Welcome back all you Riverdale fans! The season finale is upon us and, somehow, it’s the least bonkers finale we’ve ever had. Sure there’s arson, curses, blackmail, spooky calls from serial killers, and no shortage of skeletons but it never quite reaches the heights of “Survive the Night.” Maybe it’s better to think of it as a mid-season finale instead.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
1. You Were the Chosen One!
Before we get farther in, can we…can we talk frankly about Cheryl? I can’t figure out how Riverdale wants us to see her and it has left me frustrated. Normally I can either be earnestly 100% down for her brand of extra or laughing my ass off over how over-the-top her life is. See Queen of the Bees. Here? I wanted someone to deck Cheryl for being as bad, if not worse, than her mother. It’s like she’s regressed as a character AGAIN into a spiteful, narcissistic, impatient teenager rather than being a woman who’s closest friends hurt her personally so she’s lashing out.
Cheryl’s actions feel forced and dissonant from how we’ve been asked to see her for the entirety of the season. She pushed away everyone for seven years, becoming a hermit with her chaos loving, old-money toxic Nana, and then spent the last year steamrolling over everyone for perceived slights. It’s only since her religious phase, something that’s completely dropped here, that she’s started to actually atone for her personal mistakes and grow, instead of performatively atoning for her family’s sins.
Archie braved toxic conditions in her mines to get her palladium and was willing to put up with her demanding they keep at it even when things were getting dangerous, yet Cheryl has the gall to accuse them of being horrible people for not instantly acquiescing to her demands upon being shown this information, for the first time, I might add?
What gets me most is she just bursts into the room, like Veronica confronting Hiram every other week, and throws it into their faces with no preface. She’s like a Twitter commenter, assuming the absolute worst of every argument and then getting inordinately angry when things don’t instantly go their way. It’s like she heard this story from Nana Rose, a very unreliable storyteller who has fabricated many, MANY objects, and is using it as an excuse to absolve herself of any guilt or responsibility she feels and push it onto Betty, Archie, and Jughead, three people who have treated her pretty good considering how garbage she treated them.
I think my issue comes down to her being framed as more in the right than the wrong by the episode. There’s a way this could have worked and ended in a similar way but 1) it would’ve required the season to have a structure that led them here which, HA and 2) would’ve needed Cheryl to be more reasonable and the rest of the crew far more unreasonable, both in the first meeting and in the second when Cheryl bursts into the reincorporation meeting with accusations pulled out of her ass and then succeeding from the town with Britta in tow.
It’s true that they were being dismissive of her, showing how they’d make pretty garbage leaders, but the episode goes from zero to no chill in 5 seconds flat without even showing the crew breaking a promise to her. Her anger is not justified and yet the episode wants us to see it as justified by making some iffy implications about America’s collective inability to actually talk about and reckon with our shameful pasts when building our futures.
Instead of this being a failure of our cast to learn and properly address the past, and thus them bringing this tragedy upon themselves, it’s an example of the rich and powerful having a persecution complex, using that to justify further harm and get out of having to reckon with the harm they or their family has done. Even if we assume the episode is trying to get us to sit somewhere in the middle, it fails to do the work to make this a viable position.
I know you’re tired of me griping about this because it’s Riverdale but Cheryl, and frankly the whole cast, had been on a pretty clear trajectory before this week and a lot of it got thrown out in order to seed the five episode special event we’re getting in a month. Cheryl’s actions feel less like her and more like the writers needing an excuse to have her curse the town. There were better ways to accomplish the same goal, ones which were more fun in their ridiculousness, but I guess we needed Cheryl to be the antagonist again. Sure. Whatever.
Continued below2. From Trash to Top Brass in Twenty Weeks
You wanna know why else that Cheryl thing bothered me? Besides them finding a way to make skeletons in the mine dull rather than hilariously mundane? The finale had the perfect set up with the reveal that TBK knows where Betty’s office is and they squandered it! OK, I don’t know what they could’ve done with it but I was so baffled by the focus on Cheryl being this major dissenting voice in the town’s reincorporation after a suddenly unearthed story about her ancestor which conveniently singles out Betty, Archie, and Jughead’s ancestors that I put TBK second rather than first. His name is Trash Bag Killer! That silliness has gotta be #1 every time.
