episode thoughts

- watching this delayed way has made this so much funnier for me bc of all the nice sweet messages in my inbox that are like, can’t wait for u to get to 5! so i’m like :) :) :) and then i turn it on and MY SON is DEAD

- lmao u bastards

- and we’re doing paradoxes. i was thinking about paradoxes in my last ep thoughts too. sincerely, my favorite part of doing these posts is when i manage to be on the right track, one step ahead of myself, but only in a way that makes me look like a complete dumbass. ty for staying tuned as i blindly grope my way into semi-relevant episode thoughts. it’s a privilege to be here.

- speaking of relevant thoughts, reggie is the closest to meta-awareness of all these characters. he notices his double in the comics right away. and he calls out the donnie darko reference that the entire episode is modeled on. only awake person, beyond even jughead

- here’s a video essay explaining the movie, if u want

- s4 already visited donnie darko, at least superficially

- this ep even gives a nod to that plot-era by recalling chipping. obviously s4 couldn’t yet match the sci fi elements like parallel universes and time travel, but in retrospect it did make kind of a point about the unstoppable track jughead found himself on against the stonies, and his feeling of inevitable doom re: his relationship with betty

- on that note, another significant time this film was referenced was during betty’s s2 serpent dance - soon afterwards they broke up with the exchange ‘how many times’/’until it sticks.’ i’m sensing a theme

- that version of the song was made specifically to play over the film’s outro montage of characters waking up in donnie’s prime universe after the reset and ‘remembering’ the next 28 days in the tangent universe as nightmares. + donnie’s dead body being recovered. it’s a lot like what this ep opens with.

- speaking of songs and scenes, jughead’s high school hallway hallucination experience was some crisp homage to the film too, but with the soundtrack borrowed from a very different film

- also on the topic of music, the creepy minimal score in the opening when jughead wakes up in the garage is the first of a few things that reminds me very much of another time travel movie: primer. admittedly this might be bc i permanently have primer on the brain at all times of my waking life. there’s a couple other things too

- the specific combination of narration (he asks her to read the comics ‘and tabitha did’) and the fade transitions between these shots, to me strongly evokes the style of primer

- the other thing is, and i do feel like boo boo the fool for not thinking about this one before now, one of the main materials the two guys talk about using to build their machine ,, is palladium. they rip it out of one of their catalytic converters to use as an efficient conductor. not quite a magic ‘science’ ingredient in a universe spawning explosion but hey.

- at this point i feel like despite never once thinking about palladium before it came up in rd now i’m seeing it everywhere.

- since this episode isn’t about accidentally building a time machine i can sense ur doubt about the relevance here. but beneath its impenetrable time travel plot, primer is really about the relationship between two best friends, aaron and abe, and how their unanticipated power over reality affects their friendship and their approaches to life. each feels like he can be a ‘savior’ of reality

- aaron becomes obsessed with perfecting reality by re-doing it until the best outcome is arrived at. life doesn’t matter to him the first time around anymore except as material to write a script. only the end result counts. meanwhile abe tries to game it to benefit himself, aaron, and aaron’s family, but carefully prepares for the worst and ultimately chooses to sacrifice his own future to go back and ‘correct’ reality to before the pandora’s box of time travel was ever opened. the ‘worst’ in this case is they and their loved ones find themselves in a paradoxical time loop beyond their comprehension, and by the end of the film u might lol realize that from the start you’ve been witnessing the resulting struggle for control of the situation. the narration of events throughout has been aaron’s part in that one-up-manship.

- a little dense, ok. but archie and jughead’s dynamic mirrors aaron and abe’s - one ultimately wants a selfish and dangerous result and the other wants (perhaps also selfishly) to conserve what he cares about, even if it means isolating himself from it forever.

- another thing about primer and also about donnie darko and, as it turns out, also about the rebuild of evangelion movies (which i finally got around to watching for this ep after only knowing the show) is this: can we know whether or not this is the first go around the time loop??

