Riverdale closes out the first part of its season still riding the momentum from last week’s excellent therapy episode. Sadly the characters don’t seem to be in therapy any longer even thought they still clearly need it. Still, some of the good outcomes remain. Jughead has completed his Baxter Brother’s draft. It’s good enough that he gets the contract, even over Brett’s protest. The contract comes, of course, with the stipulation that he “follow the rules.” I’m sure Jughead wrote a winning story, but this is starting to feel like a hush contract more than a genuine offer. Fortunately, Jughead has a half-brother in the FBI. Charles agrees to help Jughead track down their long lost grandfather so he can get some answers about the origins of the Baxter Brothers series. It works surprisingly quickly. Jughead finds his grandfather, who gives him the full story. It’s not quite what Jughead thought.
FP the First was burning out at Stonewall and his days there were numbered. All he had written was a detective story about two kids: The first Baxter Brothers mystery. He didn’t know what to do with it, but Francis DuPont had an idea. He paid Jughead’s grandfather $5,000 for the story. When it became a multi-million-dollar franchise, he got depressed and started drinking. He took his anger out on the world and his own son before deciding it was best if he just disappeared. I was surprisingly OK with this explanation. It moves Jughead’s story forward rather than being caught in an endless loop of “you plagiarized” vs. “prove it.” The show’s been struggling to make that interesting, so I’m glad to see it go somewhere new. And hey, the door is open to revive the mystery still. When Jughead tries to bring his grandfather to see his dad in the hospital, the old man mysteriously disappears.
Why is Jughead’s dad in the hospital? Well, that’s because of Archie’s story. Once again, he has the weakest story of them all, but at least the midseason finale moves on from the Dodger angle. Where they take it from here, I don’t know, but the Dodger fight has led to one good episode in the Thanksgiving one, so I’m just happy to see Archie move on. FP finds out about his vigilantism and cuts a deal with him. One more night where they beat up the gang members together, and Archie gives up the mask for good. I have to admit, even this story had its good moments. It was fun to see FP back in action again. While they’re celebrating they’re victory at Pop’s though, someone walks in and shoots FP. Dodger and his mom delivered one last parting shot before leaving town.
Archie decides to beat the hell out of Dodger and ends up doing it right in front of the kids he was trying to protect. Yeah Archie, bet you feel like a real tool now. And so his story ends, for now, with Archie brooding and feeling bad about himself as usual. The show does seem to have something planned for after all this, though. When Archie is cleaning himself up, a man shows up at the community center. It’s his dad’s brother. Who’s never been mentioned before. I honestly can’t feel one way or another about this because the show hasn’t done anything with this new character yet. It’s just, here you go, see you next year. I guess we’ll wait and see, but it’s not doing much to make me care about Archie’s story any more.
Skeet Ulrich as FP Jones and KJ Apa as Archie — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW
At least Veronica’s got a little more interesting. Her war with her father is starting to grate, and it’s especially ridiculous now that they’re fighting over a rum recipe. This one involves colleges. Veronica is getting rejected from every other school she applied to and her dad looks to have something to do with it. She has an interview with Columbia though, which her dad tries to sabotage by inviting her interviewer to Veronica’s speakeasy. He thinks it’ll make her look bad if Columbia sees her… running a successful business. OK, his reasoning is he’s trying to have them catch her in party girl mode. Because if there’s anything we know about Columbia, it’s that parties and underage drinking definitely don’t happen there ever. Honestly, this is just an excuse to get Veronica to sing a song that underscores Archie’s fight with Dodger. And on that level, it works. Riverdale hasn’t done this all season, and it always makes my inner theatre geek happy.
Over on Betty’s side of things, the story immediately goes off the rails. It starts when Polly scratches a nurse’s face off completely unprovoked. When Betty talks to her though, she doesn’t remember a thing. One minute she was in the rec room, the next she was strapped to a bed. The hospital notes she received a phone call just before the incident. While Charles works on tracing the origin of that call, Betty’s mom gets one. Right after she hangs up the phone she grabs a knife and tries to kill Betty with it. Betty figures she must be hypnotized and snaps, bringing Alice out of her fugue state. Just like Polly, Alice has no idea what just happened.
Charles traces both phone calls back to the prison where Evelyn Evernever is being held. Evelyn admits to everything right away. She says all she has to do is say the key phrase, “tangerine” repeated three times, and the subject thinks they’re Betty. Then, they have to kill Dark Betty. Yeah, this is contrived right from the jump, but at least it’s the kind of goofiness I’m looking for from this show. Betty’s afraid it might work on her, even though she was never in the cult. Still, for reasons that don’t quite make sense, it does. She has Charles try it on her and when she gets home, she sees herself as a child about to kill her cat. Charles suggests that she use it as an opportunity to stop her past self, in her mind anyway, from killing Caramel. That way, Dark Betty won’t exist anymore.
It appears to work at first. She tells her younger self she can go play, freeing her of the dark task her dad forced on her. That night, Betty says “Tangerine” three times in the mirror to see if she’s really free. When her mom check on her, Betty says she’s fine. The broken glass, however, says different. As does the flash-forward that ends this half of the season. We see Jughead dead on the ground. Archie asks Betty, who appears to be exiting a fugue state, what she just did. This is the first time these flash-forwards have made me feel something. There’s a direct connection to the episode we just saw, which makes it more urgent. The reason they haven’t been working for me is that they don’t do anything to move the main story forward. They’re all foreshadowing with nothing for the characters act on. Instead, it feels like they’re bumbling toward an inevitable outcome, and it takes all the tension out of one character’s likely death. Here though, we see a direct cause and effect, and I’m immediately more interested.
KJ Apa as Archie, Camila Mendes as Veronica, Cole Sprouse as Jughead, Lili Reinhart as Betty and Vanessa Morgan as Toni — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW
For the episode billed as the midseason finale, I was surprised at how small it felt. Stories ended with only hints at their replacements. Archie has an uncle. Jughead is part of a secret society now. Those all could go somewhere, but the show hasn’t given us reason to be excited about them yet. The episode’s best story is given the shortest amount of time. Cheryl pretends to kill herself with poison gas to draw out whoever’s been tormenting her. Surprise! Turns out it’s her mother. Cheryl puts her mother on trial, looking for some good in her. Looking for a reason to keep her around. Finding none, Cheryl imprisons her mother in the sex bunker from last season. I really hope someone remembered to wash those sheets.
This story is everything I wanted from a midseason finale. It’s bonkers and melodramatic, and it has that teen vs. inexplicably evil parent story that makes Riverdale such a satisfying guilty pleasure. Riverdale has struggled this season to live up to the complicated mysteries of the past three. Here, we saw a glimpse that the wild melodrama we love is still here.
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW
Previously on Riverdale:
- Riverdale Season 4 Episode 8 recap
- Riverdale Season 4 Episode 7 recap
- Riverdale Season 4 Episode 6 recap
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