Anyway, Betty’s reinstatement at the FBI is another one of those Riverdale contrivances that makes me question the show’s grasp of reality but only in a minor way. I mean, it has an even weaker grasp on how the law works.
3. Arsoned by the Ghoulies
Who else thought we’d seen the end of the Ghoulies? I certainly did. They never really were menacing enough to be scary nor silly enough to be fun to watch. I figured they would disappear into quiet obscurity but they get a bit of a swan song with this one guy firebombing Pop’s, getting captured by Toni & Fangs, and being tortured. Turns out they were responsible for the fires around town we didn’t hear anything about until now and were hired by, shock of all shocks, Hiram Lodge. I was wondering when he’d come back into play and secretly hoping he wouldn’t.
I gotta say, it was really nice seeing him get his comeuppance again but it feels like we’ve retreaded ground we’ve trodden upon many times before. He even gives the same “How dare you betray your own blood” speech to Veronica when she and everyone is chasing him out of town. Like, come on y’all. You can do better than that. But it looks like this is the last we’ll see of Hiram as they finally have irrefutable proof that he’s a ~murderer.!
Goodbye Hiram. You will not be missed, even though Mark Consuelos, you will be.
4. Britta Filter
HOW THE HELL DID I FORGET THAT BRITTA HAS ALREADY BEEN IN THE SEASON SINCE THE START? Why did none of y’all call me out on that!? It took until she said she needed to stay fit for football for me to remember my fav baby gay, who is now stuck with toxic disaster lesbian Cheryl and her haunted manor/school/independent village/fiefdom(?), was already a main side-character of season 5. It just goes to show you how much that extended break mid-season fucked with my head.
I sincerely continue to hope she gets more screen time next season because she’s criminally underutilized and under-developed and, like Midge and Ethel, I don’t want to see the show forget about her and then either send her off after being indoctrinated by a cult (read: Cheryl) or fake murdered and then real murdered. I also kinda wanna see her act as the reconciler between Cheryl and Toni and thus the rest of the town? I dunno. Just more Britta please.
5. Onwards to Our Noble Hauntings
I know I’m not talking much about the many smaller developments that happened this week, like Reggie & Veronica’s new casino and their hookup, the new council of Toni, Uncle Frank, Alice Smith (ugh), and Tabitha, Barchie coming back, Kevin going back to Broadway, and Pop Tate coming out of retirement as they rebuild Pop’s, but honestly, they weren’t interesting enough to get a thought on their own. The Cheryl thing overshadowed a lot and then much of the rest of the time was spent on Hiram so…it was a bit of a wash of a finale.
It honestly felt like the season blew its load early with “Dance of Death” and then used up all its true, well-done earnestness in “Next to Normal”, leaving us in a weird limbo where the only two unresolved plots were Hiram and TBK. Rather than ending on a single stinger, we meander until the finale where maybe we’re finally admitting the existence of the nebulously supernatural and we get the tried and true tradition that is the ambiguous but shocking episode ending cliffhanger.
Continued belowThat’s right everyone! Season 4 didn’t get a proper one because of COVID but season 5 leaves us wondering if Archie and Betty will have survived the cartoonish bomb that was planted beneath their bed by Hiram “stuck to this show like a barnacle” Lodge. I didn’t get many chances to laugh this week but this made me smile because it’s so silly. Seriously, slap the word ACME on the bomb and it could’ve fallen out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
As longtime readers of this column know, I do not trust a Riverdale cliffhanger. There’s no way they died, unless KJ Apa and/or Lilly Reinhart decided to leave the show, and even then it likely won’t happen until after the 5 episode special event. How they’ll get out of this one, we’ll just have to see. I would say I’m excited but I’m less enthused after this finale than I was last week. C’est la vie.
That about does it for now! Thank you all for following along with me for this weird season. We’ll be taking a small break as Riverdale recalibrates to a “normal” TV schedule and starts up the much hyped “5 episode special event” on November 16th.
In the meantime, what’d you think of the finale? How do you think Betty & Archie will escape Hiram’s Judge Doom bomb? Do you have any speculations on the identity of TBK? With Betty’s track record, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was her former partner whatshisname. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough and if not, well, we’ve got our theories. Until then, stay trapped in the mines full of the dead bodies of your ancestors’ killers Riverdale.
Best Line of the Night:
Tabitha: “This wind…”
Jughead: “Yeah. It feels like someone’s walking on my grave.”
