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Let’s Talk About ‘Folk Heroes’:
- Percival convinces Veronica to let him lease out one of the suites at Babylonium as his new home.
- Britta’s parents agree to accept her for who she is and she bids farewell to Charyl and Thorn Hill.
- Percival has plans to restore Pickens Park, reinstall a controversial statue of his ancestor, and change the face of Riverdale.
- Jughead comes to the conclusion that Archie needs to be the hero Riverdale can look up to in order to get the town out of Percival’s grip.
- Cheryl is bedevilled yet again, but this time it isn’t Abigail’s doing.
- Percival’s manipulations are pitting friend against friend, but he’s surprised that Archie seems immune to his suggestions.
- Percival challenges Archie to a boxing match, which Archie is sure Percival will lose.
With the introduction of Percival Pickens, Riverdale has undoubtedly produced its most nefarious villain yet. While the Black Hood was a fun slasher movie throwback kind of story and the Gargoyle King was just stupid, Percival Pickens has become a truly unsettling character, one who seems won’t be easily vanquished … although perhaps this week’s Cheryl subplot will somehow play into his ultimate demise (especially if he turns out to be the Devil incarnate as I hypothesized last week).
Percival has his claws firmly in the grip of Riverdale, outside of Archie, Jughead, Betty, Tabitha, Toni, Fangs and Cheryl. Veronica knows that there is something up with him after the suicide in the casino but not even she is completely susceptible to his power of suggestion (and why Archie and company haven’t coordinated with her remains a puzzle). But after blatantly turning the town against Babylonium, Percival weedles his way into his own living quarters at the casino, offering Veronica a boatload of cash in advance for the residence. Oh, and he also talked her into giving him the spotlight over Kevin in the showroom (if Kevin is aware he’s no longer the headliner at Babylonium, we don’t know as he was MIA this week).
He’s also managed to turn Veronica against her friends and partner in subtle ways. First, he’s been pushing the city council to replace the Pop’s billboard on the way into town with one for Babylonium — and even managed to get Alice and Frank on board now with promoting the casino they tried to destroy last week! Now Alice sees the casino as a money-making venture for Riverdale … and no one called her out on it! Instead they just voted to not only award the billboard to Veronica, but also remove ‘Home of Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe’ from the ‘Welcome to Riverdale’ sign, replacing it with the new motto ‘You can’t stop progress!’ To make matters worse, Percival has persuaded Veronica to start serving diner food in the casino along with alcohol-infused milkshakes … not to mention the free cocktails that also cut into Toni’s business at the Whyte Wyrm. To really make this all the more repulsive, Percival has presented plans to restore Pickens Park to its former glory … complete with the statue of his ancestor General Pickens, which Tabitha points out was removed because of what it represented to some people in Riverdale. So if you’re not paying attention … Percival has specifically targeted two businesses run by women of color and wants to reinstall a statue that we can guess has racist connotations associated with it. And when Tabitha and Toni fight back by introducing alcohol onto the Pop’s menu (not something Pop himself is pleased with and calls out Tabitha for doing it), and Toni bringing back live performances to the Wyrm (much to Fangs’ chagrin), he suggests that perhaps Veronica should just firebomb the diner … bait which she fortunately does not take. She’s not that far gone after all, and he’s defeated a bit when Veronica cuts a deal with Tabs to set up a Pop’s food stand in the casino and gives some slot machines to Toni, splitting profits among them. Of course this only solidifies Percival’s resolve to destroy the diner, which he sees as a blight on the town.
He also managed to turn Veronica against Reggie by alerting her to his extra-curricular activities. She thinks he’s at the car dealership helping his father but Percy suggests she see for herself what he’s actually doing, and she finds that he’s moved a couple of slot machines to the dealership to run his own side hustle, siphoning profits from the casino. She’s not happy and she tells him he can keep the machines but he will be banned from the casino … and her bed. We have to assume Percival was behind Reggie’s actions as a means to weasel his way into Reggie’s 50% ownership of Babylonium. But will he be able to get Veronica to fall completely under his sway?
Seeing how deeply he’s gotten into the psyche of the town, Jughead realizes that the town needs a hero to rally around, to draw them away from Percival, and that hero is Archie because … well, he is sort of a superhero now. They cook up a plan to have Archie perform a series of amazing feats to get him entered into the Guinness Book of World Records, as well as stage a boxing match against their old pal KO Kelly, which concerns Archie because KO has a reputation for knocking out all of his opponents and Archie can’t be KO’d. Jughead assures him that won’t be a problem because KO will score a technical win, all Archie has to do is be standing at the end of the match to attain a Rocky-like triumph to draw the town’s attention back to someone they all know and love. The plan works at first as Archie does things like lie on a bed of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on him, and taking blows to his stomach with a giant mallet. The town is thrilled by his feats and it’s clear Percival is perturbed that the attention is drawn away from him. Jughead deduces that as long as they can focus on something that grounds them to Riverdale and who they are, they can beat Percival but getting the whole town to do this will be a challenge.
