#riverdale episode recap
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.
A very normal-length episode recap with completely neutral & fair minded opinions. Spoiler warning! I will say, that if this whole bit with the superpowers and the Evil Englishman is somehow still connected to Bunker Rivervale Jughead Narration Creator, then he’s really confronting his unrequited yearning for Archie Andrews in this episode.
When Jughead Jones decides to do something, he always chooses the most difficult possible way of doing it. When he became a gang leader he decided to be Moses and Jesus and also everyone’s underage father. When he wanted to be a genre novelist he had the genre happen to him, becoming the dead body that the whodunit was trying to solve. He played dead on a gurney at the morgue and everything. You can be a hipster writer in New York City without having a drug dealing girlfriend or the mob after you but what would be the fun in that? So now that he’s decided to a journalist and newspaper runner for his small hometown, Jughead Jones decides he must publish the most incendiary, anti-Riverdale take down submission of all time, and anonymously, at that, taking on the burden of protecting this provocateur himself. Because of course he does.
In the opening narration, where Tabitha is concerned to be reading this ‘submission’ that Jughead published, Jughead Jones is talking to a “you.” Has he done this before? Break the fourth wall while narrating? He wants me (and me specifically) to know that he can read thoughts and is still hearing impaired. Jughead is lying to everyone including his friends that his hearing has returned.
The question asked is if he’s a bad person for lying to everyone. I say no. “I can read your mind” only makes him sound insane on top of being deaf, for one. People generally don’t react well to magic powers that are this invasive, even in fairytales. It’s not a great choice, sure, but it’s the Jughead Jones way of caring for people he loves - By resisting burdening them with his last possible strand of strength.
One of the anachronisms I adore about Riverdale is that every person keeps reading a printed hard copy of the paper, obsessively, daily, like smartphones and twitter don’t exist. Sweet Pea read Alice’s newspaper back in the day, and now Alice reads Jughead’s with … her boyfriend Uncle Fucking Frank. (Shout out to the tumblrina who pointed out that whenever Betty fucks a boy, Alice feels compelled to fuck the boy’s nearest blood relation) (also wondering if this is why Archie refused to date Betty when his dad was alive - he couldn’t do that to Fred). Reggie and Veronica, and Fangs and Toni all read the paper during their different morning routines. Veggie haven’t gone to bed yet, and Fangs & Toni are hoping the baby sleeps a bit longer. Cheryl is very pleased, and the Keller men, because I guess they’re both too macho to cook, are breakfasting at the diner.
The thing is, Percival is not wrong - there is no performing arts or culture is Riverdale, and when even when it wasn’t quite so blighted it needed to try to recruit teen gang members as deputies to try to clear out the Gargoyles and so forth. But then the show does a pivot to talk about the “Homeless encampments around every corner.” Percival is extremely pleased to see his writing in print, so he smiles as he tells Pop Tate he’s very pleased to have moved to Riverdale. The funny thing is - the writer does not attack the dire stupidity and tokenist representation on the so called counsel, four unelected officials that apparently wield an immense amount of power in the town: A crazy lady (Alice, you are crazy), a mercenary and petty criminal, Minnie Mouse gang leader-bar tender who somehow is also given untrammeled access to children, and the girl who has only recently moved to Riverdale to work at her grandpa’s ailing business. This is intentional, of course.
The article does not actually mention Archie (He owns - apparently??- a functional business and not in a gang - anymore? - and his sins of violence are not known to Percival - I guess?) but in any case, Archie is pissed.
And that’s what it comes around to, in the end, no?
Jughead aimed this take-down article at Archie in particular. Jughead fully knew that its contents amounted to a “razor blade that cut to the very heart of Riverdale,” and published it anyway, after YEARS of calling Archie Riverdale’s soul, spirit, heart, symbol etc etc. It landed fair and square. “With no author named, who would take the brunt of blowback but…” is delivered in a long-suffering, irritated way but c’mon Jughead. You wanted to hear Archie think thoughts about you. You also wanted to take a razor blade to cut into his heart the way he’s done to you since Ep 4.17. Let’s be real here, ok? This has to be the most convoluted way of pulling someone’s pigtails to show you ‘like’ them. You published this article anonymously so that Archie would have NO CHOICE but to talk to YOU.
