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Let’s Talk About ‘Venomous’:
- Archie learns that Reggie is now working with Percival.
- Cheryl is struggling with the decision to contact Heather or not, and her Magic 8 Ball is of no help (nor is Nana Rose).
- Archie is surprised to learn Jughead is a huge comics fan, but he has a flash of memory from Rivervale in which he helped Jughead move his comics collection.
- Dr. Curdle Jr. is surprised by the amount of poison in Veronica’s body, fearing she will die without immediate treatment.
- Betty asks Jughead to do a deep dive into her subconscious to find out what her mind is suppressing.
- Archie asks Cheryl for help in building up an immunity to palladium.
- Reggie attempts a hostile takeover of the Babylonium.
- Tabitha is still in Albany.
- No Toni, Fangs, Kevin or Moose this week.
It’s nice to see the core group all interacting acting, and actually including Cheryl. I guess everyone is over all that curse business now that they have a much bigger problem on their hands. They are, however, still trying to grapple with the question of how they obtained their special powers. Archie still thinks it was the explosion, but that doesn’t explain Cheryl’s pyrokinesis or Veronica’s poisonous kiss or Tabitha’s time travel ability. And why wasn’t Kevin or Toni or Fangs affected?
With everyone navigating the hows and whys of their powers, the biggest hurdle to overcome is Archie’s susceptibility to palladium, which unfortunately Percival is all too aware of, having the piece he possessed forged into a new ring. Archie cannot afford to tackle with Percival until he can figure out how to become immune to palladium. But paying a visit to Jughead sparks an idea when he sees his friend’s massive comic book collection. Now, the two have been friends forever but Archie never knew about Jughead’s passion for comics — but he did suddenly have a flash of memory in which he helped Jughead move that stash of comics to his new apartment, which seemed to momentarily confuse him. This, of course, was a memory from Rivervale which suggests the lines between the two universes are even further blurred. But thanks to Jughead’s knowledge of comics lore, he learned that Superman was able to become immune to Kryptonite by constatnly exposing himself to the mineral. So Archie should be able to do the same with a piece of palladium which he borrows from Cheryl.
Unfortunately, the effect of constant exposure to the piece of metal around his neck is not making him immune, it’s only weakening him further to the point that he beats his knuckles into a bloody mess punching the bag at the gym, something that didn’t even happen when he wasn’t invulnerable. Visiting Cheryl again, she suggests ingesting small quantities of palladium as Rasputin the mad monk did with poison to make himself virtually unkillable. Cheryl prepares Archie a batch of palladium soup, but the ingestion of the mineral only weakens him further, dropping his weight to 135 pounds. Cheryl concludes that the palladium is absorbing the rest of the essential minerals Archie needs and to keep from dying he’s going to need more iron in his diet. But that may not work. However, there is another solution based on alchemy. Instead of turning iron into gold, she suggests a spell in which she turns palladium into iron, basically forging the metallic elements in Archie’s body using magic and heat that would render him completely invulnerable, even to palladium. It’s a last gasp for him, but he asks Cheryl to let him and Betty have one more night together just in case it doesn’t work. The next day, Cheryl and Archie perform the ritual and while it seems like Cheryl’s intense heat on Archie’s body is about to consume him while he recites an incantation, it all comes together and Archie is reborn anew, now totally invulnerable and ready to take on Percival.
Cheryl also tries to help Veronica with her new venomous power. After a visit with Dr. Curdle Jr., the immediate medical opinion was that she needed dialysis to cleanse her body of the poison coursing through her. At this point, even her sweat or tears could kill someone, and the doctor is shocked Veronica is still alive. At the casino, she begins her treatments, but also has to deal with Reggie and the Board who are attempting a hostile takeover of the casino because there have been no profits under her sole leadership. Someone also snapped some photos of her while on dialysis in her office, so the Board is concerned that she’s too ill to run the place and now have a buyer lined up so that they can get a return on their investment. V insists that everything is fine and she will prove it, but after the meeting she confronts Reggie in Percival’s suite — telling Percival he’s free to move out any time he wants — yelling at her ex about his actions. Suddenly Reggie develops a nosebleed and Veronica realizes that even her breath is now potentially deadly, so she runs out and consults Cheryl, who happens to have a greenhouse full of poisonous plants. Sort of taking the same route as Archie, V takes a collection of plants to nibble on to see if she is in fact immune to the venom in her body, and she begins studying poisonous spiders. In the end, she realizes that she has literally become a Spider Woman.
