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It’s finally here! The long-awaited seventh, and sadly final, season of The CW’s Riverdale, a season that promises to give us a lighter, happier tone than what had become progressively darker as the series wore on … but of course it will still come with all the craziness we’ve come to expect — and hope for. I mean, the whole premise of the season is the craziest yet, and that comes after seasons full of serial killers, time jumps and Old Scratch himself, not to mention a comet that ended the previous season and brought us to where we are now.
If you remember the Season 6 finale, the denizens of Riverdale/Rivervale had vanquished ‘Percival Pickens’ but still had the threat of Bailey’s Comet to contend with. Percival was going to use the comet to turn Riverdale into his own personal Hell on Earth (but he didn’t know he’d been magically transported to Rivervale and so his plan failed), but with Percy out of the way they still had that pesky comet to deal with and Cheryl attempted to use all of her powers to destroy the ball of space ice and rock before it could make impact. But suddenly there was the time jump of all time jumps, 67 years … backward, as Jughead and his pals found themselves in 1955 Riverdale. Except only Jughead has any knowledge of what had just happened.
He’s kind of enjoying 1955 with its inexpensive burgers, comic books and pulp novels but the memories of what had happened are haunting him and he needs his friends to remember. Interestingly, this version of Riverdale isn’t quite the same as the present day. There’s no Reggie or Fangs, yet anyway. The school principal is Mr. Featherhead, and Cheryl’s twin is Julian instead of Jason. Hal Cooper is alive (we don’t know about Polly, Dagwood or Juniper), and Archie’s dad never made it back from the Korean War. Jughead lives alone in a run down camper van with his dog Hot Dog. Veronica hasn’t arrived in town either, but she soon makes her appearance and it is inferred that Hiram is alive. Relationships are different, notably the dating couple of Betty and … Kevin?! Jughead and Tabitha barely know each other. But it’s still a blissfully happy time for most of them — with a very funny and clever nod to the original Happy Days opening titles set to Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (that show’s original theme song before it got one of its own) — while others are experiencing a not-so happy 1955. In fact, the season kicks off with a very real moment in history — the murder of Emmett Till — that impacts the lives of Toni, Tabitha and Clay Walker, but it will have an impact on the rest of the town as well. Another real world incident impacts Archie’s life thanks to his mother’s obsession with the death of James Dean, making her completely paranoid that Archie is also going to die in a horrible car accident with that jalopy of his. It has flames painted on the doors, after all, so she forbids him from driving it which puts a cramp in his style when Veronica does arrive.
Ronnie’s story is a bit different too. Instead of a New York City socialite, she is now the daughter of the stars of a popular TV sitcom ‘Oh Mija!’ (with Tillie Temple as ‘Little Ronnie’) — we see the show’s opening titles with obvious allusions to I Love Lucy — and she has come to Riverdale to soak in the small town life as she has been cast in a role in the upcoming film production of Our Town … or so she says. The boys are immediately smitten with her, especially Archie and Julian, but her presence is a thorn in the side of Cheryl, whom Julian notes to his mother that she’s upset because she’s no longer the prettiest and most interesting girl in school. But Cheryl loves her movie magazines and the jig is up for Ronnie when the actual casting announcement of Natalie Wood is plastered on the cover, giving Cheryl her big moment to humiliate her new rival. Veronica does admit to Archie that she actually has been banished to Riverdale by her parents because she was a bit too much of a party girl, and was actually there when James Dean crashed his car (she also regaled her schoolmates with a tale of skinny-dipping with the up and coming movie star, piquing Kevin’s interest when she revealed he liked girls and boys … with Kevin also asking about Sal Mineo and Ronnie shooting him a knowing look). Hermione seems to have eyes and ears all over the place and calls her daughter to admonish her for having a boy in the apartment (Archie) but Ronnie assures it was all very innocent.
But Jughead still feels the need to jog his friends’ memories, and while hanging out with Archie in his garage Archie asks for a hammer. Jughead remembers that the hammer was buried in a time capsule along with other items and asks Archie for a shovel. Somehow that time capsule (actually a picnic cooler) made the trip to 1955 as well, and Jughead gathered the gang to show them what they had buried in the future. It doesn’t seem to help, with Ronnie claiming what she’s looking at are just mediocre props. They ask what the future is like and he tries to explain smart phones and the internet but they want to know what they’re like in the future. He explains how Archie joined the military and was a hero, Betty joined the FBI and tracked serial killer — wait, that term hasn’t been invented yet, oops — Veronica owned a casino, Toni bought Ronnie’s Speakeasy and turned it into a biker bar, and Kevin was … um, he directed some school plays. Good save, Jug. Thankfully Kevin had buried the script for Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the time capsule which aided Jughead’s deflection from the truth, but wanted to know what the inch was. Cheryl seemed less than thrilled to learn that she was possessed by her ancestor and had become a witch. Oh. But Archie asks why they would want to go back to that when they’re having good lives now? It sounds miserable. Jughead completely loses his audience when he suggests the only way to break through the space-time continuum is to get Archie and Betty in Archie’s bed and set off a bomb — since Bailey’c Comet is now two years away from arriving again. But, yeah, no, no one is up for blowing up Archie and Betty. Archie says they should go for a walk, and Jughead immediately panics, thinking Archie is going to beat him up because he’s really violent in the future. Archie tries to convince his pal that they are not from the future, no one time traveled, it’s 1955, and what did Jughead place in the time capsule? He says he had a crocheted beanie but it wasn’t there. Archie just attributes this flight of fantasy to an overactive imagination and Jughead should keep writing his comic books but keep his thoughts to himself before he gets locked up in the looney bin.