“Here we go,” Jughead sighs (faux unhappily = happily). Archie thinks - BACKSTABBER! This constant worry about stabbing Archie in the back and being stabbed in turn is a constant in their relationship. Calling Riverdale the “worst town in America” is a bit harsh, so I give Archie that. America has like, full on KKK /Nazi towns that POC point out on maps as places to avoid while driving from point A to B.
Archie asks Jughead: “Why would you publish something like this??” at school (where they’re still coaching and teaching). Jughead ends up just telling Archie (who doesn’t get it) his true emotional intentions behind publishing this article: “Let me interview you, and I’ll publish it next week.” Oh honey. It’s so desperate, Jughead’s need for Archie’s attention, care and involvement. Archie probably avoided ‘saying’ anything to Jughead after that initial conversation about his hearing loss, I reckon, because that’s how Archie has been to Jughead post time jump. And Archie is just a brute - “No screw that!” is his simple concise answer. Archie doesn’t want to do anything private with Jughead - he wants him to come to the town hall.
Meanwhile at Thornhill, Britta is visiting Grandmistress Rose in her prison. Britta is just such a resilient kiddo - survived homophobic parents, expulsion from her home, witnessed a demon(?) possession, an exorcism (that Nana Rose called something else), the derangement/ possession of her only guardian, and the trauma of watching an old woman get tossed into a medieval dungeon in the house she lives in. The idea of Cheryl being not quite dissipated into nothing and instead imprisoned in a ‘mental jail’ is the thing that brings this feisty kiddo to some level of alarm. Nana Rose is the catchall character for all whackadoo magical things. Sleeping next to someone if they possessed you once is enough to let you inception yourself into their ‘dreamscape.’ The thing is, Britta belongs here because she hears this story and her immediate next reaction is I COULD DRUG HER TEA. OK but which drugs are these? Britta has dream-inception drugs that can be dissolved into a tea?? And like all good fairy stories the old witch sets an arbitrary deadline: Britta must ‘emerge’ from the dream faster than Abigail or there will be ‘wrath’(undefined) bear.
We get a preview of the mental jail that Britta is going to have to brave, literally ‘through a looking glass.’ This next bit was AMAZING. Riverdale is doing Mommy Dearest!!!. Penelope Blossom is doing a nightmare parody of Faye Dunaway doing a parody of Joan Crawford as presented by an adopted daughter who absolutely hated her. They gave the Penelope actress the extremely rigid eyebrows and the big shoulder outfits. The Blossom twins all their mother, Dearest Mumsy, in unison.
Jughead is at the town meeting, sitting in the corner, listening in on people’s thoughts. “Who wrote the article? Probably Alice” is one thought that he hears. The way this meeting devolves is very interesting. Alice thinks there is much to ‘dispute’ about the article, but the thing she hates the most is Veronica and Reggie with their casino (but somehow not a gang?). Veronica tries to makes a case for herself (she brings tourists and employs the locals). Alice says that the true beneficiaries of a casino are its owners. Alice is a moron - this is how capitalism works, babe, not just casinos. Veronica is sitting right next to Archie but he acts like he doesn’t see her. He only wants to know who wrote the article.
The writer of the article was Percival. Toni says Percival’s great great grandfather (on his dad’s side) having led genocide against her ancestors would be a strike against Percival pointing out that Riverdale as a town sucks (and that the Serpents under Toni’s rule kind of suck as is having to deal with on-going gang warfare between weaksauce gangs also sucks).
Archie ups the ante by daring Percival to come up with ‘real solutions.’ He wasn’t ready for Percival actually having any, so he instead offers to punch his lights out. Percival follows the fascist playbook down to the T - he attacks the people on the margins that everyone present has mixed feelings about: homeless people in Sketch Alley. Percival wants to ‘bus-out’ the homeless. What does it mean to HUMANELY bus the homeless out? Bus them where? Archie counters with a good statement - that you can’t just bus people out of your town - and with a lie “Riverdale takes care of its own.” But it really doesn’t though. That’s just not true. They let all those Southside Serpents live a tent village. Alice Cooper is the prototypical Riverdale resident and she doesn’t even look after her own children.
