#pops chocklit shoppe

Riverdale S6B Ep. #106 (“Angels in America”)

“Every town has that place that the community comes together” is how Jughead Jones opens the narration for this episode.  A lot of what Jughead says about Pop’s over the years could sort of amount to a college application essay opener.   He also calls it “Home away from Home.”  Since he doesn’t qualify it with pablum about the community and so on, he’s really speaking for himself, with this one.  Home in place of home, more like, for him. 

Pop Tate, Tabitha and Jughead, during what must be an exceptionally slow day at the diner, are watching Alice Cooper’s TV show - “Riverdale Today,” and today’s special guest is Percival Pickens.  Alice Cooper giggles at him because he’s given her head (my headcanon, pun fully intended, ignore me, sorry).

Alice Cooper’s career cracks me up. How is she this untouchable? She has the most Teflon of reputations and careers.  Granted, she has a valid-seeming, patiently-built up journalism career.  She ran the Riverdale Register for a long time,  transitioned successfully into tv journalism, and now she’s this major (small town) authority with her own talk show kinda like the Fox News desk anchors who walk the line between reading the news and proselytizing their own opinions.  On the other hand, she was too dumb and self absorbed to realize that her husband was a (very underperforming) serial killer, that Gladys Jones’ daughter who lived with her at the time was the one making and leaving terrorizing VHS movies, not to mention that time she fully became inculcated into a cult despite the intensive efforts of Betty Cooper.  Unobservant, dense, and of poor judgment, but full of ambition and delusional righteousness = TV journalists, according to Riverdale. 

Percival announces that he’s going to build a railway ‘through the heart of Riverdale’ which puts Tabitha immediately on alert but Jughead doesn’t immediately catch on.  “Progress demands” that Pop’s be replaced with a train station which will bring revenue and tourism and etc.  This entire proposal was also very funny.   In the indeterminate forever 2020 but not really time that Riverdale exists in, they have / had smartphones with apps which to me implies uber/lyfts and by long-distance association, eventually self-driving cars, but A TRAIN STATION  is Percival’s idea of progress.  

Tabitha moves fast. She literally runs over to Percival’s residence inside Babylonium (I assume?) with her black leather biker jacket thrown on over her cute Pop’s uniform, to declare her firm intention to never sell the diner.  He’s very sneery about the diner (“past its heyday”) and his way of being smarmy, like continually calling Riverdale “our town,” is laid on very thick, so I admire Tabitha not getting sidetracked with irritation. He tries using “the voice” on her but she doesn’t even seem to feel it.  First (and) un-PC thought - Does British mind-control intimidation only work on white people?

Tabitha’s tries to rally the troops, in a very curious order and in a way that shows what she thinks are that person’s biggest priorities.  And their responses reveal something terribly unflattering about each of them. 

The sequence is Archie → Betty → Toni → Veronica → Cheryl before giving up and talking to Jughead.

Tabitha thinks this is what the others care about the most. 

- Archie:  Family legacy & Important Riverdale landmarks (first black owned business in Riverdale).

- Betty:  ABSOLUTELY NO INFORMATION and it’s not clear that Tabitha actually gets to say anything before Betty rudely interrupts to say what she says to Tabitha.

- Toni:  The Whyte Wyrm.

- Veronica:  No direct dialogue is heard but given context clues it appears that Tabitha went with an ‘entrepreneur -to- entrepreneur’ heart to heart approach with Veronica. 

- Cheryl:  Longstanding blood-feuds of a historic nature.

- Jughead:  He loves the diner possibly a bit more than Tabitha herself does, so she can take his support for granted.

And this is what we learn about each “main” Riverdale person:

- Archie is not the heroic brave person that Jughead Jones keeps making him out to be. He’s cowering because he is not physically invulnerable anymore.  Oh, and Archie is a terrible boxer.  (Personally I’m starting to think they picked this activity for him because it’s one of the sports where the male torso is routinely revealed.)  He’s willing to go punch the Ghoulies bloody when he has superpowers, but without them he is going to hide.  Aren’t these the basic instincts of a bully??

