#so i wont address it in the text
Riverdale S5 E 19 (RIP?) - 5 Things I loved/ 3 Things to Consider.
5 Things I Loved
1. I just love Nana Rose telling that insane story about the witch burning and prodding the already unhinged Cheryl into a full blown meltdown. I kind of enjoy the fact that the show leaves it ambiguous as to whether Nana Blossom says and does all the things (the lying about mothmen, the meltdown about philandering men fathering feral Blossoms, whatever) because she is senile or because she’s just plain stirring shit up for kicks. How do we know Nana Rose didn’t just write that diary as a form of fanfiction about her own ancestors? We do not!
I love everything about this character design - after looking like a hippy during the 60s or whenever it was that Pop Tate had the alien visit hallucination, Nana Rose dresses completely like an Edwardian lady. I imagine that Nana Rose during menopause decided that modernity was not useful to her and dug out her grandmother’s old clothes from one of the many secret backroom cubbyholes on the Blossom estate and just started dressing like a stranded time traveler and nobody could stop her.
2.“Nay Cousin! What is decreed is decreed! Tata~ Come along, Britannia.” This is an astonishingly unhinged line and it was delivered with peak camp hysteria vibes and I was so very delighted. That Cheryl says this and the way she said it is a significant part of why I watch Riverdale.
I also wondered if the chaotic and self-serving way Cheryl fails to cope with any sort of nuance with the complicated legacies of the past is how the late Millenial/Gen Z political activism and attempts to grapple with history looks like to the Gen X people who make this show. Or is this a commentary of a different sort, that is trying to demonstrate that pat answers are impossible? She either thinks people are victims or perpetrators, and that an injustice endured wipes out the obligation to make recompense for bad acts perpetrated and it’s just not that simple. Oh and I loved that Britta’s name is BRITANNIA.
3. I don’t know why I love this, but I see the season finale pairings as a sort of gauntlet thrown by the makers and it fills me with anticipation of a good kind. A brilliant mutual who also watches this show with close attention pointed out to me that the values of Riverdale are actually very conservative, and the season finale pairings seemed to reflect this. The conservatism is expressed in the like-matched-with-like aspect of all the pairings:
- Jughead who is weird is with Tabitha who is weird and they are both arsonists. Jughead as a child was schooled in an eye-for-an-eye form of primitive justice, and Tabitha seems to have the same orientation (If you snark about my business going up in flames, I set you on fire!). Such pretty faces, such dark souls.
- Betty who is violent and self righteous is with Archie who is violent and self righteous. But also, I absolutely adored the way Betty bursts into laughter and giggles and touches Archie in that kitchen. Betty can be so incandescently charming and beautiful, and I was so happy to see her happy. She hasn’t laughed like that much this season.
- Toni and Fangs are both aspiring gang-leaders who cannot project menace whatsoever because they are completely hampered by being very doe-eyed, and they share a baby so they are now together. I mean, it’s possible to coparent without being in a relationship, but the Serpents are actually deeply conventional, and it makes me laugh whenever I see them together.
- City slicker Veronica is with small town slicker Reggie, and they are both all about the money and also indifferent honest, with near identical experiences in defeating their highly problematic fathers.
Sidebar: The out gays are alone which is really weird: Kevin is living with his dad and going to pursue his Broadway dreams, and Cheryl is living with her grandma and adopted(?) redhead child and pursuing witchcraft and revenge and atonement.
This is a big about-face from say, what Bughead was, which was the weirdo who really wants something conventional and solid getting together with a normatively conventional looking person with a lot of hidden weirdness, and trying to create something different from both (and, I would say, failing). Veronica sought out Archie’s company because she wanted to join Wholesome All Americana, but Archie is an oblivious gay who wants to just live with lots of virile bearded men so he’s not actually that wholesome or Americana.
In any case, I loved this neat lining up of the dominoes. I want to see how they fall.
4. I loved that Hiram Lodge’s inner soundtrack is Goldberg Variations. I was so shocked by this - Hiram Lodge listens to Bach?? And then Archie just somehow punches down his hotel door like the Koolaid Man. Is this how Hiram sees his relationship with Archie? It’s possible. He’s just sitting peacefully in his nice room in his nice life calmly imbibing good rum and thinking along with Bach’s thoughts, and then Archie Andrews bursts in uninvited. This made me laugh.
5. I love the way Reggie says that “he almost passed” the test. I was raised to view tests of all types as either I got 100% or I FAILED so this was immensely liberating for me to hear, and I’m gonna just apply this to everything I do now. ‘I almost did the dishes” or “I almost told a funny joke.” I mean I love Reggie in general but I especially love him with Veronica. They’re both so pretty (such EYES on the two of them) and so full of ideas. I don’t come from entrepreneurial stock, so I love actual and fictional people who just come up with the next thing to try, nonstop.
3 Things to Consider.
a) “The Serpents are a Joke.” Guess why. GUESS WHY.
Say it with me:
Sweet Pea Is GONE!!!!!! (#cult of sweet pea #is forever)
But I mean seriously - Fangs and Toni are even less scary than Jughead during his failrun as Serpent King because at minimum he had a feral unhinged energy that could believably escalate. I really don’t know where they’re gonna go with this and really can’t find any reason for it. Are Toni and Fangs just trying to cope with their cognitive dissonance in how conventional they actually are? Outwardly they look like a nice straight couple with a baby and stable jobs. Maybe they need to just lean into that identity?
b) They Need An Adult: The show brought back Pop Tate, and the Core Four nominated two completely insane middle aged people to sit on the council. The lost young people of Riverdale still feel very lost, and they feel the need for adults even though they are a year older. Alice Cooper is not stable, has never been stable, and Uncle Fucking Frank is a war criminal who skipped town after fucking over his brother, the Sainted Fred Andrews. But Betty and Archie, out of all of them, are the most trapped by their childhood personae, and really do need adults. It’s a very dark message, isn’t it, that unless you’re fully abandoned by the shitty people that raised you (Jughead) or you do the immensely difficult work of rejecting them wholesale (Veronica, Reggie, possibly also Tabitha?), you are going to revert to reaching out to the very people who locked you into the worst parts of your life. (Rescue Betty Cooper from Alice pLeAsE.)
c) Hiram walking into the wilderness after being rejected by his daughter, and his departure bringing in the witch wind or whatever that was, was interesting. Was Hiram that powerful all this time? Or was his type of villainy - to do with gentrification, real estate, capitalistic greed, drugs decimating communities, the draw of organized crime in economically depressed areas, municipal politics - something the show doesn’t want to cope with anymore?
