#riverdale s5
EMDR being talked about on Riverdale? Yes, we love to see it. Also, Archie/Cheryl friendship ❤️
and lol at no one paying attention during Cheryls prayer.
Riverdale S5 E18 (Next to Normal) - 5 Things I Loved/ 3 Things To Consider.
5 Things I Loved
1. Charles Smith (son of Jones) is much more terrifying as a Gene Kelly type grinning dancer in his All American Boy High School outfit than he had been as Chick’s lover or killer or FBI agent. I loved this - that Alice’s vision of normal is completely horrifying. The completely lobotomized version of Polly, a Polly without the pain, undercurrents of frantic hysteria or the bitterness at opportunities lost that the actual Polly had, is also extremely soulless and false. Alice Cooper absolutely never understood her daughter, even if she did love her. And it was terrific that even the vision Polly ‘turns’ on Alice. This was very well done.
2. Jughead making his bid for Tabitha and her accepting it was just all kinds of cute. I mean, this is Jughead the Failman of Messy Mess, so he’s doing this only after getting two of the broadest possible hints ever provided by a beautiful woman to a man in the history of narrative (“I’m his girlfriend” to his ex girlfriend, and then “He’s also my boyfriend” to her dad, and forcing him to act along) but nevertheless - good for you Jughead!
I know nothing about this musical so I don’t know if this is how it really goes or if they reworked most or all of the lyrics, but in any case, his progression was extremely funny to me and very in character with post-time-jump Jughead. He says Ask Me To Be Your Real Boyfriend and she refuses (good for you Tabs) then he says, The World Sucks So We Should Date (um?) and then he says, I Suck In So Many Ways So We Should Date (??!?!) but it works! She doesn’t even mind that he wears the most hideous jacket to a Meet the Folks dinner.
I like this relationship between these two very strange people so much, these two very pretty oddballs who make an extremely wholesome commitment to each other before they’ve ever been sexually intimate. Also I got a kick out of the smoochy smooch sound effect noises that sounded like they’d been added post production. Because the word ‘normal’ is worked to death here, I liked that the way Tabitha and Jughead are using the much more loaded word “perfect” in their numbers was a nice antidote.
Sidebar: Tabitha was running away from an overweening closeness with her father, apparently, so she is similar to Veronica in that way. Is that why I’m so in love with her? I absolutely adored S1 Veronica so hard.
3. I loved the interesting and very ‘visible’ directorial/ photography decisions in this episode.
One is the way Tabitha’s tall elegant parents are framed to be absolutely gigantic and enormous compared to how Tabitha and Jughead are framed. Jughead is not actually a short person and everything I’ve seen of Tabitha indicates she’s quite long limbed herself, but the two of them are photographed to be constantly peering ‘up’ at Tabitha’s parents, who are both framed to fill up the entire screen and seem to be constantly looking down from ‘on high.’ Tabitha and Jughead look completely adorable and diminutive together.
The other was when Archie and Veronica are discussing breaking up, and both their worlds are cocked at an ‘off’ angle. The Andrews’ kitchen, which is usually lit orange and warm, is suddenly in slate and is full of sharp hard angles, and it’s tilted. The camera doesn’t feel like it’s doing a dutch angle thing - it feels like the house itself is wrong. And of course it is all wrong, for Veronica.
Veronica tiny and alone in the beautifully lit and nicely appointed solid-Americana bedroom she shares with Archie, all wrong and bored, was very moving to me as well.
4. I loved the fanservice they put in for us Cheryl Blossom stans. During Cheryl’s number in her emptied church, she sprays water on her mother’s face accompanied by whip sounds that used to happen when she flipped her hair around in all the other musicals we’ve had to date. So I stand corrected. It wasn’t that Cheryl’s magnificent hair comes with its own sound effect. It’s that the sound of a whip cracking is actually Cheryl’s musical leitmotif. Ha!
