-I finally get the purpose of having Jughead's narration be a novel that he's writing in-show about the events of the show. It's so they can do meta scenes like the one tonight where they talk about the novel while also talking about the show but they're not actually talking about the show. Clever (Yes, this is sarcasm.). There is something I like about that scene though. Jughead tells F.P. that he's less interested in "whodunnit" than he is about the idea of Riverdale being a good or a bad place and F.P. suggests that it can be both. That's Riverdale in a nutshell. It's giving us the world of Archie we've always known and it's also adding a lot of darkness and edge into that world but one doesn't negate the other. The good and bad in Riverdale exist side-by-side, making for a much more interesting show than if it had just picked one or the other.
-The "F.P. and Jughead discuss the book scene" also provides a fascinating glimpse into Jughead's worldview, showing us that no matter how wise beyond his years he seems, in the end he's a kid who still has a "black/white" sense of viewing the world. Few things are purely good and few things are purely bad, as the character of F.P. and his arc of "criminal trying to get his life and family back together" illustrate, but Jughead has a hard time seeing things that way. It's why when he discovers Archie and Veronica's betrayal at the end, he's equally mad at Betty even though her offense is nowhere near as bad. It's why Jason's death and all the complexities and deceptions it's revealed has rattled him so. Jughead is on course to learn that the world isn't all black and white, and hopefully he'll learn that sooner rather than later.
-After a couple weeks of relatively good and sympathetic behaviour, Alice is back up to her old tricks this week. Would you believe that Betty inviting her mother to join the school newspaper that she revived solely to get away from her mother turned out to be a bad idea? Honestly Betty is right to be mad at Archie and Veronica for going behind her back to investigate things while she was busy but she also needs to be mad at herself for allowing her mother into the school newspaper in the first place.
-Hiram is getting out of prison in time for season 2 (Where he'll be a series regular played by Mark Consuelos, unless Consuelos' other show Pitch gets a second season) and Veronica is not happy. Camila Mendes has been playing Veronica's growing disillusionment with the man who recently blackmailed her very well these past few episodes and she's especially good at keeping Veronica sympathetic tonight as she reaches her low point here, going behind Betty and Jughead's backs to help Alice investigate F.P., convinced that he murdered Jason on her father's orders. When Jughead brought up how he doesn't really consider Veronica a friend in the last episode, what seemed like a clever observation on how those two really don't interact outside of a group context turns out to be a plot point here as Veronica doesn't have the loyalty to Jughead that Archie and Betty do. So when the opportunity to learn the truth about her father comes up, of course she's going to take it. She's so obsessed with the idea that her father could be involved in this that she almost gets her and Archie caught during their break-in session because she can't believe there's nothing there. It's an interesting turn for the character in line with how comic Veronica would behave and Mendes does a great job selling it.
-Okay, let's get real. Archie claims he was helping Veronica investigate F.P. because he was worried about Jughead but we all know the real reason. He just wanted to finally be involved with the murder investigation after a whole season of being at most, Murder Mystery-Adjacent. And if he also got some action because of that, all the better. This episode does a really good job though at showing how Archie's biggest character trait, his need to help and protect his friends is also his biggest character flaw. Archie ultimately agrees to investigate F.P. because he doesn't want Jughead to get hurt by his dad again, even though he knows he's breaking Jughead's trust by doing this. He doesn't trust Jughead to handle the information. He just decides what's best for Jughead and does it no matter the consequence. That's called being a bad friend Arch.
-You know it's a great episode of Riverdale when there's an awkward dinner scene and we get a great one this week when Alice invites F.P and Jughead to dinner so she can interrogate F.P. while Archie and Veronica are off breaking into his trailer. Betty has been learning some tricks from Alice though and invites her father to dinner to throw Alice off. This leads to a fantastic scene where Mädchen Amick, Lochlyn Munroe and Skeet Ulrich passive aggressively insult each other and throw veiled references to Alice's abortion around that's uncomfortable to watch but impossible to look away from.
-Seriously though, did Jughead really not pick up on the fact that Alice clearly suspects F.P. of being up to something during that dinner? She wasn't even hiding it! Why did he need Betty to tell him what he could see with his own eyes?
-Cole Sprouse does a terrific job as Jughead every week but he really takes it up a notch this week. We know all that kid wants is to have his family back together and to have that dream finally start to become a reality (Even if it means moving to Toledo) only to have it snatched away at the same time his closest friends (and Veronica) betray him is devastating, made even more devastating by the way Sprouse makes us feel what Jughead is feeling every step of the way.
-So I know I rag on Jughead's narration almost as much as I rag on Archie's music (the best joke of the night for me was easily the scene where Betty and Jughead finally have a reaction about Archie's music that isn't "It's uniformly great!") and I know that I literally started this review ragging on his narration but because we've spent all season accustomed to some kind of narration to close out the episode (Though not always), the total lack of it once Jughead disappears after homecoming added greatly to the emotional impact of him leaving.
-Archie and Veronica breaking into F.P.'s trailer was bad but if they didn't do it, they wouldn't have realized he was being framed later. So what they did was bad AND good. Duality. Sometimes it's cool to break and enter.
-Meanwhile Cheryl apparently forgot that she's supposed to be holding a grudge against Polly (Based on the fact that an episode literally ended with Cheryl crossing out Polly's face on a picture) and the two of them are out campaigning to be the co-queens of homecoming. Of course this is all just pretense for them to have a reason to stumble upon the ring Jason was going to give to Polly hiding among Penelope's things. The elder Blossoms are such obvious villains that it seemed to eliminate them as killer candidates but this episode makes a strong case for them to have done it. Sure Jason denouncing them and returning the ring seems believable and them drugging Polly to calm her down is perfectly in character but finally giving Cheryl the validation and approval that she's always craved? Telling her she should be running the company one day despite everything they said about her a couple episodes back? They are hiding something for sure. Luckily, Cheryl isn't an idiot and she's holding onto that ring nice and tight (Also I know they were trying to appease Cheryl but the fact that they took her story about disposing of the ring at face value seemed out of character for them, considering how distrustful and paranoid they are.).
-Molly Ringwald is still around and she's a delight as Mary, fitting into the world of Riverdale perfectly whether she's trying to get Archie to go to Chicago, bantering with Fred, or not buying into Alice's mindgames for a second. More of her please!
-Mary thinks Archie will be safe living in Chicago? That seems a bit too farfetched, even for Riverdale.
-The scene where Fred enters the dance with both Hermione and Mary at his side was a very funny recreation of when Archie did the same thing with Betty and Veronica during the first episode. Like father, like son.
-I enjoyed Archie and Veronica's performance of Kids in America, even if Archie's guitar seemed totally unnecessary but it's telling that Archie couldn't come up with his own upbeat, danceable song. Expand your range Archie. You won't get far without it.
-Also we're totally getting The Archies in season 2 whether we want them or not, right?
-Murder Theory Corner: I'll be honest. I'm impressed with how straightforward Riverdale has kept it's big murder mystery. There isn't dozens of suspects or reasons why Jason Blossom could have been murdered and everything seems to come back to the Coopers and the Blossoms or the Blossoms and the Lodges. The show means it when it says they don't care about the "whodunnit" aspect. So I'm comfortable with buying into the idea that Penelope or Cliff Blossom killed Jason. In case the show does want to surprise us with the big reveal though, let's have Hermione Lodge as a back-up guess. And as a real outlier theory, let's speculate that Jason was killed because he was trying to rip off drugs from the Southside Serpents by Mayor McCoy, who secretly has the Serpents under her thumb and uses their profits for her own end (It won't be this, but better safe than sorry).
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