I have a lot of feelings about Riverdale, particularly with their more ill-conceived plot lines, but the one thing I do consider exquisite amidst the shit-show is Penelope.
Consider for a moment the exceptionally difficult life of Jughead Jones. Limited to just his adult life (after 21) he has coped with drug addiction, career failure, homelessness (again!), surviving a bomb and hearing loss, and now, in this episode, bad weather and the apocalypse. The new core four, apparently consisting of two straight couples (Barchie and Jabitha - which is a very curious concession to heteronormativity in a show that is obsessed with making every single one-off and side-character gay), are conferring at the Andrews residence about what to do.
Given the grab for power that Percival has successfully pulled off, Archie wants to stage a coup. I’m surprised that Archie knows what a coup is. Jughead actually uses the phrase “coup de town” to describe an attempt at disrupting the machinations of the council. French speakers, help? If the common coinage is coup d’etat, is what they’re doing considered coup de ville?? coup de village? Jughead just intones, ‘coup de town’ yet nobody chuckles. Why does no one laugh at Jughead’s jokes?
Jughead sensibly says that they need to get ‘public’ support then immediately goes on to list the people he considers ‘the public.’ As a longstanding Veronica Lodge fan I’m appalled that Veronica is the first person he lists as being in the outer circle. The list is Veronica, Reggie, Toni, Fangs, Cheryl. (This is, not coincidentally, the sequence of storytelling in this episode.) I think V and C are gonna want words with Jughead. Also Jughead always just fuckin’ hated Kevin (and possibly, vice versa?) because he entirely forgets that Kevin exists - Tabitha reminds him, even putting in a good word for the increasingly problematic Mr. Keller. Tabitha is such a saint. All of them are overheard plotting a secret meeting by Alice Cooper who demonstrates a stealth mode that she has never had before. Is this a gift from Percival to Alice?
Alice is appalled that the four kids who appointed her to the council for no very good reason (well, other than Betty Cooper’s delusional belief that she can somehow control her mother and it’s not the other way around) now want to remove her. When Alice tells this to Percival he’s polishing something in his curiosity shop. The face he makes (eyes closed, inhaling a deep calming breath) briefly raised my hopes that he would whack her over the head (in this instance and in this one instance alone, I support violence against a woman) but instead he says he’s tired of the agitators. To stop them, Alice decides to issue a damning weather report about the ‘wrath of god’ fog that is ‘rolling in’ from somewhere.
On TV, Alice Cooper announces that a fog on the scale of the very unimaginatively named Great Fog of 1922 is coming in, and that 1922 was 100 years ago. IT’S 2022 IN RIVERDALE PEOPLE, IT’S OFFICIAL. (Maniacal laughter). I’m fascinated by the map of Riverdale that she has behind her which gives absolutely no geographical context clues about where Riverdale is beyond the fact that Sweetwater River is to the west of Riverdale in general and that Greendale lies across the river from the river in a southwesterly direction from my favorite fictional town.
Fog causes ‘imminent’ power outages (which … how? why? what? is there something about North American fog that does this in particular?) and hazardous driving conditions (fair), the council institutes a curfew. Tabitha makes the prettiest What The Fuck face in the history of humanity in response.
Veronica is annoyed at the lack of customers, so tells a lackey that if inclement weather is to blame, everyone should be sent home and she will lock up alone. Betty is crossing off dates on a paper calendar using information stored on her smartphone calendar. I wasn’t sure what the heck she was doing - apparently she doesn’t know that period tracking apps exist? She’s informed by that a woman has escaped from TBK “just like you.” Eyes wide as saucers, Betty wants to talk to her right now, but the show is saving it for a later episode (assuming they don’t forget?).
Meanwhile, a gay man and two bisexuals fail to figure out how to be a family together. I’m talking about Kevin, Toni and Fangs (thanks to the beloved mutual who gave me FONI as the pairing! To that I will add a bit and call the threesome FONIN, pronounced Phone In. Get it???). Toni tries to make peace, Kevin is a smug dick, Toni finally girds her ovaries and threatens him right back (FINALLY FINALLY OMG FINALLY). The thing is, the whole thing makes me feel for the rubber doll that is Baby Anthony because oh my god that child does not have good options. Gun addict Serpent dad, failed Serpent Queen mom, sex addict other dad. But the real problem is that none of the three of them actually respect each other.
I was so irked by all of this but then Riverdale brought me right back in with the ever delightful pair of actresses that play Penelope and Cheryl Blossom. The very fascinating nun outfit that Penelope wears is probably a reference to something but I have no idea what (do you know?). All I know is that I love it. I love the wimple, I love the modified peter pan collar, I love the short cape, I love the baby-blue-and-maroon color scheme. I want this outfit.