Sidebar: The fact that people who were in it for the ‘new spirituality’ and cult drop out once the religion turns out to be an old spirituality and an old god (Gaia) was extremely funny to me and felt like a very Catholic thing to say about religion: that everyone wants the new shiny thing, because the old stuff carries actual duties and responsibility.
5. More fanservice - Reggie in his slick outfit with his hair all smoothed back studying for an exam and talking about his 5 year plans. I do not understand this way of studying, where you have another person present and they’re talking to you AND they are making you talk to them but also I am an ultra introvert who would rather go without than have to make a phone call to talk to a person so maybe this is a me problem. Anyway, Veronica coming to an introspective realization when helping the most unintrospective person in Riverdale do something was a nice touch.
3 Things To Consider
a. Why does nobody in Riverdale know the word NORMATIVE. Normative does not mean good, and normative rarely actually reflects reality. This obsession with ‘normal’ and equating that as some sort of standard - when there’s literally not a single ‘normal’ family in the entirety of this city made me feel like I’d been powdered with fleas. Part of this is personal - I knew from the get-go that what I was born into was not normal, not the people, not the circumstances, and even worse, a lot of what I had looked “special” (super-normative?) (see e.g. being a dip kid in boarding school) - so I could not view normal as aspirational, only as a method to hold things over people’s heads and make them feel bad.
b. Marriage: I’ve noticed that marriage, once entered into, seems to be a really addictive lifestyle, and they’re kind of saying that in Riverdale.
I do not mean this to be disrespectful but when someone’s beloved dog dies after a long illness, I’ve seen a significant number of dog owners go off the idea of having a dog ever again, and stay dogless (though absolute adoring and showering love on every single dog they see) because they’re so heartsick, for years.
Marriage, though, seems to be the opposite of that. People who’ve married once keep getting remarried no matter how vicious the breakup and how costly the divorce. So Veronica, her first marriage having come to a pretty spectacularly bad end (killing her husband in the middle of her divorce proceedings) jumping immediately into cohabitation while talking about children and making marriage-like compromises looked very realistic to me, and also created a wry commentary about trying to find footing in an unmoored world. Too bad that what Archie wants to do is live with the man who had been in love with him as a boy (I am talking about Jughead) and his father-substitute uncle.
The thing is, traditional marriage (the only kind that Veronica seems to know how to make - further commentary on Catholicism??) is shit for women entirely and always has been, which is why she can’t bear it even with Archie.
c. Primary Relationships in the Main Four: After the extremely brutal way that the show ended Bughead 1.0 two episodes ago, where Betty simply does not (cannot?) give a shit about Jughead’s problems, I think this episode was the show trying to offer a gentler explanation for why it’s not going to work.
Jughead Jones has no primary attachments to his actual family of origin - his primary relationship is always with the girl in his life, for good or for ill. However, Betty Cooper’s primary attachment is, very sadly, to her very fucked up mother, Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper’s primary attachment was I think to her son Charles, that she gave up, and that’s why she’s the way she is.
This is the problem for Veronica and Archie as well. Archie’s primary attachment is to Riverdale (he can’t even fuck when he’s not in Riverdale, people). Veronica’s primary attachment is to competitive achievement, and this just ISN’T available in Riverdale.
The arrows are all pointing in different directions, and not towards each other.
Riverdale S5 E12 (Jaime/Hiram) - 5 Things I loved/ 3 Things to consider
5 Things I loved
1. The music selections for the Jaime to Hiram transitions were delirious and filled me with joy. I admit up front I’ve never heard any of these songs before, so if they turn out to be a horrible kind of misappropriation or desecration or something I will feel bad. In any case - Riverdale commits to giving you a dose of the surreal every episode. The difficulty with doing that in this episode is that the stories being told in it are unusually straightforward, even staid, for Riverdale. So they went to town with the sound track.
There’s a song (Demolicion by the band Narco) that sounds like it’s being sung by the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Toons on a bender - it’s just rawararwrarawrar. All these songs about Hiram ‘being bad’ and mentioning the ‘devil’ are so on the nose that the nose gets broken and pushed right into the skull (the title of the song is literally Devil Devil).