The homeless are not present to speak for themselves, so the correct things that Archie says (the most destitute are still citizens of the place) rings kind of hollow.
And in any case, when put on the spot, Archie doesn’t have a direct answer for what he would propose instead, and Jughead gets immensely excited: And thus began the battle for Riverdale’s soul, he proclaims. Which really means, I finally have a project I created for myself and Archie.
Because you know, when Archie creates projects, like his recent Saving Riverdale 1.0 - Avengers Assemble, he only really assigns a tertiary-at-best role for Jughead. Jughead doesn’t bring capital, like Veronica, nor muscle and firepower, like Betty. If Jughead can control the project, by contrast, he’ll put Archie first, and himself second. Even better, Betty is out of town while Veronica and Archie act like they’ve never met, so Jughead can really have Archie to himself. Old habits die really hard.
Abigail comes home to Thornhill where Britta is wearing her long hair in braided devil’s horns. I KNEW THAT HER ELABORATE BRAIDS MEANT SOMETHING! I love Britta signaling her devilish intentions through her hair. Britta offers to provide handmaid services to Abigail, who accepts them without question. Britta (like the young Jughead and the young Cheryl) is in a situation that’s hair raisingly terrifying if you stop and think about it too much (her guardian is either demon possessed or completely insane, and the only other adult present has been locked into a dungeon and tells her to drug the guardian OH MY).
Jughead shows up at the Andrews house, where he’s now twice lived in (or attempted to) and twice got kicked (or rather BLOWN UP) out of. The first thing he says is, Don’t punch me in a sardonic, flat way. He tells Archie the obvious, that he himself had been homeless more than once (I mean, if he and Tabitha, god forbid, break up, doesn’t he go right back to being homeless??). Then come the Riverdale the Show’s statement about the unhoused/homeless/destitute: All of them are without exception good people who deserve resources. Archie points out that Jughead didn’t say anything at the meeting, but Archie still doesn’t get it. Jughead needs this 1:1 discussion and buy-in from Archie about their joint project before he’s going to involve himself in this project. Jughead gives Archie the idea of giving a micro home for everyone in Sketch Alley, and he thought of this in particular because Archie has a construction business. Of course Archie says yes - this was tailor made for him by a person who’s loved him forever.
Britta with her little devil’s horn hair somehow (Tea + Whooshing sound) invades Abigail/ Cheryl’s dream mindscape where Penelope Blossom is hamming it up to high heaven with an accent that’s vaguely Southern and Mid-Atlantic at the same time. Cheryl in the dreamscape is in time out, weeping at her own birthday party. Britta bravely stands up to Penelope on Cheryl’s behalf. When the dream-inhabitants give Britta a stern look, she escapes the dream, waking up shortly before Abigail.
Reggie and Veronica are in their office with the portrait of Hiram in the space. Veronica wants to make the casino a clean business because she wants to rehabilitate the Lodge name and contribute to ‘fixing’ Riverdale. Reggie reminds her that going ‘legit’ is going to be highly expensive, so Veronica gives the go ahead, which is fine enough, but then she does something very peculiar - she wants to hang up a portrait of her dad as a sort of hate-watch, so she can be reminded of who she doesn’t want to be like. This is not how that works.
Percival is buttering up Alice to vote his way at her house. I don’t know why this scene was necessary - Alice would’ve voted to bury the homeless alive if she thought enough people would go for it. I hope Percival serviced Alice after we pan away (Uhh minors DNI?).
We’re at another town council meeting. Veronica and Reggie present their proposal for a Riverdale as Atlantic City. She wants to open an arcade. Frank says there are too many broken people in Riverdale for a casino to be a ‘good’ option. So both Frank, who lives off of his nephew that he just described as broken, and Alice, former cult member and child abuser, that the idiotic core four elevated to these unelected super powerful positions and have moreover never launched nor run any sort of successful business are basically naysaying the only person with any sort of entrepreneurial spirit in Riverdale. Oh boy.
