Five Thoughts on Riverdale‘s “Reservoir Dogs”

Welcome back all you Riverdale fans! If last week was a very focused, albeit dull, look at Hiram’s past, this week is a fractious but exciting look at everyone else. It’s like going from leisurely eating a whole, slightly-dry chicken to being served a 10 course French meal where you only have 5 minutes to eat each dime sized course. Oh and the server might be an FBI agent or a serial killer. It’s really a crapshoot there.

And as always, spoilers ahead.

1. Like Harrison Ford, I’m Getting Frantic

There’s something to be said for “Reservoir Dogs’” approach to its presentation of information. By intercutting between all of the many plots going on, it can more easily swap between tones and craft a feeling that we’re working through the days in chronological order rather than siloing each individual thread. It’s a clever approach to telling stories which, if bunched more closely together, might not have the same oomph since there isn’t all that much to cover, like with Reggie & Veronica’s hunt for investors. However, other plots, like Archie’s PTSD and the dog fighting ring feel needlessly chopped up.

The point where I first noticed this was the one scene where Cheryl finds Kevin in the woods while she’s out doing her Red Riding Hood routine or something. It’s less than a minute long and then we cut to Archie’s house for another scene that lasts less than a minute before cutting to the follow-up scene to Cheryl’s midnight romp which we then cut away from after a slightly longer but still rather short amount of time. And this keeps up throughout the whole of the episode! It’s maddening to not be able to focus on one thing for more than a minute or two.

That said, I actually really enjoyed this episode and a lot of that came from Riverdale’s willingness to play with mood and format. The war flashbacks being in a traditional film ratio gave it the right gravitas, even if I wasn’t particularly moved, while the playful split-screen and delightful anachronisms of Veronica’s phone collection gave those scenes the needed whimsy to distract from the utterly dull nature of finding investors for your new brokerage. Seriously, I could not care one whit about the specifics of what Veronica was doing but she and Reggie did it all with such panache that I could watch a whole hour of them working to close sales and screw over Hiram. And speaking of…

2. Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring. WIRELESS PHONE.

I cannot get over the phones used by Reggie & Veronica this week. We start off the episode by having her show off how a single smartphone and some names can do what she used to do with a whole team in NYC before getting a parade of a not quite OG Bell telephone but the second, single handle model before transitioning to seeing a regular, though green, rotary phone, a touch tone phone, and then a CHONKY brick cell phone that seems to exist solely for finance people in the 80s. All that was missing was a car or briefcase phone and we’d have covered the whole gamut. You know what? I kinda wish Hiram was using a briefcase phone so that when he threw it, it would look even more ridiculous.

All that aside, Reggie dropped a HUGE bombshell about SoDale in this episode that I don’t think was meant to be a bombshell. It turns out the whole thing is a front for the palladium mining, which I kinda knew but I genuinely thought he was creating a new town and that it already kinda existed. Am I wrong? Wasn’t that the implication? Or is this defrauding his investors about brand new housing? If it’s the latter and no one knows about it, that’s HUGE. They just kinda brush past it here so I hope Veronica capitalizes on this more in future episodes. Maybe with a razor flip phone.

3. Chainsaw Man

Betty’s obsessive hunt for the truck killer, and her missing sister, seems to come to a head this week as she, once again, stumbles into a problem, is rebuffed, and then goes right back to doing what she did before. It’d be frustrating if I wasn’t more frustrated at what the FBI represents here. Not in a “Riverdale did something wrong” way but in a “Riverdale totally got the absurdity of this” right. Of all the over-the-top, pulpified versions of things in this show, the FBI catfishing and dragnetting a highway for solicitors and prostitutes to arrest them under the guise of protecting them is probably MORE tame than the reality of the governmental agencies and laws’ attempts to criminalize sex work under the name of protecting the workers or, more often, “the children.”