The story that Penelope tells is absolutely batshit insane. She traveled the world seeking sanctuary because her daughter kicked her out of her home until she found the OG Sisters of Quiet Mercy, who are in fact a Christian order (this was the most shocking part to me) located in THE HIMALAYAS, which accepted her. Cheryl’s blanket response (“You’ve got to be kidding me”) applies to every single part of this story. I think Cheryl has forgotten how Catholicism works because Penelope’s past would not disqualify her from joining a convent. What really stuck out for me are three other things: 1) The way Penelope pronounces the word weekend as wee-kend and 2) the fact that flying from Kathmandu to JFK/Laguardia are 23-24 hour long-hauls but Penelope made the trip for JUST A WEEKEND somehow to wrap up her prior life is either exceptionally draconian or the whole thing is a lie. (Or maybe nobody on the Riverdale writing team actually thought about the logistics of traveling from the Himalayas to upstate New York) and 3) SHE DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO MAKE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS PROPERLY.
Cheryl’s vulnerability to her monster (literal monster, mind you, someone who wanted to watch children kill themselves on her grounds) mother is heartbreaking.
Speaking of heartbreaking, Jughead Jones over in the diner asks Tabitha if there is any way she might use her time travel powers to alter events so that he doesn’t have to be deaf. So it’s confirmed then, that Jughead Jones is still deaf but with a not very great exception: He can hear thoughts and only thoughts . That gave me shivers of horror. To hear nothing - no normal sounds, no music - but just an endless readout of other people’s thoughts? OH NO. Tabitha, in the gentlest possible way (I love her so much) tells him that the bomb and his deafness are somehow essential events to the universe that cannot be altered without bringing about further disasters of a cosmic kind. I’m as upset as Tabitha looks at the way Jughead smiles so nicely at her after she delivers this terrible news, that his affliction is unalterable.
Just in time, the fog moves in. I mean they call it fog but it looks like smog and now I understand what Alice meant about the corrosive effect of this thing. Betty Cooper tries to leave her house. She stops dead in her tracks when she sees a big TBK sized man standing down the driveway from her front door, then runs directly to the “I’m Invulnerable” Archie, who wants to go out immediately to deal with it for her.
The song that plays over Archie and Betty making out immediately after they cancel their evening plans to stage a coup de town is called “Don’t Bring Me Down.” It has ominous lyrics: “The darkened skyline/ outside my room/ a kingdom that i gave up too soon/ to be without.” What the heck.
Can we stop for a moment and appreciate the way Betty smiles into kisses? She’s so beautiful.
Post coitus Betty and Archie affirm that their relationship feels right to them, which is sweet, but then it’s revealed that they never discussed birth control which is not so sweet. Betty thinks she might be pregnant. The abduction at the hands of TBK made her go off of birth control, never to get back on it, which is the weirdest thought sequence ever voiced by a reproductive aged woman. The power goes out right after this.
At the Diner, Tabitha has a brief phone call with her grandfather, then thinks: What Am I Going To Do When I Lose Him? Jughead hears her thought. His response is - “Pop Tate is gonna outlive all of us.”
I already know from US-based Tumblrinas that Jughead is somehow slated to die this season like he was in every other season, so I guess Pop Tate at least outliving Jughead Jones is being foreshadowed here??
Tabitha gets very irked, telling him that it’s an invasion of privacy, he says he’s not doing it on purpose, then the power goes out here too.
What occurs next is an exceptionally candle heavy episode of Riverdale. I’m surprised they’ve never mentioned nor had a candle related sponsor. In the high school years, Jughead and the Stonies were the truly candle obsessed people so when we cut to the extreme amount of candles that Betty and Archie have lit in the Andrews House, I wondered if this had all been a stash that Jughead had built up over the time he lived there. Speaking of which - Did Uncle Fucking Frank move in with Sheriff Keller or something? Where is he?
Archie actually asks Betty an intimate question which Betty actually answers in an honest (seeming) way and I am blown away. One of the traits that I find very off putting about Archie (because it reflects something about me obviously) is that he’s a very incurious character. If someone directly makes a blunt request he will often try to either accommodate or render assistance, but in the absence of such explication it just doesn’t occur to him to ask questions (he never asked Jughead wtf was going on with him in the entire time post time jump when they lived together, for example). So it means a lot that Archie asks Betty exactly what happened when she had been captured by TBK. I tend to rant about Betty’s tendency to creatively lie whenever she doesn’t want to admit to something, so the apparent veracity of this story, which is rough and disturbing, is as important for her.