- that’s a major plot point in primer and the answer - that once the time travel starts we only see what is at least the second pass thru the loop - is one of the few things known with certainty in the film. the rebuild of eva films.... appear... to be the final run thru a time loop that the events of the series have been cycling thru, until shinji can finally rewrite reality to a conclusive solution.

- in donnie darko, donnie’s sleepwalking leads him to wake in many strange outdoor locations but in the first scene he wakes in the same spot where he later goes to conclude everything. one (of many) interpretations of the movie is that he’s trapped in a convoluted time loop and he’s tried unsuccessfully to end it before, which is why he wakes in the spot. the only way to stop the cycle is to accept he has to die in his prime universe so that the tangent universe will not form.

- the point here being that jughead starting the ep at archie’s bed with no bomb under it, catching the blast on the stairs, and then waking up as if that was a dream, could be interpreted as him already being inside the time loop - just one that hasn’t stabilized yet.

- considering it’s never answered how or why the dead narrator already had a comic book before archie killed him, or for that matter why archie killed him at all before the narrator knew anything (in fact dying was what caused him to find out,, nice one archie) this feels plausible to me.

- and on the topic of savior complexes like donnie and abe and shinji, one must remember jesus. lol jk. no but donnie darko has a bunch of homage and parallels to the last temptation of christ, so i watched that too and uhhh Couldn’t Help But Notice that maybe rivervale has been referencing it for archie all along? the heart removal being the most noticeable similarity

- the last temptation is a story supposing what if jesus was just a guy and instead of choosing to sacrifice himself for humanity, he had doubts and just like, didn’t do that. what if instead he got married and lived his life? what could go wrong? also he’s obsessed with his dad.

- another kind of commonality between these films - donnie darko, primer, the last temptation, and the rebuilds of evangelion - is the central character struggles with feeling alone and covets a happy family. that’s literally the ‘last temptation’ in the last temptation. donnie feels misunderstood by his family at the film’s start and is thrilled to meet a girl who kind of gets him - too bad she dies unless he dies to save her. in primer, abe’s motivations seem to revolve around aaron’s wife and child instead of his own relationships unless u count his extremely homo-domestic relationship with aaron. shinji.... well. u know.

- this could be applied to archie - coveting betty as his wife bc he thinks that will bring his dad back. it could also be applied to jughead - one last brush with the life he once wanted before it ends with him accepting isolation and things reset as they should be, more or less.

- on that note, marriage and kids seems to have been a central element throughout these rivervale episodes - but specifically as a negative thing. starting in 6.01 when betty points out to archie that every married couple they've ever known is divorced. then she does some sketch shit to conceive a child with him. a cursed entity tries to kill toni and fang's baby. jack demands another child from bitsy despite their loveless marriage. finn wants to marry abigail to inherit her estate after he kills her to get his serial killer rocks off. etc.

- notably jughead and tabitha's relationship and interactions have been blissfully separate from this tangle. love that for them

- veronica and reggie also seem separate, but i feel like it's not as simple for them?? reggie is still comparing himself to veronica's past relationships, especially archie. and a big tho underdeveloped part of veronica's narrative is what direction in life she'll choose, including the decision to have kids or not

- anyway. the episode.

- lmao at betty snubbing my boi curdle jr. for the wedding. that's cold. what exactly happened here??

- conversely so sweet that curdle didn't even ask jughead for money to keep the body on ice. maybe he's been extorting betty all along and she's right to not invite him. maybe he's in shock that there’s a jughead who actually managed to die

- what i really want to know is what jughead would encounter if he drove past the sign and left the town limits. does the rivervale universe include the rest of the world? jughead and ethel later seem to acknowledge that it does not when they only specify that 'billions will die' if the prime universe collapses.

- a joke is being played on me by my own past self or possibly my anons. i can't believe u guys just let me run my mouth about not liking the comics and now it all comes down to more comics lmao

- so. i confess after watching this ep i looked up the time police (the remake one) and tried to read,,, and then i remembered i tried it once already a while ago bc the art is cute at least. but the writing..... i can't. it's just. not for me.