- Betty projects all her issues on to other people.  She can’t imagine that someone else doesn’t have a weakness she absolutely does.  Tabitha was just now safely in a room with Percival, but Betty doesn’t actually care to ask about that. She just says no person should EVER be alone in a room with Pickens because Betty Cooper has no capacity to resist his mind control and she must perforce assume nobody else can withstand it either.  Oh and whenever Betty is caught in a weakness she lies by omission, compulsively.  Very consistent.

- Toni is a person of limited vision and not a leader. As long as her little business is fine, as assured to her by a person who successfully engineered a near massacre against her, she is not going to stand with Tabitha.  This may appear to be inconsistent writing as the characters of Riverdale often don’t remember what happened in the previous episode any more than I do, but it isn’t.  Toni is someone who will talk about her individual accomplishments and awesomeness when her identity as a Serpent is denigrated.  She tends to miss the point, you see.

- Veronica says the right things (“I’ll support you in whatever way you need”) but in essence she’s a true daughter of capitalism.  She has no time or room for sentiment. The Pop’s brand and formula works in more than one location, so Veronica doesn’t see how Tabitha’s business is threatened so much as the location that she’s sentimentally attached to.  One can always make a venture newer, bigger, improved.  Like a lot of us half-assed/ former Catholics, Veronica is uninterested in the spiritual side of things.

- Cheryl is without obvious flaws beyond going through uncontrollable hot flashes that force her to keep her home icy cold.  Why Riverdale is making menopause jokes like this is beyond me, but I am actually having the best time.  If my menopause is going to be anything like my mother’s, I will be uncontrollably melting down with no warning (yay?) so I am taking notes about how I’m going to wander around my house in a red bathing suit with a gauzy white robe, wielding a fan.   I guess if I had to reach for it, Cheryl’s flaw is that she has such a hard time escaping her childhood home.

- Jughead’s flaw is that he’s loyal to Barchie beyond all reason, prioritizing their needs to have their weaknesses covered up above all other priorities.  He will lie to Tabitha to protect Archie and Betty, even though they have not been shown to make a priority of Jughead whatsoever since they all returned to Riverdale. 

By the way, Kevin is working for Percival as his spy and really, Kevin can catch no breaks on this show.  Why is he like this?

Jughead slips up in his conversation with Tabitha, answering her thought (“how can I fight him if I don’t have anyone’s support?”) out loud. I suppose you could read the exchange they have - she says she doesn’t have anyone’s support and Jughead insisting that he supports her - in a negative way towards their relationship:  Why doesn’t Jughead count as anyone?  Or you can read it in a way that condemns Archie & Betty, Toni & Veronica for the way they treat Jughead as being so very unimportant. That is to say, the people who have known Jughead the longest and deepest that Tabitha knows about treat him so poorly that she has no recourse but to assume Jughead Jones is not (ahem) an influencer.

Once Jughead has explained the recent developments that have happened to the survivors of the explosion plus Cheryl, Tabitha summarizes for those of us in the back, and to her left on the wall is an interesting painting of a black woman shedding a single tear into her palm.  Is this a well known painting?   I laughed because it just looked to me like a comment that went something like: Oh These White People.

By the way: IS JUGHEAD STILL DEAF?  Or did his deafness just ‘go away’ like some alleged doctor allegedly told him a couple episodes back?

In any case, Jughead wants to try to get a place he loves declared a historic landmark, and hence untouchable, recalling that he had been unable to do this with the Drive-In back in the day. And it turns out that Pop Tate has a box filled with historic memorabilia about the diner!   

Oh Jabitha are so cute, doing a little research project together, going from afternoon to evening.  Pop’s was in the Green Book!  The box contains a photo of Eisenhower at the counter (I guess if Nixon or Reagan ate there, it would be a no no?) as well as the diner being transformed into a polio vaccine distribution center.  Jughead is so excited to realize that the place he loves for personal reasons (granted, important ones - he may have literally starved to death without Pop’s) is also historically significant. He’s composing the application he’s going to draft out loud (“Moral crises, national tragedies, they all took place inside these booths!”) when some blank faced white man comes in and shoots Tabitha. 