We get a TBK flashback. I keep checking out TBK’s body with close attention to see if I can recognize him from just his biceps but I cannot. Maybe spotting people with just their abs is a Veronica Lodge specialty. Betty did not fight off or outwit TBK. She just went along with what he obviously wanted, did what he asked, and was released by him because he found this option more entertaining. All Betty had to do was dismember the corpse of a TBK victim, a big man laid out on a table in a garage.
Moved by her ordeal, plus the fact that Betty says she feels like her soul is dismembered, Archie finally admits that he thinks Riverdale is cursed. Archie announces his statement of purpose: He wants to raise a family in the Andrews house, the home of his childhood. He calls it ‘My dad’s house.’ The ownership of this house is something the show keeps playing with - Fred owned it but upon his death ownership passed to Mary, such that Frank called it herhouse, and Mary made sure to make Archie give him money to hand over the house, but in a complete (and deserved) erasure of his mother Archie calls it his fathers’s house, rather than ‘our’ house or ‘my parents’ house.’
As Betty sheds a tear, Archie promises her commitment and support and expresses a desire to start a family with her. They kiss in a warm hazy orange glow of the fog.
We cut directly to Veronica Lodge sitting by herself in her casino pouring herself a stiff drink (rum?). LOL!
Reggie enters stage left, carrying a box of his belongings. Veronica invites him to stay, drink, and play strip poker. This is when the power goes out at the casino. Are the power outages following some sort of grid or am I supposed to understand that these are lights going out on these couples in order of their priority in the current hierarchy? (Barchie → Jabitha → Veggie.)
Tabitha is lighting a bazillion red candles at the diner. Jughead comes out of the kitchen (he calls her Tabs! So cute!) with an idea for how to restart the generator. He goes out to get the gas after telling her to fire up the old ham radio out back. Lots of ominous music plays as Jughead heads out.
Veronica appears to successfully seduce Reggie after besting in strip poker but there’s something about their hooking up that is so commercial it’s kind of upsetting to watch. The very grim lookin’ Hiram portrait staring them down leads Reggie to suggest moving to a champagne suite. Many of the candles lit in the champagne suit post Reggie x Veronica hookup are green. That’s probably just to match up with their forest green robes, but I noticed them. In the same slightly depressed, commercial tone of their sexual activity, Veronica suggest that perhaps their relationship is worth maintaining to Reggie, and he agrees in the same room-temperature tone.
However they then immediately commence fighting again - about the Hiram portrait, about Archie, about Reggie always feeling like he’s second best to some man who is consistently more valued by Veronica. Very, very brutally, Veronica confirms that he is right. I love Veronica Lodge for many reasons, but the way she treats Reggie Mantle always takes the gloss off of her. She’s just so harsh to Reggie. She spells out ‘You’re my consolation prize because I failed out of New York and got rejected by Archie and you’re about what I can manage right now.’ Reggie gives her a dark, heavy look before telling her his statement of purpose - to find someone who will finally say to him with their whole chest, “You, Reggie. You’re the one.” Veronica fully fails this test, so Reggie conveys his very incisive analysis that he is reproducing his father’s sad-sack life as a man who couldn’t get himself to be prioritized by his woman, and she’s reproducing Hiram who dragged Hermione around unhappily until she finally broke free. Yeowch!
I must say, I did very much appreciate the very gentle way Reggie tells Veronica these thoughts. He’s giving her every chance. Sadly, Veronica agrees that they’re toxic together and for each other. Reggie makes a very dignified exit from the relationship and Babylonium and his fantasy of Veronica being his future.
Kevin, alone, is filling out forms and thinking of his life - flashback to Joaquin, to a random hook up in the woods, that homophobe who got violent with him instead of just saying no thanks when Kevin hit on him. Just as he’s about to go visit Foni, enter Moose! Looking fine and handsome and very hirsute and broad chested. He’s been hired as Riverdale HS’s new PE teacher! He persuades Kevin to stick around and ‘really talk’ with him for half an hour. Kevin always chooses sex over everything else in his life given half a chance, so of course he stays.
TOSTITOS PRODUCT PLACEMENT because this is what Toni puts out in anticipation of Kevin’s visit. Foni are trying to discuss what their individual visions of the future are. Fangs is doing a very, um, straight man thing (sorry Fangs) of positing a glorious past that never ever existed and calls it ‘old school’ and wants to hearken back to this imaginary thing he just made up in his own mind. Toni wants the Southside Serpents to be the Sweetwater Serpents (which admittedly is THE DUMBEST name of all time. This is what happens when you write off Sweet Pea in that way that they show did and no I will not shut up about it). He thinks political activism is just as dangerous. Toni has a continual inability to stand up to her chosen male partner for things she actually believes in. This is very retrograde heterosexual of her. What is wrong with these people? The only thing Foni agree on is that they don’t want to waste money on legal bills fighting the custody issue.
