowing it’s not Polly, she, Alice, Tom Keller and some others head back to the swamp — why are they always going at night? — but are headed off by Hiram, Reggie and a few more armed goons for trespassing on private property. Apparently Hiram is going to drain the swamp and put a turnpike in to Sodale and he won’t have anyone snooping around looking for dead bodies. But Betty is undeterred, especially after a chat with FBI boyfriend Glen (Greyston Holt) delivers the news that the Trash Bag Killer is back. At the swamp, she is again confronted by Reggie but this time he helps her by telling her he found another body and Hiram doesn’t know. This is one of the other girls who had gone missing, someone Toni tried to help, but with three bodies all found in one location, and another twenty-one reported missing along the Lonesome Highway, it can mean only one thing: a serial killer. And Reggie even talks some sense into Hiram, telling him he’ll be a hero if he allows them to search the swamp instead of filling it in with concrete. Hiram loves that idea, and besides, the turnpike is just smoke and mirrors anyway. So what exactly are Hiram’s plans with Sodale?
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Jughead is delving deeper into his investigation of the ‘mothmen’ that Old Man Dreyfus told him about, digging up more news stories to corroborate his claims. One article even told of several Riverdale citizens seeing a bright light in the sky. Tabitha Tate thinks it’s all a bunch of malarky but one of the people quoted in the article is … Pop Tate himself. He returns to the diner to talk with Jughead for his article, recounting the night everything went haywire at the diner, he and the patrons witnessing the light before it disappeared. He says he heard it was military testing although he never saw the light again. Pop really hoped it was something otherworldy. Oh, and one of the witnesses was … Rose Blossom. Jughead and Tabitha immediately schedule an interview with Nana, and her tale is quite wild. Not only did she see the light, but she saw one of the mothmen, dead in the maple grove. No one has ever talked about the sightings because the mothmen didn’t want them too, but they wanted the body of their friend. Rose said she told them it had been cremated but … she kept it, perfectly preserved in a vat of maple syrup.
Jughead and Tabitha just think the old woman is crazy until … a large barrel of syrup is delivered to the diner. And inside is a misshapen body, just as she had described (and, by the way, not perfectly preserved because it just looks like skeletal remains). Tabitha isn’t too keen on having this thing stinking up the back room of the diner, but Jughead offers to take the night shift so no one goes snooping around in the back. Late that night, Juggie is on duty and there’s no one in the diner. Suddenly the jukebox starts playing, the lights flicker, gumballs roll out of the machine and a bright light moves along the front of the diner. Jughead goes outside and the light is gone. Suddenly a bright, white light hits him from directly overhead, and Jughead doesn’t remember anything until he woke up four hours later in a booth. Tabitha thinks he was drunk, but did Jughead have a close encounter with the mothmen?
Riverdale is taking a week off, but will return on March 10.
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