Next up is Archie, mouthing the things that Jughead told him to say. Toni likes it, so does Tabitha (who mentions that she’s seen these mini houses in Chicago, which means this was where Jug got this idea from). Alice says no, because it’s expensive, and Percival points out that his plan is very low cost.
Archie and Percival have their tete-a-tete, long overdue. Percival points out the obvious, that Alice (“your neighbors”) would rather the homeless problem disappear. He basically describes what NIMBY is which Archie describes as warped and cynical.
Archie calls on Toni and Tabitha to ask for money ($25K per) to build the microhomes, and both women say yes. Jughead takes Archie and other irrelevant people to Sketch Alley to let them know they’re going to build them the microhomes. Doc looks really happy, so you know it’s going to turn to shit, because Doc is tied to Jughead, and Riverdale is a story about taking nice things away from Jughead Jones (If Tabitha dies I will riot).
Reggie meanwhile is giving Veronica a big reality check. That they can’t go ‘legit’ and ever turn a profit. And just on the heels of this piece of sobering news they’re told that ‘something bad’ has happened in the ‘private’ gambling room. A man has committed suicide in there. These two hard nosed criminals (that’s what they are) talk about what they should do to save their long term business interests right in front of a dangling corpse. Veronica decides to call the Deus Ex Machina Godson.
Britta has drugged Abigail a second time to have a go at inception again. Her hair is back in the demon braids. I love this hairdo on her, it makes her look like Irish Chun Lee. She finds Cheryl, but they barely have any time to talk before Penelope Blossom reenacts Mommy Dearest for us all, making her kids scrub the floors. She even mentions the hanger!
Next day at Sketch Alley, people are building things without any sort of training somehow and I’m supposed to think this is all good. That is, until Doc wallops Kevin across the head with a hammer. (Who is looking after Baby Anthony right now?)
Alice is all over it at her news channel or whatever that is. What is that? It’s an opinion channel that commentates on current events? Tabitha, Toni and Archie are at the diner and very concerned. Tabitha and Archie are still all in on this very losing endeavor, the microhouses. I think I’m supposed to think they are good and kind people, but I am not. I want these two very young women who are struggling running a diner and a bar in a dying town to just look after number one a bit, or at least, their own employees, instead of pursuing this cockamamie plan with Archie. But that’s because I dislike Archie.
Reggie has done an interesting thing to actually investigate why the gambler suicided in the private room - he’d been winning huge! It turns out Percival was literally whispering in his ear. Okay then. But they don’t have much time to discuss this because Abuelita’s Godson shows up to ask where the body is. I love Reggie’s “Jeez, cut to the chase much?” Reggie like crimes of a financial nature, and Jughead (in Killing Mr Honey) had been very prescient that he would be ill at ease with murder, corpse desecration and other wet work (ooooh I got to say that like I am a tough person). Geraldo is not amused by his humor.
Britta consults with Grandmistress Rose about Cheryl’s situation. Is Nana Rose’s character that she’s going through early stages of dementia? Because she goes through lucid phases like this where she’s quite coherent about the underlying family dysfunction (“Penelope has always been Cheryl’s tormentor”) and other times when she’s just gleefully doing batshit insane things without a care in the world. Poor Britta. She’s tasked with figuring out the solution to this strange magic/witchcraft/ demon coma problem that the Blossom women have created amongst themselves.
Percival Pickens knows the power of showing up for people. He seems to be the only person who actually visited Kevin in the hospital. (Toni, Archie and Tabitha absolutely have not, though they care). Never underestimate the power of physical presence, friends. When you want to influence someone, SHOW UP IN PERSON.
Benjamin Moore donated the paint for future houses, is what Archie says, in front of the finished microhouse. Is this SUBTLE product placement? Or was this Riverdale the Show trying to solicit a sponsorship? Or are they trying to pressure Benjamin Moore the company to make donations to homeless shelters and microhomes? …. Youtubers with less than 10K subscribers do a much better job of advertisement for sponsors that Riverdale. Jabitha and Farchie (Frank and Archie probably fuck, I don’t know, I hate Frank so much) are very happy in the parking lot.