- SO instead i googled a little more and found this, an article which walks thru the original time police comics, which are probably at least as, if not more, relevant anyway,, if this is relevant at all. betty's spaghetti suggests it is, bc that line was pretty random otherwise. or maybe the new time police features making spaghetti too?

- ironically, i don't have time to find and read those issues, but luckily someone loved it enough to have written this nice summary.

- mostly what this puts in my mind is the great potential for more town history that featuring this particular comic series could present. ras, pls, the show can't end before we bring it back to the town origins. i already posited there was a blossom who looked like jughead. might as well borrow it all from time police and add the colonel pickens plot too. that would be fucked and hilarious

- absolutely Love that jughead and tabitha's response to the comics is like 'wow a parallel universe? that's definitely the weird part of this' instead of something like, huh there's a published series with an omniscient narrator describing our lives as if they're stories, and these comics are for sale and possibly many people now have private details of our lives.

- but i think a more egregious oversight is that they don't stop to wonder who wrote the comics. where the fuck did these come from? jughead bootstraps them into existance, fully formed

- then again, maybe there's a clue within the ep?

- sounds pretty familiar,, ,

- that came from lucifer who's technically an angel, formerly with access to heaven??? it's extremely bizarre that rivervale's heaven is populated with comics but whatever. that’s another mystery of the universe i guess

- i do wonder if the heavenly diner has issues past 100 stocked. is it outside the flow of time? doesn't seem like characters can exit to a point before they died. but could they peek ahead to later comic issues?

- the two options offered to jughead in the deal for his devil interview also closely resemble the narrator's and writer's fates by the end of this ep. 1) publish to great acclaim but never write again = the narrator, omniscient and free but unable to write the story himself. 2) infinite story inspiration but cursed to remain unpublished in obscurity = the writer, sealed away but generating stories to power a universe.

- what does it all mean

- Jason Spake

- i’m not coping with that one at all, in case ur wondering

- it would have been dramatically funnier if he just strolled past and waved without saying anything but i'm also just happy he's here and i'd love to ask him some questions if he has a minute in the midst of all that tennis, jason wait a minute come back jason pls it's important jason the farm wait

- a monumental in-episode parallel happening here is that ethel is elated/devasted that jughead, her crush, finally acknowledges her but not romantically, while jughead's first crush, jason, has literally come back from the dead and Finally spoke to him like he always wanted but it's just. not meant to be. alas

- at the school library jughead hunts for 'the philosophy of parallel universes' which is a nod to donnie darko's philosophy of time travel. we're pointedly given the name of the author:

- a qooqle tells me thomas walker is the father of one of the main characters in caos and a reverend in greendale. this lines up with donnie darko. the author in the film, roberta sparrow, was a nun until she had, presumably, an experience like donnie's after which she dedicated her life to science and wrote the book. probably an inconsequential detail but v thoughtful, i love stuff like this

- dilton's logic here is wild like,, beloved u could publish something amazing about universes self destructing but what universe will host the publication after these 2 are gone? someone should go check if he has an interdimensional ship

- it's not my jam or a thing any of my friends have done so i must ask: is it normal to have ur mother at ur bachelorette party?

- there is a waitress at the casino who keeps showing up in frame like she's supposed to be important and Every single time i have a moment where i believe that it's polly. she looks so similar :'(

- and Where Is polly? is glen back from being murdered? what about reggie's dad?

- i think it's probably absolute garbage that reggie's only storyline this episode focuses on him struggling against an anomolous version of himself for a position in his own fucking life and relationship when not that many episodes ago his story involved grief and coping with a dead parent which is more than a little relevant presently with regard to archie, who is another character reggie's self esteem suffers for comparing himself to. there was a plot with a lot of potential on the table just waiting to be picked up and instead the writers went with inviting back reggie prime and the low-hanging fruit of threesome bait. sure, it's a compact subplot that wraps up easily but it leaves some pretty serious unfinished business for rivervale reggie.

