What’s up river-bitches?! Are you mentally prepared for the penultimate episode of this weird, wacky, wild show? Are you braced for what madness they have in store for us in “The Golden Age of Television?” Are you ready for 45 minutes of earnest and heartfelt conversations and sentimentality?
Wait. What?
As always, spoilers ahead.
1. The Writers in the Outfield
Tessa Leigh Williams, you’ve done it again. Joined by head honcho and “big episode writer” Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, you gave me an absolute banger of an episode whose only real complaints are the problems of past episodes. How dare you bring in such pathos to the second to last episode? How dare you seamlessly transition from the wrap-up of the hyperreal WTF of last week to the far more grounded melodrama of this one via the forced retirement of Principal Featherhead?
How dare you make me cry AGAIN? And multiple times in one episode! My tear ducts were not prepared for this and are mad at me. That’s what you did, Tessa and Roberto. That’s what you did.
2. Archie in America
I know I faux ragged on how many times I cried during “The Golden Age of Television” but I am genuinely surprised by how emotional I got. This episode went straight for the heartstrings and refused to stop playing. Case and point: the small but important arc of Archie & Reggie’s summer plans. It’s so minor, and is really Archie’s narrative (which is a shame but not unexpected,) yet it remained moving thanks to the show’s steadfast earnestness, really pretty staging, and KJ Apa & especially Charles Melton’s performance.
Seriously. The chemistry between these two this season has been electric. The joy they feel when palling around; the bonds they share, complex and interwoven; the support you see in every action and the love they freely offer each other, it’s a vindication of this season’s argument for kindness and deep connections. I have been glad, so glad, for this season’s change in their personalities but I don’t think I truly felt it as deeply as I did here. Hats off to the writers but again, hats off to Melton & Apa for making it look effortless and true.
3. Alice Heart
They did it. They actually managed to have me fully, wholly, accept Alice’s transformation and Betty’s choice to stick by her. Do I think they fully earned this resolution? Not really. The season was way more scattershot in its portrayal of how awful Alice was and did not do nearly enough to build to this week’s developments.
But perhaps that’s what makes it as impactful as it is.
See, I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for the writing team to commit to Alice never improving or finally starting on the road to making amends. Until this week, we never got either. With “The Golden Age of Television,” Alice is forced to confront her ACTUAL issues via Betty’s book and the conversation they have after. It’s hilarious that it’s at night and she’s just crying at the foot of Betty’s bed but it’s also really moving because it illustrates just how much the book affected her. How much it got her to finally reconsider everything she had thought “had to be.”
Mädchen Amick absolutely crushed it this week. She always crushed it but this was one of the rare weeks I thought she was given the material to really show her stuff. Alice is afraid of being alone and feels powerless as a woman in a world built by and for men. So she doubled down on it, trying to find power within that world, and it led her to buy into its worst aspects and to reinforce that with her kids. With Betty in particular.
It’s only through this episode that we see she did care and simply couldn’t see that she was hurting people by denying reality for the nuclear fantasy.
4. Street Comics
There are so many little moments I wanted to highlight this week but I don’t have a good place to put any of them. There’s the triumphant return of Nana Blossom & Principal Weatherbee which was a real joy to see. Then there’s Clay being tasked to write a screenplay of The Comet for Veronica to produce with (potentially) Sydney Poitier and Veronica mispronouncing W.E.B. DuBois’ name.
Continued belowMaybe I could talk about Frank & Sheriff Keller? I don’t know how I feel about that but maybe they’ll wrap it up next week. Perhaps I could laugh at how Featherbee & Werthers essentially turn on each other or sober myself up with the reminder that not all ills go away so easily when Werthers says he’s going to Washington to basically do his censorship shit on a federal scale.
The biggest little moment is the demise of Pep Comics and Jughead’s final editorial for it. I’ve been a bit harsh on Riverdale’s rosy portrait of their EC comics analog and the predatory aspects of this medium we here at Multiversity love so much. Fairly, I might add but I think my criticisms often miss the point. It’s an analog within a story utilizing the Archie Comics aesthetics to respond to itself and tell a story of change and hope.
In the case of Pep Comics, that story is also a bittersweet one. Not every battle can be won and there are always casualties. But the fight remains important and it is better to go out fighting for what is right. And just in case it needs repeating, censorship is nearly always a regressive, conservative impulse and it is their calls for book removal and capricious, arbitrary rules of “decency” “for the children” that most lasting damage to readers and artists alike.
Oh, and for the curious, yes, EC Comics did publish their final book with a story that nearly got pulled by the comics code for having a Black character in it. While it wasn’t an adaption of “The Comet,” which was a good call-back to earlier in the season, it was a reprint of the story “Judgment Day,” which featured a Black astronaut.
5. City of Pep
Finally, we have the entire second half of the episode, condensed into one thought. I didn’t really have all that much to say about Tabitha’s return and the follow-up on the whole “timeline split, war between heaven and hell” stuff. I thought the finale would be this big blowout extravaganza but instead it’s going to be a very quiet affair like this episode. It seems like “For a Better Tomorrow” got all of the bombast out of the show’s system.
What I was happy to see was them finally, FINALLY answering the questions of where the narration in Riverdale was coming from. I’ve long argued that the best textual explanation is that these are chapters from Jughead’s book long into the future. That’s not really what we’ve got here but it’s something similar.
It was also nice getting to see all those clips from past seasons. Everyone looks so young! And we got some shots of Skeet Ulrich and Luke Perry laughing which warmed my heart. Like I said, they did a damn good job of constructing an episode that was full of sentiment and never felt like it was going too far. Or too far by Riverdale standards.
My only question is why Betty felt she had to retain her bad memories? I think if I was less exhausted I would have some thoughts on this playing with the show’s propensity for saddling all the “darkness” onto her. As it stands, it’s fine and they imply that this will make Betty stronger because she can handle both the good and the bad.
I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts later about this season’s juxtaposition against the rest of the show and how this episode seems to complete, or at least near completion, of Riverdale’s reckoning with its treatment of these characters and world in the quest to set itself apart from the romanticized, idealized 50s aesthetic of the original comics. Perhaps I’ll have space in the finale to talk about them. But for now, I must take a page out of Tabitha’s book, say goodbye, farewell, and adieu, and leave you all with a parting kiss before disappearing in the blink of an eye.
Thank you all for joining me on this journey. We’ve got one episode to go before we say so long to the town with pep forever and I can finally archive my folder of reviews. While we’ll only have to wait one week for the episode, it will sadly be at least two weeks until you’ll be able to read my final thoughts. Turns out The CW decided to schedule the finale the exact day I go on vacation and then added skip weeks to make sure it stuck instead of ending a week or two earlier.
Continued belowSo, that just means I’ve got a little more time until I have to truly say “Goodbye, Riverdale.” Until then, keep crying at the foot of your children’s bed Riverdale.
Best Lines of the Night:
1. Kevin: “There’s gotta be better candidates.”
Reggie: “Like Captain Hook. Or Godzilla.”
2. Jughead: “The good. The bad. The bear.”
3. Principal Weatherbee: “Be kind. Be decent. Be better.”