Tabitha comes to on X-mas Eve, 1944, standing in the same place (behind the counter at Pop’s) wearing almost the same uniform but with very different hair, and someone calls her Teresa.  She’s shown the same issue of the Green Book she and Jughead found in the ‘historic items’ box, except it’s fresh off the press this time.

When she sees Jughead in a booth, Tabitha runs over to ask him what is going on.  And Jughead explains, then says:

“Also, I’m not Jughead. I’m an angel. Your guardian angel.”

Turns out, Tabitha is in a coma at the hospital, with Jughead at her side.  According to Raphael-as-Jughead, guardian angels are always nearby but only show themselves for cataclysmic or cosmic events.  He gives her a book that might explain things - Milan Elliott’s “The Enigma of Time Travel”  (quick google reveals an actual book exists called The Enigma of Time, published in 1983).  Through it, Tabitha figures out that she’s a ‘chrono kinetic’ - a time traveler.  She speculates that this ability may be trauma-triggered like her boyfriend’s and the other’s special powers.

“Why to 1944?” she asks, which made me blurt out, very rudely, ‘Cuz you’re not white?  I mean, if I had time travel abilities, I’m not sure I’d go to any time before 1980 for various reasons. 

Raphael thinks she has a mission, but Tabitha is really only interested in finding a totem (an item of “symbolic, mythic or religious power”) so she can return to her immediate present.  Raphael seems to get the upper hand because Titus invites Tabitha to a very important meeting, about whether to turn Riverdale into a “Sundown Town.’ 

A Keller ancestor is Mayor, with a very strange way of doing air-quotes: palm to the ceiling, fingers curling towards his face.  Is this historical accuracy?    Tabitha is alarmed to discover that a Perkins is Sheriff, who very much wants this Sundown Town ordinance. Artie (not Archie!) Andrews stands up as the lone white voice against this discrimination right on the heels of Tabitha’s fearless objection and confronts Sheriff Perkins.  Thanks to their efforts, the attempt to railroad (ahem) this ordinance does not pass and will be reconsidered in the new year.

In the middle of Tabitha talking over the events of the evening with Angel Jughead, Toni and Fang’s 1944 versions come banging at the door for help, their car having run out of gas just as they are passing through Centerville, a Sundown town. I need to do more research about this because I just don’t know a lot about it - but would a POC family with a little baby actually run out of gas traveling through an area they know are Sundown Towns without vigilantly checking the gas nonstop? This seems more like, We got hunted down by white supremacists.  So if that’s what happened, why would Fangs & Toni tell their story in this way to Tabitha of all people?   In any case, ‘44 Toni begs refuge from Tabitha-Teresa. She says of course they can stay.

Sheriff Perkins and Kevin Keller ‘44 (Oh heavens, baby, WHY?) as his deputy (once a deputy, always a deputy?) show up to arrest the ‘trespassers.’  When the Tates put up a brave and united front, Sheriff Perkins opts to get a warrant sent from Centerville.  Any plan to go on a run for it is impossible with the baby.  When Titus Tate says they need a miracle, Tabitha gets a great brainwave and gets Angel Jughead to agree to show his true form to the villains, which causes both eye-rupture and brain-breakage while a heavenly chorus sings Amen Amen.

Then we never see Angel Jughead for the rest of the episode, which means that the ‘revelation’ of the true form of Raphael results in the total destruction (through immolation?) of the Jughead body.  So, basically, Jughead even in an embodied angel form dies to fulfill someone else’s needs once again? 

Tabitha then summons Artie Andrews to go with her, to make the impassioned case to Mayor Keller that he should reject the Sundown Law, because it would “cost Riverdale its soul.”  And miraculously (this is the real miracle), this works! 

Percival Pickens will not give up though, so just as Tabitha is trying to wrap up this story with Titus he bursts in, having escaped from the insane asylum (complete with frayed strait-jacket) to shoot her himself, this time making her push herself into April 3, 1968.  She tries to stop MLK’s assassination, starting with directly going to Memphis herself.  (So sorry to be shallow about this but her 1960s coat with the big black buttons is gorgeous and I love it).  The bus breaks down just outside the city limits.

