Welcome back all you Riverdale fans! I’m so happy we’re getting to revel in the supernatural after 5 seasons of skirting along the line between creepy and genuinely extra-normal. That said, I think this episode is more of a dud than I was hoping it would be. We did get a nice Twilight Zone opening & closing though.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
1. Expectations Vs. Reality
I didn’t really know what to expect from these five episodes before “Welcome to Rivervale.” After watching Archie get Temple of Doom-ed, I thought I had a pretty good idea. Each episode would be standalone episodes, playing with classic horror media and living in a more heightened version of reality than usually presented in Riverdale, and we’d get some clues as to how we got here as well as why there was suddenly real magic. Maybe a major character would die each week. I was very wrong on all accounts.
It seems that this episode follows directly on the last one, with Archie dead and the town once again on good-ish terms with Cheryl, rather than in new Rivervale. From there, we get three different ghost stories that are told piecemeal and have some more subtle homages to classic Stephen King stories but aren’t full pastiches. There’s a bit of a tease at the start when Dagwood says “mother is back” implying that La Llorna is Polly but that turns out to be a red herring.
We do technically get a character death but it’s not the one you’re expecting. Honestly, I thought this would be a bloodbath and that the cast would be slowly whittled away. Seems it’s going to be a bit slower than expected. This is all fine with me but I am a little disappointed. I was really looking forward to these five episodes really letting loose after the bonkers way “Welcome to Rivervale” played out.
At least we got to see Pop Tate again.
2. Why Not Vignettes
It’s kind of amazing. Both this episode and the previous one were directed by the same person. I could have sworn they were done by two different people. Not because of any technical reason though; the copious amounts of rainy windows and moody, dark lighting can attest to that. No, the performances were just significantly more wooden this week, like everyone was tired and wanted to get through it as fast as possible. It wasn’t off in a fun or unsettling way either.
I suspect it has something to do with the script, which is not the writers’ finest work on the show. I liked the serious emotional moments when they happened but the connective tissue between scenes, and the character work itself, was very thin. Normally this isn’t a problem for the show but it doesn’t capture the pure lunacy these episodes seem to want to channel. It feels like a regular episode of Riverdale with a more supernatural bent. Part of why I feel this way is because, other than Jug’s presence at the end and beginning as a narrator, the structure of the episode is about as traditional as you can get. I seriously think this was the biggest flaw of “Ghost Stories,” even if I understand why they did it.
Splitting each story up broke the tension of each and was unnecessary. Besides one or two short scenes, they don’t interact with each other. Either sticking to a single narrative/doing a fake-out multi-thread like last episode, or actually committing to doing three vignettes with Twilight Zone-esque framing would have served the episode’s purposes far better and given more opportunities to flex those horror skills. I get that the idea of interlacing the thread was to keep us guessing as to who was going to die but it’s only upon reflection that I actually understood that aspect. The actual presentation robbed most of the scenes of their teeth, sadly, and that undercut my worry for the characters.
This is also, potentially, because the writer wanted to subvert the usual endings for these ghost stories. They all end “happily” in that the ghosts either leave without the deaths or destruction of those they’re haunting and it only really works because of this format. So, it’s not quite a dud but it’s not as easy to set aside my gripes as I did with “Welcome to Rivervale.”
Continued belowBut seriously, would it kill them to linger on a plot thread for longer than 2 minutes at a time?
3. All Work and No Play Makes Jug A Dull Boy
This is the storyline that plays on expectations the most. It’s a pretty typical story of a couple haunted by a ghost couple, doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past as filtered through the issues of the present. Most of us know the basic shape of this story so Riverdale is able to use that to its advantage. It doesn’t succeed, per say, but it still was a valiant attempt.
What I like most is how it’s kept pretty ambiguous as to what aspects are ghostly meddling and which are their own insecurities and worst habits being amplified. Like the toothpaste cap vs Tabitha’s reaction to it. The cap was explicitly ghostly meddling but her intense reaction is either ghostly amplification OR a stand-in for her real issues: that of Jughead’s laziness and failure to follow through on his promises.
It is interesting that, rather than the usual manic obsession portrayed in stories like these, Jughead is just kind of absent-minded with bad priorities. While it makes Tabitha’s reactions seem out-of-proportion to Jug’s actions – it’s only because we don’t really have a good baseline for why she’s reaching the end of her tether now. What’s stressing her out isn’t well established but it almost doesn’t matter. She feels like she’s being taken advantage of and ignored. Enough moments of that and things are going to get nasty.