Abuelita’s Godson wants to help Veronica’s business by putting out the word to ‘the wise guys.’ He’s trying to help, so Veronica wants him to investigate Percival Pickens. The fact that nobody (neither Journalist Alice nor Journalist Jughead) have actually done this is an indictment for both.
Within a single evening, the model microhouses they set up in front of the Diner has been graffitied nastily. Archie punches the hell out of his car. Our hero. Meanwhile, Jughead visits Doc, to ask why he attacked Kevin. Is this what happens to all of Jughead Jones’s father figures? They get visits from a very disappointed Jughead while behind bars? Doc completely takes it as a given that Jughead can read his thoughts. Okay then.
At long last, Jughead has a 1:1 with Percival. Jughead opens strong by lobbing a Gandhi quote at an Englishman. I wish the show had let this have a little bit of room to breathe, because that is very, very funny, not just because of Gandhi v Evil Englishman but also because it’s one smug white man doing this to another smug white man. Jughead gets caught “rooting around inside” Percival’s mind. Jughead is so scared.
Britta is left handed, with lovely penmanship and knows her way around a fountain pen. She’s trying to dream inception to rescue Cheryl again. This time, Cheryl’s hair is all torn up, weeping in a chair in a sailor outfit. Britta tries to wake Cheryl out of it, but they’re caught by Penelope. Dream Penelope can tell IMMEDIATELY that Britta is both sapphic and a slut. Awesome Gaydar you got there. Penelope has to be gay. She has to. I love the white flowers on Britta’s sweater. She leaves the note for Cheryl as she gets kicked out of the dream house. Penelope’s hunched-shoulder flailing around in a rage is EXCEPTIONALLY delicious. Cheryl, just from this one note from Britta, recovers herself entirely, lipstick, bustier and all.
Next morning, Jabitha, Frank and Toni are repainting the microhouses. Just as Jughead is about to convey important information about Percival’s mind bending powers, the man himself shows up to announce that the homeless have been successfully ejected from Riverdale.
The new fivesome (?) visit the emptied out Sketch Alley that evening (I don’t know why they couldn’t go right away?). It’s Frank, Toni, Archie in the center, Tabitha and Jughead. I like that there’s more for Tabitha to do than be Girl-Friday for everyone and Toni doesn’t have to try to be some sort of tough which she can’t do, but I HATE THIS LINE UP. The two POC women are still completely subordinate to the whims of Archie Andrews, and they’re the ones taking the biggest risks with their businesses.
Cheryl is back to herself so she’s visiting Britta in her dreams to say they have to drive Abigail out of Cheryl’s body.
Everyone is applauding Percival for his successfully clearing out Sketch Alley. Alice is one of the people applauding. I hope once again that she got cunnilingus at least out of this. Sheriff Keller hires Percival as a deputy and the core four are peeved. Jughead finally makes a mistake where he assumes that someone he wasn’t looking at said the thought he overheard - Archie gives Jughead a dire look.
Alice loves exercising all this power over other people. Saying no to people, getting in their way, kicking people out of their own businesses. Why Alice suddenly despises Veronica (other than Percival’s interference?) seems unsupported to me so I feel the same sort of boredom I feel about any other sort of unmotivated villainy.
As a result, Veronica decides to be her Daddykins’ daughter after all, which is music to Reggie’s ears (he wants to run scams!). Abuelita’s Iceman says he couldn’t find anything on Percival. Betty comes back to the Andrews residence, saying she’s lost TBK (what else is new) but she’s acquired an affliction in the form of terrible migraines. Archie tells Betty that Jughead can read minds, and that Percival Pickens can control people’s minds. He says the whole town is in trouble.
I wonder why they didn’t show this very important discussion between Jughead and Archie? Is it because Archie was as indifferent, brutal and irritable as he’d been about Jughead’s deafness?
In his commonplace book, Percival writes “Jughead Jones ,Mind reader??” but his penmanship is much worse than Britta’s. He has a murder board set up with Core Four and Uncle Frank.
Riverdale S6B Ep #107 (“The Fog”)
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.