- not to mention showcasing veronica's selfish side and her lack of interest in understanding his reaction. yikes

- anyway

- here is jughead lingering in a wistful moment of nostalgia and longing with Zero space between him and archie, who is in this same moment flipping thru his mental planner to figure out the best time to murder jughead before he can stop the world ending. ✨bffs💫 the seductive song from next scene bleeding in over top really adds a little something

- then they go rescue jason from 'the blackhood' in the whyte wyrm's basement which looks suspiciously exactly like the diner's basement bar but i can't help but think of that scene in men in black. yes, it looked like jason was being held hostage but what if actually his dad was about to surprise him with a pizza party and a little father son time? the rescue party just uhh surprised him into pulling a gun

- where does that pizza go?

- it escapes to a different universe

- i love when mr. weatherbee and miss bell attend events. archie's closest living family members couldn't make it thru the town boundaries for the wedding rehearsal dinner and betty decided she hates my boi curdle, but it's fine. the high school administrative staff are always down to fill seats and celebrate whatever.

- i accept toni discovering and being most affected by cheryl's death. but i don't love to see cheryl and toni together at the end bc in my opinion there's no walking back the racist way cheryl was written the entire span they dated. toni appeared to have come to healthy terms with this in s5 and it's my hope that's the end of it, i hate to see characters go backwards. i had a whole bit i chopped out of my thoughts for last episode, pondering whether cheryl (or abigail) and toni had ever been together in rivervale, bc it's not really acknowledged. but that's all whatever.

- why did archie kill cheryl tho? does jason's absence at all the wedding stuff despite basically being betty's brother-in-law, not to mention his lack of acknowledgement by everyone other than cheryl, indicate that he de-manifested? did cheryl realize something wasn't right and come to believe jughead after all? and was she maybe capable of effecting a change on the situation??

- there's a moment in the narration here that's very !!!

- in riverdale 'prime' i have always thought of the narrator and the writer as the same person - the storyteller, speaking/writing from a point in the future about events that are in the past from his perspective. and prime's jughead is distinct from the narrator in that he's just a character within the story, same as all the other characters. he's privileged with a definite future bc he has to survive to tell the story and his emotional insight is probably the most central to the story, but otherwise he's not omniscient or in control or anything.

- and rivervale's narrator may speak possessively about jughead the character's life from time to time ('my old pal archie' 'my ex girlfriend' 'our keys' to the apartment with tabitha) but the stories he's telling are clearly not treated as recollections of his own life. even when he doesn’t say it's from his imagination he still maintains the distance of a rod serling type host. actually ‘host’ might be a better name for him than narrator. (btw there’s one and only one twilight zone ep where the characters see rod and it’s about a writer who controls reality too)

- but this episode stands apart immediately, bc for maybe the first time ever (?) the character is narrating. at the start he says 'this really happened,' establishing he’s speaking from his own experience. and here there's this moment where the character appears to have sudden realization while at the same time the narrator voices it as 'wait a minute...' meaning the narrating character doesn’t have more information than the in-the-moment character.

- to me this is so trippy?? bc it confirms the narration is from the character's limited perspective. he isn't omniscient, he's not necessarily telling this after the fact. he can't know what's going on in other people's minds unless he can find out somehow later, but does he have time for that? does this explain why everyone else is so strange and one-dimensional in this ep?

- idk, i don't think i know how put this thought into words all the way

- same bag, same bag, bag man foils. there can only be one bag man. ilu dilton but u gotta go

- dark horse ethel Comes Through <3 i'm devastated that shannon's not a regular or more frequent guest, she's so good. she hits that tragic unreciprocated obsession love mark perfectly. ethel was def about to suggest she and jughead could kiss again. for the sake of their friendship it's probably better this way.

- that did remind me tho of how the s3 g&g plot actually has a precedent for jughead authoring reality - when he writes the 'red paladin rescue campaign' that the squad saving archie unwittingly follows. was he actually able to do this all along? that's fucked up

- speaking of saving people, jughead's usual inclination to save as many people as he can is on full display this ep. i mentioned the possibility that this isn't the first go-round in the time loop

- one reason i get that vibe is the specific discrepencies in people's lives here. jason's alive. the black hood never happened. hiram never arrived - in fact, he died on the night veronica recently described (to us) as the night he ruined her self esteem. these are changes, which i assume means someone had to do the changing. i think jughead, tho he can't remember it, has been thru this loop once already and tried to rewrite everything. unfortunately now this universe is destabilizing and the collision with the prime universe is undoing the work as un-edited reality bleeds back in.

