Welcome back all you Riverdale fans! Somehow, despite having four seasons under its belt to figure this out, Riverdale has put Alice Smith back into the position of being The Worst Mom™. I guess 7 years really doesn’t change a person.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
1. Pop & Granddaughter
Pop Tate deserved better but his retirement paves the way for a new character to join the fold: Tabitha Tate. I’m glad we’re expanding the side characters again, and adding more characters of color after doing literally nothing with Josie for three seasons and then making Toni essentially a background accessory for Cheryl once they became a thing. While I do hope we get more Corra, I’m okay with that receding into the background.
We don’t know much about Tabitha at this point but it looks like her primary interactions with the main cast will be through her new employee, Jughead. Honestly, I am really digging the “Jughead is a one hit wonder because he doesn’t want to write about the thing he knows the most about” status quo. It’s a good choice for the character and having him have to dodge debt collectors returns him to his season one roots, in both obvious (moving into Archie’s place) and thematic (tying himself via work to his second home, Pop’s) ways. Plus, by diversifying the locales of the main characters, we can get more incidental characters and more interactions with characters like Tabitha.
The series wasted Ethel, it wasted Midge, it wasted Moose, it even wasted Kevin & Fangs, despite them still being around, so I’m hopeful that this is the start of them trying to fix this. Will I be proven wrong? We’ll just have to wait and see.
2. Veronica Reborn
Show of hands: who ever thought Veronica would be a high school teacher, even “only for a month or two?” Yeah. Neither did I. What a twist for the She-Wolf of Wall Street.
That said, Veronica’s plot this week is so fucking tired. It’s like the writers took an outline/Mad Libs they’ve used 100 times before, shook a bucket of names and adjectives, and then used that for her journey to accepting the position and telling Chad to fuck off & unfreeze their cards & stop having her followed like a giant fucking controlling creep. How many times do we need to see Ronnie roll up to Hiram, pretend to be superior only to get royally shut down by Mr. “I literally wrote the playbook you’re using,” and then scheme and fail at that scheme to repeat the same process one more time before doing what she should’ve done in the first place and see to her own problems herself.
Like, I kept asking myself what Veronica was doing every time we cut back to her. Why’d she give into Reggie so easily? Why didn’t she just use her power move on Chad right away since we all know she can and will crush him for being a garbage Wall Street trader (a redundant description but Chad deserves it) who didn’t even earn 90% of their funds? It’s baffling and felt like an excuse to give her something to do while the rest of the plot fell into place.
Veronica deserves better and I expect we’ll get more of that next time. Or, if not, she’ll at least have her American Excess card back.
3. Archie VS. Ghoulies
Did anyone else wonder if what Archie & crew did to kick the Ghoulies out would hold up in court? Riverdale has always had a bit of a loose interpretation of those things, only bringing in “real procedure” when they need to kick Betty or Veronica in the teeth because apparently they just can’t catch a break. I dunno, it just stuck out to me. Otherwise, it was fun seeing Archie get his house back in a short brawl and then trying to figure out how long it would be until the cleaning house scene turned into the opening to a PG-13 sex scene.
The answer, you might be surprised to learn, was about 3 exchanges later than I expected and one floor up from where I thought it would happen.
Continued below4. Riverdale Must Die
The show didn’t waste any time with this story beat and for that, I am grateful. Hiram is a brilliant schemer and I didn’t want to watch 10 episodes of Toni and the rest beat their heads against a wall trying to stop him from unincorporating the town and closing the school. It’s an interesting plot development, and I have no idea how it’s going to work out, but I’m excited to see where it’s going. This is true for Toni & Cheryl’s relationship as well. Them breaking up was a good choice, narratively, and puts them in a place where more paths are open for the story to go.
Their dynamic has shifted into a less static one and that’s a good thing for an ongoing story. I am particularly interested in seeing how they’ll run the school now that it’s private and basically acting as the seed from which to regrow the town. It’s ambitious and almost certainly doomed to fail but hey, this is Riverdale we’re talking about. It’s survived worse.
5. Polly R.I.P.
I have a lot to say about Polly and Alice. In fact, I have a lot to say about the entire Cooper/Smith family. They all suck! The one who’s the least terrible is Betty and that’s only because she has to live in constant opposition to Alice, who belittles and puts down Betty at every turn, and Polly, who was ready to sell her sister out and sacrifice her own children to The Farm. Now, I cannot fault Polly for the cult stuff because that’s gonna fuck your head up but damn if the writers just want Polly to be someone to yell at Betty for “abandoning them. Betty left to have a life! Fuck you Polly and the horse you rode in on.
She’s right in that Betty has no right to judge her decisions in the way she does; like I said, Betty is the least worst but still has a self-righteous & self-important streak that has never gone away. However, she has never, ever in the history of the show tried to see where Betty is coming from and, you know, explain any of her actions?? From being with Jason Blossom to The Farm to lying to her mom about her job & about being with The Ghoulies, who have done some real nasty shit, she’s done very little to deserve any benefit of the doubt from Betty.
And then there’s Alice, who has always treated Polly as the Golden Child Who Can Do No Wrong, even when she’s, I repeat for the people who missed all of season 3 and half of season 4, tried to gaslight and drug her sister and mother into joining a cult and selling everything they owned. Does Polly have remorse for putting Betty through all that shit? I dunno. Apparently the writers are trying to say Betty leaving them was the ultimate sin so even if she tried during the seven years, Betty’s crime was worse and thus negated all reconciliation. Alice is fine with this and spends the entirety of this episode acting as if last season’s “In Treatment” didn’t happen. She makes excuses for Polly, doesn’t want to be straight with Betty, and then acts defensive when Betty tries to make sense of it all because she’s concerned.
Honestly, I didn’t think I had this much vitriol left for Alice but somehow, in one episode, they managed to dredge it all back up. I hate this character, I hate what the writers have done with her, and I hate how the show doesn’t feel the need to take her to task about any of the shit she’s pulled over the last four seasons. Polly gets a slight pass, only because it looks like she’s either gonna be brutally murdered, a fitting end for a character the show has literally had no idea what to do with after revealing her secret technical incest twins, or kidnapped by the spooky evil truck from last week.
Maybe she’ll escape because, as we should all know by now, Riverdale cliffhangers are a crock of shit. If she survives, I hope Polly is given something more to do than be That Bitch™ because I just can’t anymore.
Continued belowThat about does it for now! What did you all think of the second episode in this brave new world? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you all in a week for things getting steaming again. Like, really steamy apparently. They don’t call this Sexy Archie for nothing. Until then, stay incorporated y’all.
Best Line of the Night:
Veronica: “Chad is threatened by my ‘alpha-ness.’”
