You know what doesn’t get talked about enough in American discourse? Especially in January? Football. American-style football, I mean. It’s an obscure sport, I know, but there’s actually a championship game in real life coming up. Who knew, right?
That’s why it’s so nice that Riverdale is taking time out of its big midseason return to raise awareness about the sport. Maybe it’ll get enough people interested in it to check out that championship game. Give its ratings a little boost. Riverdale has its own big match in this episode. Riverdale High’s football team, as Jughead helpfully narrates, has made it all the way to the final, against Stonewall Prep’s team.
The football game is a big deal to the school. The principal asks Betty to write an article to make sure everyone’s familiar with the nature of American-style football before the big game. She starts by interviewing her own high school’s team, but soon stumbles on a scandal. Stonewall’s team, she’s told, plays dirty. They set out to intentionally injure key members of the other team to win games. We’re given to understand that this particular kind of violence is the bad kind in this sport.
Lili Reinhart as Betty, Charles Melton as Reggie, Eli Goree as Munroe, and KJ Apa as Archie. (Photo Credit: Jack Rowand / The CW)
She checks with Brett, who plays for Stonewall, and he doesn’t deny the accusations, but doesn’t admit to them either. Speaking with players from other teams Stonewall has faced, she learns of a rumor that Stonewall players are paid bounties for injuring certain players on other teams.
Riverdale is actually pulling from real life here. In researching American-style football, I learned a team based out of New Orleans found itself caught up in similar accusations about a decade ago. What a fun little Easter egg! There appears to be some truth to the rumor, too. A couple nights before the game, some people in masks jump Riverdale’s star player, Munroe, and take out his knee.
Betty enlists Veronica’s help to try and get a confession/brag out of Brett. The disguise sequence that follows is fun and ridiculous in that wonderful Riverdale way. Veronica sees Brett and comments that she can feel his privilege from the entrance, which is wild coming from the girl who lives in a penthouse and has her own bar and rum company at 18.
Veronica gets Brett drunk… well, drunker and flatters him. It almost works. He’s just about to brag about exactly how his team “makes their own luck” when Jughead sees her and asks what she’s doing there.
Not only does that kill Betty’s hopes at a confession, it reveals to Betty that Jughead is in a secret society. He hadn’t told her about that. They have a small fight about it, but it doesn’t really lead to anything. Jughead promises no more secrets and moves on.
Cole Sprouse as Jughead and Lili Reinhart as Betty. (Photo Credit: Jack Rowand / The CW)
Jughead, meanwhile, gets some good news this episode. His English teacher showed some of his stories to the admissions director at Yale, who wanted an interview. In-world, the interview goes well, but oh boy. The show needs to stop using Jughead’s love of H.P. Lovecraft as evidence that he’s a good writer.
Yes, Lovecraft wrote some invaluable contributions to early horror, but he was a horrific racist, even for his time. More than one of his horror stories are not-at-all subtle metaphors for interracial families. If that wasn’t enough to make Riverdale’s unquestionably fawning references super awkward, there’s also the fact that he was kind of a crap writer. At his best, he knew how to tap into a primal fear of the unknown, but that was his one trick. And even then, the stories are filled with dry, plodding prose that make it a chore to get to the good parts. What part of Jughead’s writing reminds the Yale admissions guy of Lovecraft, exactly? And why is that a good thing?
After the interview, Jughead’s headmaster asks him to convince Betty to kill her story, and he refuses because he’s not a total ass. At least not yet, who knows where this season’s going? For a second, it looks like it might endanger his Yale admission, but that would be a little too ridiculous, even for Riverdale. He doesn’t have to, anyway. Without a confession from Brett, the article doesn’t hold up and the principal refuses to print it. Instead she writes the puff piece he commissioned, so everyone can familiarize themselves with this strange sport before turning up to watch.
Lili Reinhart as Betty, Cole Sprouse as Jughead, Casey Cott as Kevin, and Molly Ringwald as Mary Andrews. (Photo Credit: Michael Courtney / The CW)
It would have been real easy for this episode to end up being directionless. Riverdale often falls into the trap of trying to tell a different story for every character and telling none of them well. Especially this season. That’s why centering each story around a football game worked so well. It gave the episode a focus.
It felt like each individual story was leading up to the same big event. The individual stories were, for the most part, on the weaker side, but they all worked together to produce an episode that’s better on the whole than the individual parts would be on their own. Even Cheryl’s battle with the cheerleader head coach is more fun because of it. Normally, it’d be a nothing side plot, the likes of which we’ve seen played out many times on Riverdale. But since it leads up to the game, it ends up driving the episode forward. Sure, it was just an excuse to end with a musical number of The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb,” but hey, I’m not complaining.
My biggest issue was that things end just a little too conveniently. The show took the easy way out whenever it could. Jughead’s never under any real pressure to kill Betty’s story, and he doesn’t end up needing to anyway. Archie’s uncle offers Munroe some painkillers for his knee, even though the doctor said playing could injure his knee permanently. Munroe takes the painkillers anyway, despite Archie’s objections.
I didn’t necessarily want this story to end in tragedy, but I needed it to lead to something. Maybe another player sacrifices himself to keep Munroe safe, or even just an injury scare. But no, he plays and is just lucky enough not to injure himself. Then he gets recruited by Notre Dame, so I guess the moral of the story is always take unmarked pills from your friend’s shady uncle.
Camila Mendes as Veronica. (Photo Credit: Michael Courtney / The CW)
Meanwhile, Veronica’s rum feud with her father continues. She tries getting around his patent on their family recipe by making a spiced rum, but one of Hiram’s chemists finds that it’s chemically the same. Look, I don’t know a ton about liquor production, but isn’t that just… rum? Like, chemically, it’s fermented cane sugar, right? I don’t think you can patent that?
After the football game, she teams up with Cheryl to make rum out of Blossom maple syrup. That’s a win for both of them, as well as a happy ending to a story that never made a whole lot of sense. I mean, we don’t come to Riverdale for sense, but it’d be nice if the show at least tried for some.
Despite the individual stories not being Riverdale’s best, they combined to produce a fine midseason return. It felt like a visit to a small town wrapped up in the big high school sports tournament. It also set up the stories for the rest of the season in a way that felt fun and natural.
Betty convinces the principal to let her start a quiz team to go up against Brett and Stonewall prep, and Jughead gets into Yale. Jughead is thrilled, but slightly less so after learning that Brett will also be there. This is starting to feel like a weird control situation. It gets even weirder when we cut to the future and Brett’s telling Betty she got what she wanted. Jughead won’t be going to Yale, and she will be. But we already know she didn’t get in.
OK, these flashbacks just got a bit more interesting. And it looks like it won’t be too long before we catch up with them
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
Previously on Riverdale:
- Riverdale Season 4 Episode 9 Recap
- Riverdale Season 4 Episode 8 Recap
- Riverdale Season 4 Episode 7 Recap
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