Regarding Riverdale: You'll Fly, Too

Watching Riverdale is a bit like getting a bad wax job; you go into it feeling nervous, it hurts during, and then afterwards you’re not even that much better off.

This is my third rant about the teen drama but if you’re up to speed with it – spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen any of Season 3 – you'll likely agree that it’s perfectly justified. The direction this show has taken has gone from a bit bizarre to certifiably insane, and I’m very angry about it. Therefore, it’s time for my review no one asked for of Riverdale Season 3 so far.

This season picks up with the ever-so-irritating narration from Jughead. “It’s the calm before the storm” he says, which makes me nervously think that seasons 1 and 2 were the ‘calm’ of actual sane television viewing, and the storm is the insanity on our screens now. But he’s actually referring to “the summer before your junior year in high school”. “Junior year?” I said to my friend, outraged. “That’s lower sixth. That means they were in YEAR ELEVEN in seasons 1 and 2.” And then my self confidence took a nice nosedive because I wasn’t driving classic cars at drag races and going on dates with men with five thousand abs and catching serial killers at fifteen. Damn it...

And I certainly wasn’t on trial framed for murder, like our good pal, Archie (whose eyebrows aren’t even close to matching his bad dye job anymore). His mum, Molly Ringwald, is his lawyer, saying the trial is a, “cloudy testimony from unreliable people”, but surely she, as his mother, is unreliable as his lawyer. Isn’t that conflict of interest? Or maybe I’m making that up; I don’t actually know anything about law, but that’s one thing the writers of Riverdale and I have in common. Fred Andrews finally punched Hiram – highly enjoyable – but that’s not going to stop the resident baddy from being evil. The jury is undecided, postponing the verdict over the Labour Day weekend. This gives Archie one last weekend of freedom to go to pool parties and get a ‘sick tat’, known as a serpent tattoo to non-morons, because, “There’s gonna be serpents in juvenile detention.” Looking really respectable, Arch, getting a gang tattoo aged sixteen. But at least they got to frolic in a probably dirty lake. Aaw.

But Archie clearly isn’t destined to make good life choices. The jury is deadlocked, six-to-six, so the judge calls a mistrial. “We have to go through this again?” Archie says, as if he's been told that his train's been delayed half an hour. His prosecutor makes him an offer: he can have a lesser sentence, just two years in juvenile detention and then a shorter stint in prison, if he pleads guilty. Which, no innocent person in their right mind would take. But, Archie TAKES IT. IS HE SERIOUS. He just admitted to MANSLAUGHTER essentially so he wouldn’t have to bother with a second trial. And I thought I was lazy...

He’s perp walked off in slow motion and this would be the most mental storyline if it wasn’t for what I’m moving onto next.

Jughead is approached by Dilton Doylie. You know, the scout leader. No? Whatever. He approaches Jughead looking like he’s huffed quite a bit of jingle jangle and yammers on about how “the Gargoyle King is real”. I hope you weren’t too attached to Doylie because in his next scene he’s with this kid called Ben Button (really, writers? Benjamin Button?) with these satanic symbols carved into his back, dead, with blue around his mouth. There’s animal bones, poison chalices, all that stuff. Nice and creepy, highly alarming and ridiculous.

 And somehow it gets EVEN WEIRDER. Cut to Betty, whose mum and sister are part of this creepy farm cult run by a man named ‘Edgar Evernever’ now, who wonders outside to see her niece and nephew, Juniper and Dagwood, being dangled over A FIRE. NOT THE BABAS. And then in scenes I still can’t actually believe they’re DROPPED, but then FLOAT INTO THE AIR. WHAT. WHAT. But DID THAT ACTUALLY HAPPEN?!? Maybe not, because Betty has a seizure straight after, but who the hell knows. It probably did happen, I think, filled with dread. Who doesn’t enjoy some satanic worship mixed in with their teen dramas? Well, NOT ME.