- at least, that's how i'm reading it.

- jughead and archie's fight has Such s1 vibes. not only bc this is the most these two have interacted in a very long time, but also like,, the collar grab and tense feeling resembles the 'a kid is dead' argument, the choreography starts out feeling similar to the vending machine fight with reggie, then the table smash reminds of the jughead and chuck fight in 1.10. fun

- fred as archie's villain orgin story, inspired. adult archie's solution to his ambivalence is just to do whatever he thinks his dad will praise him for, but with his same worst judgement possible as always, inevitably leading to murder <3

- if there's any logic here about characters reviving or not, my guess is that it matters where the character physically died - whether it was within town limits or not. fred died out of town. but everyone else, ben button, dilton, clifford, hal, and jason died locally. the narrator died right on the border. is that why polly isn't back? is part of the lonely highway too far away? but tabitha's friend squeaky appeared before. hm.

- also, what's so special about witches like abigail if everyone is unrestricted by death in rivervale?

- terrible missed opportunity to do like that really overwrought snl frou frou sketch and have veronica revive at the last minute and come kill archie in revenge. in no universe has he ever treated her right smh

- going back to comics, jughead and betty kissing feels like an oblique nod to the end of jughead the hunger. veronica goes to kiss jughead when the world is blowing up or whatever but then betty snags him instead. i know bughead fandom has passed those panels around a lot, which is how i've seen them. admittedly i didn't get very far into vampironica so i don't know for sure,,, , but that end seemed bad to me bc from what i read, within that canon he and veronica were actually tight while betty was actively trying to kill him?? ? ?

- who built that bomb: ethel?? where The Fuck did they get that much c4 on short notice lmao. like, ethel what have u been up to

- the song playing while these two kiss, 'you don't need me the way that i need u.' the clarification keeps getting more and more painfully explicit. is that chunk of fandom still being embarrassing? that's rhetorical lol, i don't need to know anything about that

- she suddenly cares what's happening to him? this is Not Betty in exactly the same way it's Not Archie talking about the 'threshold of revelation' and probability percentages. jughead's already written this. it's manipulated, a one-sided projection by jughead that's maybe finally giving him the closure that's been haunting him for years. it only took him controlling a whole parallel universe to get there

- viewing it this way of course raises horrifying questions. like, what's the nature of free will in rivervale? is there consent in that kiss? does anything anyone does here actually matter if it's all prescripted? fatalism creeps me out

- finally put my finger on what it is that makes narrator jughead look so uncanny: extreme undereye concealer. makes sense - a metaphysical being cannot be sleep deprived

- btw! his arrival in this ep to an interactive level is called metalepsis, here’s a vid that explains about this concept. at least, i think he qualifies? is he still a narrator if he’s not narrating? hm.

- what he is, is a hero of this universe bc i didn't want that on my screen at all whew. i realize part of this is solely a personal response that i've arrived at for many reasons, but still,, credit to the writers for getting these characters’ dynamic to this intensely uncomfortable point where all i want is for her to get away from him.

- betty is super funny this ep bc she has a uniformly bewildered response to everything

- this is what i mean when i say one-note overacting btw. but this would be a much heavier ep without this kind of levity

- her one moment that i thought stood out really well was the face she makes when he snaps and says this is how it has to be. super reminiscent of the s4 (s5?) scene that's the morning after she confesses to him and he asks if they can talk later. betty's expression for when she's told 'no' by jughead.

- time loop time loop time loop i love it here

- is it a loop like,, , like the writer generates the narrator who becomes the character who becomes the writer? i feel like that would explain why shit started breaking when jughead got close to the dead narrator and then later it was fine when the two were together at the table with betty. their loop will destabilize if any of them dies.