2. I love that Hermione Gomez wears huge 80s glasses that completely overwhelm her little face and yet Jaime hits on her and thinks the world of her. It helps to have that face, I grant you, but as someone who took the Dorothy Parker quote, Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses, very very personally back in the day, I LOVE that Jaime/Hiram has no such qualms. Did everyone notice the bust of Nefertiti that’s positioned right behind Hermione the whole time Hiram is successfully asking her out? I did and it cracked me up.
3. I loved that nothing in this story about Jaime Luna makes Hiram Lodge even a little bit sympathetic to me. Hiram is an out and out villain, and I love that. I’ve been sick of villain backstory narratives that are like, Bad Things Happened To This Man So We Must Identify With His Homicidal Impulses that keep coming out, but this episode didn’t do that.
a) Hiram is in so many ways a textbook abusive husband, and the only thing that distinguishes him from the more stereotypical abuser is that he doesn’t actually punch his victim (he just shoots at her using other people’s guns). Abusers blame their victims for ‘causing’ them to commit abuse. The same is true here. The story that Hiram tells Reggie about his life pretends to be about his father, but is actually all about the fact that it’s Hermione’s fault that he’s a gangster. She’s the one who likes the fancy clothes and the fancy car, the one who names him Hiram Lodge, the one who is turned on by Hiram working for gangsters, the one that goes to the gangsters (rather than his father or her mother or any other adult) to get Hiram out of jail. It’s all her fault and she owes him. This is in addition to his usual, You’re my wife and I own you.
I am right back to being very worried about Hermione.
b) Hiram pretends to be giving ‘life advice’ about fathers and sons to Reggie. Hiram has direct knowledge that Marty Mantle is a piece of shit, and that Reggie has a very trouble relationship with him, and that Marty absolutely does not respect Reggie at all whatsoever (“Reggie is a fool.”) Hiram uses Reggie and then ditches him when he’s done. Hiram makes Reggie an accessory to murder, which nets nobody anything at this point other than Hiram’s own blood lust - and possibly tying up loose ends because Vito is someone who can correct this yarn that Hiram is spinning about his origin - then breaks his heart. Marty Mantle is not only a dad who beat his son - he’s a dad that does not ask his son “Where did you get the money” when the son pays off a huge debt to a known criminal, and is only relieved that he’s no longer on the hook. He also tellingly asks Reggie, “That’s what you got from my story?” indicating that this is a story rather than a testimony.
4. I loved the very anti-straight men commentary the show keeps sneaking in. Like, straight marriage is the worst, especially the ones that produce biological offspring, according to Riverdale. Marty Mantle absolutely despises sex. He’s a guy who sells sexy cars to other guys for a living, and yet he hates talking about getting laid in one. He hates his beautiful sensual son, too, for being sexually successful and comfortable in his body. Both Reggie (described by the gay-bi Fangs as “very straight” even after kissing him) and Hiram (who is basically a Hermione-sexual at this point) have comically fetishistic relationships with cars and shoes, lovingly wiping down these objects at the start of each day. All the straight men say the word “shame” several times -I’m ashamed of you/ I feel shame/ so ashamed/ shame.
5. I continue to adore “I am not in high school any more” Reggie Mantle. Growing up to be a slightly sleazy car salesman is the one of the few character developments for Grown Riverdale that both makes sense and isn’t depressing. Core Four, Cheryl and Polly are all extremely depressing and supportable with logic. Toni and Fangs make out OK but they were also underdeveloped in the first four seasons. (I am too upset to talk about Sweet Pea). I was moved by his tearing up while very quietly confronting his father, and I was moved by his boyish attempt at trying to show his new boss that he’s not just the muscle. Oh and he’s so beautiful, did I say that already? There’s so much face in Reggie’s face - strong brows, deep set eyes, those cheekbones, that jawline, that MOUTH.