 Episode two isn’t much bloody better. Archie is making friends in juvie with a bunk mate called ‘mad dog’ and a guy who “dropped out of school in fourth grade to run drugs”. Fourth. Grade. Aka, year 6. He decides to organise a football match, which the warden amazingly agrees to. Cue possibly the stupidest point of the series so far, with Veronica and a few others heading to the prison in their cheerleader gear to perform Jailhouse Rock, which I think is a bit of a mocking choice but there we go. A brave choice of those ladies, as the young male inmates were pressed up against the fence literally drooling. Turns out the warden only let them play football so he could yell ‘stop the riot’ and have the lads get attacked by the guards. And I’m getting annoyed with this storyline now, so I’ll wrap it up; basically, Archie is being groomed by the warden to go into this illegal fighting pit. Which they show, in slow motion, and play sexy music over. Because Riverdale has a bad habit of sexualising things that shouldn’t be sexy. I’m actually infuriated watching it.

Have a shot of him fighting. Maybe this isn't as sexualised as I complained it was, actually...

 Plus, it’s really hard to focus on stupid subplots like Cheryl becoming a serpent or Veronica running a speakeasy (don’t ask) when there’s this ridiculous supernatural cult shit going on. So Betty and Jughead engage in their typical foreplay of detective work – “Just like when we first started dating,” Betty says nostalgically – and try to figure out what the hell happened to Dilton Doylie and Ben Button. Turns out, the lads had a creepy bunker in the woods, which I joked was used for sex until Betty and Jughead banged their later (gross, gross, gross, and she’s so going to get a yeast infection from that), and they play a game there called ‘Gryphons and Gargoyles’. G and G. REAL SUBTLE, Riverdale. Clearly they didn’t buy into the rights to Dungeons and Dragons, or perhaps they realised they wouldn’t get away with implying that D and D turns kids into devil worshiping weirdos who commit suicide to please a demon overlord.

And who’s the last living player for Jughead and Betty to interrogate? Why, it’s my all-time fave, Ethel Muggs, aka Barb from Stranger Things. Except, between her part in this and Sierra Burgess is a Loser, I’m beginning to lose a lot of respect for the actress. Her name is now ‘Princess Etheline’, not that I’ve “earned the privilege” to call her that. She was getting frisky in the bunker with Ben Button, her gaming partner. Betty wants to play with her to learn more about the cult game and win the ‘rule book’, and is rather scathingly told that she will “never be worthy” to play no matter how hard she tries, which Betty rightly takes as a compliment. So, Jughead is sent into the creepy bunker to investigate, while Betty takes on ‘the farm’.

Betty won’t get to meet Mr Evenever, the man she’s really there for, until she ‘attains certain levels’. All that nice cult behaviour, bending over backwards for a bit of gratification. Alice, who I was warming to so naturally that had to end, reveals to Betty that she’s told all of their dark family secrets to this ‘farm’. You know, like how they hid a dead body last season. That lil thing. “They’ll never use my testimony against me,” she says in a lovely moment of ironic foreshadowing.

Meanwhile, poor Jughead is trapped in that bunker with Princess Etheline, who is wearing a nice little outfit to no doubt get her in the mood.

 Now, I’ve never played D and D, but I’ve seen Stranger Things and those kids play it. And this scene is a not even discreet rip-off of the game. Jughead crosses a footbridge, has to choose between two doors, yadda yadda yadda. She presents him two chalices. One contains cyanide, the other is safe. I’m glad Jughead made the ‘Russian roulette with poison’ joke before I had to, but lucky for him he drinks the right concoction and receives the rule book from Ethel. I always say “salut” before drinking something that could possibly kill me, too. Ethel then makes Jughead kiss her – so THAT’S why she didn’t want Betty there, trying to steal her man – and, in a perfectly rational life choice, drinks the poison. A violated Jughead has to unceremoniously haul her off to the emergency room, where she is later seen talking to this.

 Jesus Christ. I'm so done.

Alice and F.P find the rule book and throw it into the fire, so Jughead kind of kissed Ethel for nothing. The episode, and thus the series so far, ends with every single kid in school reading the ‘rule book’. So, Jughead definitely kissed Ethel Muggs for nothing. Bad luck, Jug.

So, am I going to keep watching this? Maybe, I’m morbidly curious to see what new insane heights they’ll reach next, but I can’t promise I’ll make it to the end of the series. I have no Gargoyle King to appease, and I’m starting to get sick of that bad wax job.