- :') jughead writing the absolute best life he could want for himself: dinner buffet with friends and a reason to leave early to be alone with tabitha

- thank u, hugging jabitha, for my life

- wow it's just like in farscape. jk not at all, but there did end up being two of the same guy and only one of his girlfriend. someone's got to lose. luckily in this case no one is being blasted into the vacuum of space. yet? this kind of story always gets worse before it gets better tho so this feels like it's not over.

- this is just to say shannon is gorgeous and i hope they bring her back for more. also they're really onto something with those glasses huh

- does this mean there are two typewriters in rivervale now or is the jughead character who was previously the narrator now finally free of it?

- on that note,, from the tvtropes page on, i think, ‘writing reality’:

- hm

- here's the actual paradox, i think: that phone call didn't happen in the original reality and now it does. smh jughead sometimes u have to accept how things go and just let people get blown up

- it's Literally major curda's voice on the phone but i'm also having flashbacks to when they photoshopped hal's eyes bright green. some of my trust damaged by this show has been healed but not all

- there's an echo in rivervale - not literally - of jughead being affected by a loud sound. foreshadowing. that ending tho 😰 is there going to be an actual consequential injury here?? or was that just for tv drama :/

- ty, this is super interesting!!!

- so i watched the series thru (at a comically high playback speed to save time. life hack: don't do this lol) and i see what u mean! especially in the similarity between the ends.

- but straightaway one difference there is that fakir has to come up with a story that works with and not against the agency and will of the other characters - and their hard-earned agency is a central theme of the whole series. conversely, jughead automatically assumes complete control and furthermore, he's not coming up with a new story - he's just copying it from the comic the narrator retrieved from the diner. if rd is following after donnie darko's model, then the characters' free will here is treated very differently.

- plus we're missing any indication that the characters in rivervale originated within the comic books or are controlled by them. but this has got me thinking about how jughead came to possess this power. could it be a family trait like fakir's??

- but i'm fascinated by the way princess tutu overlaps with nge??? especially the rebuild films. i see some stark similarities between rue's relationship with her father vs shinji and gendo. plus mytho and rei and their null interior experiences caused by their wronged connection to their souls. also the souls-cores-heart shards stuff. the evangelion show and films end with reality being rewritten too.

- and now this has me thinking about in the mouth of madness, an hp lovecraft-inspired film revolving around an author rewriting reality - powered by belief, maybe therefore in the same vein as in princess tutu. and in the last rebuild of eva film, shinji is empowered to alter reality with a, uhhh, metaphysical spear that's the embodiment of humanity's collective defiant willpower. that is to say, these stories all seem to suggest there’s something in human consciousness that can be unlocked to transcend reality and become god

- but within in the mouth of madness, characters become more and more aware that their reality is a fiction and not only are they powerless against it, they don't even exist outside of it, which drives them to insanity and into gory cthulic transformations. that would probably be a very funny way to end the whole show

- little soon for that tho

- oh! and one last thing i watched for this ep was our town, six yrs after the show first mentioned it.

- there's two points about it that i find kind of relevant to rivervale. one is the narrator (the stage manager) who does a lot - he tells the story to the audience, directs which events are shown, and sometimes slips into different small roles to interact with the characters. at the end, he interacts with one as himself.

- that's the second thing - the last act is 'death' and the dead characters discuss how the mysteries of life, if not the whole universe, have been revealed to them. they could 'go back' and relive their lives, but their changed perspective makes it too painful bc the living don't yet know what the dead do.

- still losing my mind at how comfortably the narrator inhabits these anthology style intro bits

- it’s the fancy little silk necktie for me

- did he get dressed up just for us? does this guy wake up and pick an outfit every morning? does he exist outside of speaking to us? this is only supposed to be 5 weird eps before it goes back to normal, right? i miss him already

- speaking of the narrator lmao, remember last time i said all that about how i love a good doubles trope and also that i don’t like the comics? And Then it turned out i had to go read the predator crossover run, which is literally about doubles and is actually pretty good in story and art

- i can feel goldwater himself laughing at me. and as if that wasn’t bad enough, then i said i don’t care for caos and now sabrina’s here. stop it

- ty for the ask! to clarify ‘reboot’ probably wasn’t the right word. the pre-show archie comics reboot starting from sometime in the 2010s is mostly unexplored territory for me (except for jughead the hunger, which i enjoyed enough to want to rewrite it for myself and change everything, but not enough to finish the vampironica part lol) and now that i’ve read the predator crossover i feel like i might give the horror stuff another shot. later. when the show is over. trying to keep it simple over here.