I do wonder if the writer wanted us, and by extension Tabitha, to feel more paranoid that Jughead was lying to her. There are enough moments that made me think that but the presentation of the episode rarely reinforces such a reading. He’s just being clueless and self-centered, not maliciously so but still. I liked this and I wish we had spent a bit more time building up to the final confrontation. That and maybe an explanation for how making a bunch of fucking noise scares away ghosts.
4. You Know Reggie. You Can’t Polish A Turd
Both the apartment plot and this one share a theme of obsession and attention. Those are some of the ideas behind the original stories at least. While it’s true that we get glimpses of Reggie slowly becoming obsessed with fixing up Bella, another version of the car he used to drive, he’s simply trying to avoid his present issues by losing himself in the past. Veronica, meanwhile, has never cared for the past and wants to only move forward. She has trouble seeing things for what they represent and this brings the two into tension, feeding insecurities and breaking down communication. It’s good stuff.
That said, the whole thing with Bella being the name of the driver’s ed teacher who left the school because of rumors of improper relationships with students was…a choice. We already had Ms. Grundy fills that role in season 1 and I couldn’t tell if they were trying to wink and nudge at that or just provide a forced reason for the car to be haunted by Bella, for Veronica to beat up the car and to bring us to the usual explosive confrontation that ends with a death. Either way, I think there were better ways of handling that.
It highlights how the episode struggled with its attempts to subvert the tales they’re using as a base. We needed this element in order to seed the idea of the ghost in the car being a dangerous seductor who takes advantage of someone in their time of need and for Veronica to potentially anger it or Reggie.
However, the goal wasn’t to end with a fight and death, but instead on a reestablishment of communication. This is why the rumor turns out to not be true, at least with Reggie, and why the scene ends with Veronica reaching out to comfort him and him accepting. It replaces the horror with personal drama and excises the supernatural element almost entirely.
5. I Weep
You know, Toni’s plot is really the only one that requires the presence of the supernatural to make it work. Sure, it could be done with just Darla but it wouldn’t have the same resonance. The other two? The supernatural elements are almost superfluous. It’s one of the reasons I felt like this was a traditional episode of Riverdale without doing much special to create the sense of unease we were promised. That makes me sad because I want the show to lean into the weird and the spooky, even if, in isolation, the attempts at creating rich emotional cores is valliant.
Continued belowAnyway, back to Toni and La Llorona. This plot is the only one I don’t know how to connect back to Stephen King, perhaps because rather than killer vehicles, alcoholism, obsessed men and bad dads, we have a story about moms and their children. It’s also the most traditionally Twilight Zone-y, with a thematic twist at the end as Toni takes on the mantle to save her child and give it to Betty so she can be a mother now as reparations for both the death of Darla Dickinson’s final kid and Betty & Archie’s unborn child disappearing.
I liked this plot for the most part because it leaned into the horror hard and succeed at being genuinely unsettling and suspenseful but having the crux of the plot be Darla fucking Dickinson’s grief is baffling. What’s even more baffling is that Betty barely reacts to finding out that her kid is now gone. Seriously, she sacrificed Archie to Cheryl’s Old WaysTM so that she could have this kid and now she’s not going to be sad or angry or anything? It’s another tick in the “something’s off” box but in this episode, which really tried to not have those kinds of off moments, that feels like bad writing rather than being intentional.
Same with Darla calling down La Llorona. I rolled my eyes so hard, not at Darla being grief stricken or doing something exceptionally petty and cruel – that’s par for the course. No, it was when Toni just accepted the whole thing like “Yup. I deserve this.” I get the guilt over killing someone, especially when you didn’t mean to. What I don’t get is why we’re supposed to just accept it. Any other character, fine. But Darla Dickinson? She commands no sympathy from her past actions and there’s no accounting of her past choices in Toni’s reactions. No “she sucks but what I did was still terrible.” Nothing. It doesn’t feel like Toni but I guess Rivervale’s Toni is just different.
Also, La Llorona not actually being Polly and instead being some random lady accused of witchcraft in the past was a weaksauce move. (That’s three witch references in three episodes too. Methinks I’m sensing a pattern.)
That about does it for now! What did you all think of “Ghost Stories?” Was it spooky enough for you? Did it work better for you than me? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you all in a week for a deal with the devil. Until then, don’t drink the sweet water.
Weirdest Exchange of the Night:
Dr. Kurdel talking about hysterical pregnancies in 2021 and Betty just kinda…going along with it.