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Percival still believes he can get into Archie’s head and sneaks up on him at the gym (which Archie has also reclaimed from the city council, forcing them to move their meetings to the basement of Alice’s house). As his voice echos in Archie’s head, Percy talks him into taking a box cutter and slicing open his arm so he can see the blood running across the gym floor. Archie does as he’s told but … the blade breaks off as it touches his skin, distracting Percival enough that he loses his grip on Archie’s mind, giving him a chance to focus on the picture of his dad on the wall. Archie’s strength of body and mind is a shock Percival was not expecting, so he needs to find another way to take him down, and that seems to be the boxing match. Percival walks up on KO outside of Pop’s, and shortly thereafter Archie gets the news that KO willfully walked into oncoming traffic, putting him in the hospital. And conveniently, Percival offers to take KO’s place in the ring. Archie takes the bait, knowing he will pummel Percival, and says that if he wins Percival resigns from the council. He agrees but says if he wins, Archie will personally reinstate his great-grandfather’s statue in Pickens Park (which may be the spot that Jughead had planned to erect the already commissioned statue of town hero Archie in a very Rocky-like pose of victory).
With the town assembled at the gym and Archie and Jughead confident that this will help turn the tide against Percival, the bout begins but it becomes an unexpected bloodbath … with Archie’s blood. Percival gets in several shots, knocking Archie to the mat but he keeps getting up. Archie is dazed and Jughead is baffled. The fight continues but Percival gets in a few more head shots, the final one almost taking Archie’s head completely off, securing the win and the adoration of Riverdale. But how did he win? After the fight Archie said he felt pain, he felt every punch, he bled and the only way that could happen is if Percival knew about and had some palladium. But the only three who knew about his vulnerability are Archie, Betty and Jughead. Turns out as we see in a flashback, Percival talked his way into Betty’s house with Alice guiding him to Betty’s room while she slept. Awakening her before she could put up any defenses, he began to question her about Archie’s abilities, so she unknowingly spilled the beans and he found the stash of palladium that she’d hidden, placing it in his boxing gloves to render Archie completely vulnerable. But he also suggested that she would not remember his visit when she woke up so it will take some time to figure that out (perhaps she’ll let Jughead poke around in her head and he’ll see what happened).
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That brings us to Cheryl. After Britta’s parents learned of Cheryl’s attempt to adopt Britta they offered to allow their daughter to come home, accepting her for who she is. She bids farewell to Cheryl and Thorn Hill, but for her efforts in rescuing Cheryl from Abigail’s clutches, Britta always has a home with her. But Britta may have gotten out of Thorn Hill just in the nick of time as Cheryl begins experiencing a new bedevilment. Sitting in the parlor, keeping watch over the Abigail doll and reading a book, Cheryl begins to experience an excruciating heat that sets her book on fire. With an elevated temperature, Nana Rose sends her to bed, but she can’t sit with her as she has to keep watch over the doll (which has not exhibted any signs of movement or elevated heat). Instead she hires a night nurse to care for Cheryl but when she awakens the next morning, there is nothing left of him but a pile of ash and his feet.
Cheryl calls on cousin Betty to investigate and she takes the remains to Dr. Curdle Jr. who then determines the young man was the victim of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Conveniently, the FBI just happens to have a department that specializes in these types of phenomena — sadly not referring to it as the X-Files — and Agent Drake meets with Betty to explain that what she’s described does not sound like SHC but is more like pyrokinesis, the ability to create and control fire with the mind. She offers to give Betty a demonstration — which we don’t get to see — and Betty takes her knowledge to Cheryl, explaining that she must find a way to focus her mind and expel the heat building up in her body, the temperature of which is rising to over 300 degrees. Trying to get Cheryl to focus on the logs in the fireplace before she burns them all and Thorn Hill to a crisp, Betty reminds Cheryl that she’s basically born from fire and she can do this. But it’s not working, so Betty spots a framed photo of Penelope which she tosses into the fireplace and tells Cheryl to focus on that and all the terrible things her mother did to her. That did the trick as the photo and the logs burst into flames, Cheryl now returning to normal and apparently quite pleased with this new power. As she settles in for the night, she is able to light some candles while she settles in to read Stephen King’s Firestarter. So the question now is will Cheryl’s new powers be the ultimate undoing of Percival Pickens?
Riverdale airs Sundays at 8:00 PM.
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