Three Things to Think About
a. Why is Jughead narrating this? Jughead is unusually wrong about a lot of things in his opening narration, and I assume this is intentional. Jughead seems to use the words hero and protagonist interchangeably, and also I guess hasn’t seen Joker because most villains and antiheros also always get their origin stories too. (There’s a theory that what we’re watching is the Betty Cooper serial killer origin story, for example). Has Jughead not watched “Citizen Kane” because he asks “What is his rosebud?” about Hiram, BUT WE ARE NOT TOLD. Jughead sounds jealous of Reggie, frankly, and he’s wrong when he says Hiram collects lost souls. What OTHER lost souls does Hiram have near him? And who the heck is S5 Jughead Jones calling LOST?
b. What Reggie really wants to do - and possibly also Hiram - is to wear a suit and carry a briefcase. It’s just very White Collar Aspirant that isn’t fully explored. Like, how the 50 shades of grey movie was really about sitting in a board room negotiating a contract and having pretty women in suits bring you tea - that was the erotic highlight of that movie. We live in capitalism, so getting to use the accoutrement of the Wall St capitalist is the true fantasy.
c. The point of this episode that the show is making to the viewer is this: A straightforward narrative, where gangsters act like gangsters, and fathers and sons have realistic misunderstandings and conflicts, is something we’re capable of doing. We just don’t want to.
Riverdale S5 Ep 11. (The Voicemail Episode) - 5 things I loved/ 3 Things to Consider (potentially, spoilers)
Things I Loved:
1. I loved that Riverdale, this (formerly) teen show, was blatantly making a radical commentary about both religion and male violence, but in this sneaky way with a ‘silly’ looking trippy drugged-out music video. The statement is this: Religion = Drugs = Righteous Violence of Young Men. Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, and Riverdale answered, Nah, it’s more like shrooms.
And in fact, according to the show, being two sweet girls hanging out dancing and having fun is better than religion and righteous violence. Further, violence is Archie’s drug. I mean this is a set of pretty bold statements, people. I will also add the crazy young man vigilantes of Riverdale making the Batman rope-slide entrance was fabulous, but I also liked that the music made fun of them, like, Y’all think you’re being heroic but this is so dumb.
2. If you read my retread of Seasons 1 through 4 (the true ending, which was “Graduation”) you’ll know that I love scenes of Jughead Jones waking up from sleep. He’s so good at it, and I don’t know if my abiding interest in this specific thing elevates this to some sort of kink but I’m ok with that, if it is. (Please tell me in the comments if Watching a Cute Boy Wake Up From Sleep is an actual kink.) In this episode, Jughead is startled awake by a loud noise from a fevered sleep, and then becomes gradually more alarmed at the noises outside and I loved it.
3. This is not an anti-man blog here, so I will try to tread carefully, but I mean, I absolutely loved that the women are so much better than the men at everything in this episode.
Exhibit A:
Penelope’s cult is so much better than Edgar Evernever’s! And she is being so honest - Penelope always emotionally worshiped her son, like a lot of misogynist mothers of sons do, and now she’s literally worshiping him. Also a religion that is founded on a deceased person is much sturdier, I feel, than a religion that is like Worship Me (which is Edgar’s religion). Plus Penelope is echoing what Jughead used to say about Jason - that his death laid bare the sins of Riverdale! There’s robes in Penelope’s religion, colorful ones, singing and communion and imbibing from a magic goblet. (Can you tell I was raised Catholic? I still love statuary, robes and altars SO much).
Exhibit B:
Tabitha and Betty are so much better than Jughead at everything, including getting high! (Jughead is currently just so bad at life he can’t even get high correctly, poor lamb.) They are better at taking care of their domestic lives and are appalled at how Jughead lives. Tabitha modeling openness and transparency for Betty was terrific: She asks Betty for help and makes sure to tell her, though it’s difficult, about that ‘don’t be such a Betty’ comment and the fact that Jughead made a pass at Tabitha, so that she can make her decision to participate with the full set of relevant facts. Betty’s reaction of wtf?? followed by snorting and then moving right on - I like grown up Betty SO much. She knows it’s not true - they always had fun together, did Bughead, so she’s like, That’s a weird thing to say and then SHRUG.