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Meanwhile, the trial and verdict in the Till murder case has deeply impacted Toni, Tabitha and Clay, who all traveled to Mississippi for the trial. Jughead, knowing of his relationship with Tabitha, offers to help in any way he can, for which she thanks him. Toni writes a lengthy article about the trial, asking Betty to run it in the school’s paper, the Blue and Gold. Betty says she’s tried to run two articles about the case previously but they were shut down by Principal Featherhead and the school superintendent (who seems a bit sketchy at this point). They do bring the article for review, but publication is denied. Betty and Toni try to appeal to them that it needs to be seen to prevent something like this from happening in Riverdale, but Featherhead reminds them that Riverdale High is one of the first schools to have integrated classes. Nothing like this could happen there. Betty also tries to appeal to her parents, to convince Hal to read the article on his news program. He and Alice hem and haw, saying he only has a 15 minute time slot, and the show’s sponsors — Blossom Maple Syrup — would never approve it. Not willing to accept defeat and after Toni shows Betty the funeral pictures Emmett Till’s mother took to have published in the local paper, it sparks something in her. Betty assures Toni that article will be published, consequences be damned but Toni has another idea — what if they read a poem about Emmett Till during the school’s morning announcements? That is Cheryl’s territory, and while Toni doesn’t know her well this will be a way for her to atone for her parents’ cowardice.
While they plan an ambush, Tabitha takes Jughead up on his offer to help her. Her folks are joining Emmett Till’s mother on a tour around the country, at the behest of the NAACP, and Tabitha has gotten permission to join them. She will have her school books with her but she asks Jughead to help her keep current so she doesn’t fall behind. Of course he agrees. Tabitha and Betty approach Cheryl with their plan and she seems eager to help. The plan is to have Tabitha pretend to faint out on the field, requiring the presence of the principal and the office assistant, leaving Cheryl on her own to do the morning announcements. Once the coast is clear, she gets on the speaker and tells the school there will be a slight change in the morning routine as she allows Toni to read the poem by Langston Hughes (‘Mississippi–1955’). Of course the four girls are called to task by the principal who said that poem was not permitted to be read without his approval. Cheryl claimed that had not been brought to her attention but now that she knows it will never happen again. Case closed. But in the end it did have the impact Toni intended as it finally opened up some dialogue in the classroom as to how these events and the poem made the student feel. It was a very emotional coda to the episode.
But there is still the matter of Jughead trying to get back to the future. When he went to dig up the time capsule, there was a figure watching him from the shadows. At Pop’s, Jughead is enjoying his usual routine when Tabitha approaches … but it’s not the 1955 Tabitha, it’s Riverdale’s Guardian Angel Tabitha. She reveals to him that Cheryl was unable to stop Bailey’s Comet, which caused an extinction-level event. This is shocking news to Jughead and he asks if they’re all dead and in the Sweet Hereafter. Tabitha assures him they are all very much alive and this is just one of the many tangled timelines in which she deposited everyone until she could get things untangled and bring everyone back to a time before Bailey’s Comet hit, presumably a time before Percival Pickens set the comet on a direct course for Riverdale, but Jughead’s memory of the future is an anomaly that she needs to correct, or else it could drive him insane. She promises she will return once things are set right and everyone will return to their present, but for now he needs to forget. The two kiss which sets in motion the erasure of all things futuristic. Tabitha vanishes and Jughead runs home to try to write everything down before it’s completely gone but all he can type out are three words: ‘bend. towards. justice.’ He has no idea what that means and he has no idea what that knit beanie is on his desk or where it came from.
Next week we get the appearance of Fangs Fogerty, and Kevin begins to feel some stirrings for a male classmate. But where else will this season take us, and will — or should — everyone get back to the present, or live in the ‘simpler’ time of 1955?
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 9:00 PM.
What did you think of the season premiere? Let us know in the comments section below.
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