Anyway, I don’t wanna dwell on it much because, aside from a fun musical number that’s also another excuse to have the female cast all dance in sexy clothes for the camera for 3 minutes straight, the real stand out of Betty & Tabitha’s Bizzare Adventures is the aftermath of Betty finding the killer. She gets in his truck and all the red flags are there. Thankfully, she successfully gets the drop on him when he’s coming with his knife by kicking the door in his face before turning around (rookie mistake) and allowing him to Voorhees/Meyers himself away. It’s at this point the show embraces the utter lunacy that is this plot and has the guy grab a chainsaw and just go to town.

I laughed. So. Fucking. Hard. I know it was supposed to be a tense scene but you can’t have a chainsaw wielding serial killer in a show with drugs called Jingle Jangle and not expect me to find it hilarious. Betty was gonna survive, of course, and she did so in the most spectacular fashion I can imagine: throwing a wrench at the dude’s head. You can’t make this shit up! Or, well, you can but it’s still ridiculous. This one scene made my night and I hope it did for you too.

4. And Bingo Was His Doggo

I’ve been waiting for them to really follow up on Archie’s time in the war and I’m glad they’re doing so here. Even though they end up having his plot be related to a dog fighting ring for a hot sec, the core of it is dealing with trauma and how community, support, and being open can help one move towards having that trauma not be a major force in one’s present. It also takes a good jab at how our current systems fail the vulnerable, specifically within the realms of veterans services due to underfunding and poor management.

I do have to wonder…what war did Archie fight? Like, all the imagery we get is of trench fighting. I get that they didn’t literally fight in WWI but why does Archie dream that THAT was the war he fought? I guess it’s tying back to the photo that inspired Archie in the first place but that was a WWII photo. Whatever. It’s just a weird detail I noticed but I’d rather the vagaries than firmly placing them wherever. It gives Riverdale enough of a distance from the real world and avoids having to make any comments on the specifics of A war and instead can use war in general as a topic.

In this case, we learn that Archie is still haunted by the war not because he couldn’t save his platoon, though that is part of it, nor because of his inability to protect Eric, but primarily because he wasn’t able to TRY to save one of the other grunts, Bingo. He knows it would’ve killed him and then Eric wouldn’t have survived but the guilt still eats at him, so much so he felt he had to lie to Uncle Frank OR it was so traumatic, he replaced Bingo with a dog in his mind to lessen but not completely remove the pain of his loss.

That’s the kind of drama I hoped to see. That’s a juicy character conflict, helping to inform his actions in the episode. I’m all for it and, with the stinger, it looks like it isn’t going away just yet. Here’s to you Bingo. May you find your rest soon.

5. Kevin Keller Superstar

So I was wrong about Penelope starting a cult. Yes, her red aesthetic is weird and the preaching at first felt like a brand new religion but it turns out she’s just born again and weirdly mixing in her own family’s nonsense into the rites. It’s still really freaky but less so than I originally thought. This is important context because if it weren’t, I would be yelling so hard at Kevin to RUN RUN FAR AWAY. He’d already gotten involved with one cult and Cheryl was absolutely no help with him there, while being pretty good at destroying relationships, and now she’s trying to get him to join another? No thank you.

That isn’t the plotline here, though, and I appreciate how Cheryl is actually trying to build something that is affirming, even if the vision she had is almost certainly being brought about by palladium poisoning or something. Kevin has been aimless since breaking up with Fangs and the things that caused him to make that choice continue to inform his frustrations with the way his life has turned out. This is a good place to put him and gives him a place to go. It also gave us the chance to re-introduce Moose, give us a happy gay couple, while also allowing Kevin to go on a self-discovery arc.

Kevin’s red turtleneck was really weird though and I don’t know if I like it. Can we give him a three piece suit like JJ? Please and thank you.

That about does it for now! What did you all think of this episode? Did you expect that hilarious chainsaw scene? Am I the only one who found it funny? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you all in a week for Betty channeling her inner serial killer and maybe, just maybe, some mothman developments. Until then, keeping dancing like the night will never end Riverdale.

Best Line of the Night:

Cheryl: “And you brought your sacred truth to his profane threshold.”