Exhibit C:
Even when burly men are in a violent confrontation in this episode, the mastermind for both teams is a woman - Veronica on one side, Darla on the other.
4.I loved the two voicemails from Jughead. Yes yes, of course I would because #Jughead Stan but also - hear me out! - because they rang so emotionally true for me, and showed the difference between still-adolescent Jughead and the now-more-adult Jughead.
First, the one to Tabitha: These mushrooms make people say & do what they really think, apparently, so Jughead hit on Tabitha because he’s really attracted to her, and his non-defensive, roll-with-punches adult-self apologizing in this abashed but not self-hating way, and the way he is still hopeful that he stands a chance, was lovely.
The weepy, upset voicemail to Betty was expert fan service for the Jughead Stans, but it was thrilling for everyone else too if the HUGE amount of chatter about it is anything to go by. (Not all thrills are pleasant). I think it’s because there was a lot of truth packed into both his voicemail and her reaction (while high, but again, the mushrooms make you tell your truth).
Truth 1: It’s important to express yourself when you’re upset. Otherwise it comes bursting out at the wrong time, like pus from a festering wound, in a way that helps no one and may hurt you the most. Truth 2: Having an ex hung up on you is no fun. Truth 3: Being confronted with an utterance like, I regret THE ENTIRE time I’ve known you, can make you lose perspective, as in, Betty playing that voicemail isn’t a serve on anyone other than herself and Jughead, together, and that’s why the kind Tabitha won’t bring it up again.
There is SO MUCH discourse about that word “bitch” and a lot of it is very well argued, but I feel no urge to pick a side. What *I* have to say about that is, Jughead using that word in that way with that tone definitively marked an end of Bughead 1.0. If there’s going to be a Bughead 2.0, it’s going to have to be really different.
5. I love the character set ups for Reggie and Fangs. Fangs first - is this guy like the world’s most perfect ex boyfriend or what? Fangs is infinitely kind to Kevin. And Reggie - he’s abused by his dad but he is also loyal to his dad, working for “a Lodge” which he doesn’t actually seem to like in the little that he says about it, to ‘pay off’ his Dad’s debt. I like the adult that Reggie has become. “This isn’t high school.” His calm “Nah, the bad guys pay better” felt like a breath of fresh bracing cynical air but then the actor also managed to push my But I Can Fix Him buttons so kudos, to you, good sir.
3 Things to Think About
a)Veronica is told it’s the DIVORCE that is making Archie not want sex but please recall that the Riverdale High School is decimated and Archie is in the process of putting his genitals - oops sorry - THE BUILDING back together. He doesn’t have a libido without the Riverdale High School building. I’ve been telling you.
b)Tabitha voluntarily enters into an agreement to lie (by omission) to Jughead about the manuscript handover to Jessica and the playing of the voicemail message. She doesn’t know this yet but so far a rule of Riverdale is that you must not lie to Jughead or bad things happen. Interested to see if the rule still holds for Adult Jughead.
c) The show is very much doubling down on the fact that they think using other people’s lives as fiction is absolutely unforgivable. Riverdale absolutely hates drug dealers (which is why the Serpents are alcohol runners, and kicked out drug dealers) and yet even though Jessica is totally a drug dealer that Betty Cooper fake-FBI knows is a drug dealer, AND SHE NON CONSENSUALLY DRUGGED TWO WOMEN WHO SAID NO ALREADY, but the fact that she didn’t want her life used in a fictional outlet trumps literally everything.
Riverdale S5 E10: The Pincushion Man - 5 Things I Loved/ 3 things to consider
1. I love the fact that the actual makers of Riverdale have the same relationship with Jughead that a lot of the fanfic reading and writing fandom have with Jughead. We all, collectively, enjoy his adorable traits - a gift for romantic gestures, devotion, resilience, bottomless kindness, courage, a sweet-spicy mix of feral anger and weepy softness. The point of Jughead for the makers seems to lie generally in taking things away from him, because he suffers in such an affecting, emotionally open way. A lot of the fandom also revels in his pain and suffering. Where the fandom differs from the makers, though, is that the fandom actively tries to give the nice things back to Jughead, and most of the Jughead intra-fandom arguments are about what that should be.