In the form of Toni, Angel Raphael tries to talk her out of it.  Tabitha runs to the FBI office (her knowledge of exact dates and memory for stray bits of information astounds me) but it’s manned by a Percival and a Kevin Keller, so she leaves immediately.   MLK’s assassination is a fixed event that can never, ever be changed, by any time traveler trying anything.  Angel Toni says she will keep Tabitha company as she waits for the terrible news. They hear RFK make the announcement, making Pop Tate collapse. (I love young Pop Tate.)  They decide to keep the diner open to give people a place to go.

FBI Perkins and FBI Kevin show up to tell her to clear out the diner at 6 p.m. because of riots in the three nearby towns. So there are actual Black Panther looking people in the Diner, which makes me wonder if the one guy in just the black jacket is supposed to be a Southside Serpent of this era?  (I really want better lore for the Southside Serpents, who are implied to have had a long history).  Tabitha calls - and reaches! - J Edgar Hoover to threaten him with blackmail, and uses the force of all this to muzzle FBI Percival.  Operation Turkey Shoot was canceled in addition to firing FBI Percival for good measure. 

They play Mahalia Jackson over the segment where Tabitha grieves MLK.  That asshole FBI Percival does a very scary drive by because he just can’t let it go. In fact, he planted a BOMB.  Tabitha takes it outside and lets it blow her into the future.

November 1999 is the new time. A white kid was caught spray painting hate symbols on the diner.  He did it for a baseball card depicting Riverdale’s only major league player.  The kid got it at the new shop that opened on the outskirts of town, owned by one Paul Prince, who is Percival, of course.  She goes to the “Curious Items” shop, where she’s visited by Raphael Betty.  Raphael Betty is the most activist and criminal minded (Go Betty!) so she just hands Tabitha the key to break into Percival’s shop.  

Tabitha relying on intuition and an apparently vast knowledge of history, takes polaroids of items that look significant to her.  Back at the diner, Angel Betty tells her that one of these things is the Spear of Longinus, “said to have pierced the side of Jesus at his crucifixion.”   Oh and Percival also has the Holy Grail. Just, casually, he just does.   So  naturally Angel Betty tells Tabitha to go get the Holy Grail. 

What follows is a really AMAZING segment that I wish was both longer and brighter lit.  Percival creepily dresses up in one of his items for sale, an old military uniform (blue coats are Union, though, right?) to assault Tabitha with a saber.  Tabitha engages in a sword fight (using the Spear of Longinus) with the (a??) devil, which doesn’t faze her one bit, handily winning based on college Varsity fencing skills.  Percival just poofs out of existence.   Later, Tabitha tells Angel Betty that she then burned the whole shop down, because she shares this arsonist tendency with Jughead.

OK so this is awesome, like I said, that Tabitha gets to win this fight against Evil / Darkness Incarnate. But now I’m wondering if this is really Riverdale.  This seems so like the kind of twisted Valentine that Jughead would write for his girlfriend, don’t you think?  The Holy Grail may be her talisman so she drinks a milkshake from it, hoping to get back to her real timeline.

Except with all the knowledge she now has!  So Tabitha alters her future by chucking the giant can of tomato soup at the would-be assailant with deadly accuracy, knocking him out cold in front of the big yellow Dead End sign affixed to the counter.

Tabitha then gives Jughead an exposition dump, saying they need to gather everyone with powers to fight against Percival Pickens, who is continually obsessed with destroying Riverdale in a very Hiram-Lodge fashion in every major era.  Jughead wants to know why he didn’t get an angel, which I thought was very cute of him.  (Your angel, if you got one, would probably tell you that you have to die, Jughead.).

When the Riverdale Powers Gang has assembled, Tabitha announces that she has seen the future.  Riverdale is currently destined to be decimated, and ground zero is Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe, which is also her talisman through time (not the Holy Grail).   So wow Riverdale the Show has some ego  - the 24 hr diner > The Holy Grail.  All righty!  The railroad is still being pushed forward, and Tabitha gets the final close up of determination.