And about Baby Anthony - I am calling it. Baby Anthony is going to grow up to be a Republican orthodontist.
In any case, this is when the lights go out on the Fonis. (Barchie → Jabitha → Veggie → Foni, so my priority theory still holds.)
Cut back to Kevin and Moose. (Koose? Mevin?) Their lives are both kind of horrible. Unemployed trucker meets Broadway wannabe with two oppressive jobs (high school student wrangler and deputy). They meet in this place of failure-to-launch to make out.
Do Foni ever have sex? Because I don’t think they do, and not just because I don’t want them to for personal reasons (i.e. I hate this couple). When Kevin sends him a “I’m going to have sex with Moose at school” text, Fangs exhibits much more passion than he’s ever shown Toni about anything. It occurs to me that Baby Anthony might be an anti-breeder statement in the worst way. This child in Rivervale was a constant source of stress and finally disaster for Toni, and in Riverdale (or wherever this is) he’s the reason Toni and Fangs put up with each other. Fangs is about to run out to do violence (because he wants to touch Kevin). Toni manages to stop him by begging. They have the most unbearably cardboard dry kiss.
In the diner, Tabitha manages to hear through the aforementioned ham radio Jughead- Rivervale’s phone call to Betty about getting out of the house because of the bomb under the bed. She even recognizes the voice as being Jughead’s! It turns out not to be the Jughead who went out to siphon gas from their car for the generator.
What. Is. Going. On?
Kevin and Fangs have hooked up in the teacher’s lounge, leading to Kevin passing out to have a horrible nightmare about the Gargoyle King. Kevin says something odd: “It’s just a dream. I GUESS.” Is Riverdale going to bring back the Gargoyle King now that Moose’s father is out of prison??
Cheryl at Thornhill (which Penelope with her continued strange pronunciations calls Thorn HILL rather than the more American THORN Hill) knocks her mother the fuck out with a candlestick after finding her communing with the Julian doll that now houses the spirit of the immortal witch Abigail. (That is the most unhinged sentence I have ever written. I love Riverdale.)
Jughead at the diner gets the generator restarted. The symbolic lights of Pop’s turns back on. Tabitha broadcasts that the diner is a true sanctuary with all the necessaries. “Look for the light.”
Cheryl is making Penelope’s body temperature rise, revealing herself to be the pyrokinetic that she is. Her mother was the dragon, she was the maiden, and now Cheryl is “the maiden and the dragon.” I love Cheryl so much. Just as Cheryl is about to murder her, Penelope reveals that she has all the letters from Heather. Reading these letters now, Cheryl weeps and weeps. Penelope brings her tea which I hope Cheryl doesn’t drink.
PENELOPE COMES OUT AS QUEER TO CHERYL. I knew it I kneeeeeeeeeewwwwww it. OMG. So anyway, Penelope seeks forgiveness for her trespasses from Cheryl. This seems genuine. Penelope promises to be gone with the fog.
The next morning, Kevin calls Fangs who is clearly still in love with him, just in the extremely bitter ex phase of being in love, to say that he wants to come to a peaceful resolution. Fangs, who has fucked both Kevin and Moose, can hear that Kevin has fucked Moose in his voice, so in a fit of pique escalates the fight to say “I’ll see you in court” and “Watch your back” to Kevin. Fangs is so very dumb. There is no way that he could ever expect to win against Kevin. There just isn’t.
Veronica, divested of Reggie, finally wants to wrap up the portrait of Hiram in butcher paper.
To send us out of this episode, we learn that Percival has made himself mayor, in order to make himself Dictator Pickens (according to Jughead). Jughead asks “How did we not see this coming?”
Ummmm MAYBE DON’T HAVE MEETINGS AT ALICE COOPER’S HOUSE??? This happened because Betty couldn’t admit to herself that she got roundy beaten by Percival in her own home. Betty! Get it together!
This is when Tabitha chooses to reveal to Jughead that in 1,384 scenarios where she saves Jughead’s hearing by stopping Hiram’s bomb, everything leads directly to nuclear winter. Jughead is the most important person in the story (Jughead really is writing this, isn’t he??) but this also means he’s going to die, inevitably (Jughead is definitely writing this). “In every scenario, you die,” Tabitha weeps. He dies 1,382 times to no avail, but they do win twice. Jughead’s youthful death is fixed. “It’s not the first time I’ve been destined to die,” Jughead says, as he consoles Tabitha. In the way that Tabitha only gave into her despair at the news of Jughead’s hearing loss when he couldn’t see her face, Jughead does the same at the impact the news that he’s fated to die in the battle against evil and very soon. I love Jabitha’s dynamic, of people protecting each other in this way. Very grown up.
We end with Betty and Archie waiting on the results of their pregnancy test.