Which is to say, this midseason cliffhanger’s purpose was to Take Things Away From Jughead. Jughead starts this episode in a nice place (he’s housed at Archie’s, he’s got two stable jobs, he’s got some direction to his writing, he’s made a new friend, who is no less than the beautiful, kind, smart Tabitha). He ends it naked, out of his mind, bloody, alone in the woods and possibly summoned by aliens or rats or something, and his ex-NYC-girlfriend that he seems both afraid of and dislikes knows exactly where he lives. He can’t even have a drug induced nostalgic sex dream stay a nice sex dream.
2. The Blossom altar and magick witchcraft whatever that was, was awesome. I was HOOTING. The Blossoms keep giving me so much to love. This religion also has some sort of rosary or maybe it’s an offshoot of Catholicism? (Nana Rose totally looks like she’s praying using a rosary). Everything about this - the pile of sage, Penelope Blossom’s crazed eyes, the fact that this table full of macabre stuff wasn’t just a display but an altar all this time, and the fact that THEY CAN SUMMON WITCH WIND filled me with joy.
3. I loved Betty stabbing Glen in the stomach. Her antihero path continues - she is annoyed at having to make a cake each for the twins, you know, like, they’re not two separate people. Asshole Aunty! She uses tears and wiles to properly manipulate Charles, throws a knife at Chic (LOVED THIS TOO) and isn’t all that arsed about Charles being shot. Like, Charles is shot in the chest (!) and Glen was stabbed in a way that she knew would miss organs, but the one Betty rushes to is GLEN and this seems like a strategic, calculating choice.
4. I really LOVED, like, ADORED that Reggie’s way of trying to get the groves from Cheryl was to woo Nana Rose, and he wasn’t cheap about it either. Put on a silk tie, combed his hair back, and bought two dozen scarlet roses. His full service smiling and winking with his handsome face, giving her some of his sexy young man energy was fabulous. His willingness to set an entire forest on fire though was very disturbing.
5. Things we learned about Jughead this episode were all very very interesting to me. When he gets high he gets naked. . He dances around, which I just found so cute. He has a really lovely chest tattoo - a big crown, a quill, and a bunch of roses. He likes bondage, with handcuffs. He is really scared of Jessica but also won’t refuse her advances even in hallucination. He uses “being a Betty” as an insult, and it’s supposed to mean something to other people, and yet when his guard is down, he would have sex with Betty again in a second (I mean, fair. Have you seen her?).
3 things to think about
a) So now we know that Archie was in Uzbekistan, and it’s like I’ve already said. It makes zero difference to this story, to know where he was. Oh and just a funny bit - The reporter who calls Archie is named Sara Bellum = Cerebellum? This cracked me up.
b) Neither Glen nor Jughead (!) understanding that actual people really don’t like it if you turn their lives into content under your name as a sole author if you don’t have prior permission is very amusing. Like Glen seems to think Betty would be flattered by his delving into her entire family tree in this invasive way, and we’ve seen the Serpents’ reaction to however it is Jughead depicted them in his novel.
c) I’m not sure why I hate Uncle Fucking Frank so much. He’s constructed to be sort of sympathetic. A nice enough looking, gruff, manly man, that Archie obviously likes and trusts on sight, who is on some sort of redemption arc from a dark past about which he feels very badly, and so on. Like, normally, this type of character does not make me HATE them - feel bored by them because done to death, sure, but the level of vitriol I feel about Uncle Fucking Frank surprises me. I WANT HIM DEAD.
So Sabrina is in the Riverdale 5 episode event, sounds like something I only would watch for some 10% good contexts and 30% of the cast and none relatable or any plot but no judging till November 16, so good luck to us all as always