Her only regret, as she relates to Betty and Archie, is that before she accidentally killed Heraldo, her last meaningful kiss was with Reggie and now that they are completely at odds she’s distressed that he was her last living bit of meaningful contact. Surprisingly, Betty makes an offer — since Archie is now totally invulnerable to everything including poison, V can kiss him. What are friends for, right, especially when they have superpowers? They do and this fulfills a bit of my own supposition on those two but will it go any further than just a kiss? But with a new lease on life, Veronica assures the Board that she is fit as a fiddle and has the projections to prove the Babylonium will be a huge success, topping off her presentation with a performance of ‘Toxic’ to the assembled crowd. (She’s learned also that she can control the release of her venom so she was even able to interact with a group of dancers during the number.)
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That may depend on Betty and Jughead now that she has asked him to do a deep dive into her subconscious mind. She’s sure her mother has been lying to her about her father, and she feels Alice is hiding a big secret. Jughead agrees and delves into Betty’s mind, going through the layers like issues of his comic book collection. A lot of the ones closer to the surface involve him and Betty (and kudos to the director for some nifty transitions from the real to the subconscious world, including inserting Jughead — I believe — into footage from past episodes (you can see a noticeable difference in Cole Sprouse, so I don’t know if they went the de-aging route or just used old footage). But the first attempts didn’t uncover anything about Hal or Alice so Betty asks Jug to go much deeper.
He does and the first thing Betty discovers is that Alice took a test and also has the serial killer gene. There is a conversation between Alice and Hal in which he tells Alice this is a good thing because that means one of their kids may also have it … and he hopes it’s Betty. But is this a false memory? How would Betty have known about this whole conversation if she wasn’t even in the room? She even confronts her mother about it, but Alice denies the accusation questioning where Betty even came up with this idea. Betty is still certain Alice is hiding something and needs Jughead to go even deeper. He does and Betty has a vision of her parents doing something in the house where the dining room table is. So she enlists Jughead to help her tear up the floor (with a nice little spider web visual), and when Alice returns home Betty confronts her with … a dead body buried under the floorboards. Alice is forced to admit that Hal killed the deputy when he came snooping around and forced Alice to help him bury the body or else he’d blame the murder on her. Alice knew Hal was up to something with Betty and she didn’t intervene, thinking, hoping that when the time came she would be able to tap into Betty’s good side and draw her out of whatever darkness her father was taking her too. Betty is not impressed with Alice’s parenting skills and tells her that whatever she thought she was doing didn’t work.
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While Cheryl was helping Archie and Veronica with their issues, she was also struggling with whether to contact Heather or not. She stalked her high school sweetheart on social media and learned that Heather is a librarian in Greendale. But every time she consulted her mystic oracle — aka the Magic 8 Ball — if she should call Heather, the answers were always inconclusive. Maybe she was meant to email her but there was no response forthcoming, and Nana Rose suggested that in her experience if someone cared they would respond immediately to an email. Okay, how much experience does Nana have with emails?? Cheryl shot back that in Rose’s time, people communicated with carrier pigeons. But Cheryl did finally pick up her lip-shaped landline phone and called the Greendale library … and Heather answered. Panicked Cheryl hung up without saying anything. But later that night there was a knock at Cheryl’s door, and on the other side was … Heather, saying Cheryl called and she came. So does Heather have her own special powers? We know there are some strange goings-on in Greendale (plus the preview for the next episode featured Heather possibly telling Cheryl that she is a witch).
Riverdale airs Sundays at 8:00 PM.
What did you think of this episode? Let us know in the comments section below.
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