- what i really meant tho is the 2017 riverdale tie in comics. hate that as a concept. for me the show is the show. i don’t want to wade thru inconsistent art and writing that i’ll then have to decide how relevant to my canon i want it to be. i feel more open to the comics that the show is adapted from, rather than the ones the show has been adapted into, if that makes sense. also i Hate a lot of the art styles lmao

- with that said,

- i’m really glad i read the predator thing before starting this ep, i think it meshes pretty well?? idk how to say why. not so much for abigail in her poppy era - for all i know there’s another weird comic crossover that handles those crucible themes, probably in the sabrina stuff with my luck - but more so with the ideas that thomasina brings to abigail. agency and self determination. that’s a major theme for betty and veronica in part 2 of the comic. plus the crossover’s supernatural stuff feels like it has the same dna as whatever’s going on here.

- thinking about predator also finally led me to go back and watch the ritual. i hadn’t really thought beyond the wicker man stuff and midsommar, but the antlers, runes and sacrificed deer from 6.01 could suggest this film too. in the novel version of the movie, the ‘god’ which the ritual sacrifices are given to is known as ‘mother’ which makes me wonder, with horror and delight, what exactly the maple maiden looks like.

- ur probably like, how tf did u jump from predator to the ritual. well i have adhd they’re both survivalist bro fests in the woods. the first carcass the ritual’s hikers come across resembles the first ones found in predator too - hanging from the trees with entrails below. in the words of the ritual director, bruckner, it’s a film about ‘masculinity in crisis’ with the characters’ self image and friendships challenged. predator is similar, tho simplified.

- That in turn got me wondering so i groped in that direction and found this, a contemplation of dutch, schwarzenegger’s hypermasculine protag in predator, as an example of horror’s final girl.

- it’s not that i’m seeing film parallels to rd here, i’m just looking for thematic threads to follow because i’m starving for a way to understand archie. or is this a betty thought? i said once that i felt they’re in competition for the same role.

- i will reflect on this 😔

- oh right, the episode

- hey more clocks. shout out, ty for the reminder that the clocks are keeping hiram’s bomb present. i did forget about it literally as soon as it wasn’t on the screen

- i’m not familiar with the series why women kill, actually i never heard of it before now and i’m not even sure what i searched to find it for this ep, but the first season is premised around 3 couples living in the same house in 3 different eras (’60s, ‘80s, and ‘now’) with each storyline leading up to a woman committing a murder. i wonder about possible influence here

- this opening with the transitions between time periods is A Delight, i love it. same director as hiram’s flashback ep which i recall had some great transitions and camera stuff too

- i also think each part has its own style??

- i don’t think cheryl’s parts in the ‘now’ are stylized differently than rd’s usual. but it feels like abigail’s segments are blocked mostly in 3/4 view - characters are positioned beside each other looking across the screen, even in complete profile at dramatic moments. gives an old timey stage theater vibe

- and in poppy’s segments the camera is often right in front of or right behind her or the other characters, so either poppy’s back is completely to us and we can’t see her face, or there’s something behind her she can’t see,, or there’s something behind us we can’t see her reacting to. claustrophobic and tense

- shouldn’t thomasina be from green.... vale...? that’s fishy

- balley’s comet cycle is 10 years off from our halley’s comet, which came around not in the 1890s but in 1835 and created an apocalyptic panic. there had recently been another ‘great comet’ in 1811, then the yr without a summer in 1816, another comet in 1819, another in 1832 which was accidentally miscalculated as an imminent impact, and all this while new science was being discovered all the time but medicine wasn’t quite moving fast enough to assuage everyone’s obsession with death. stressful overwhelming times probably, imagine relating to that. a lot of sci fi and speculative writing was inspired. also mark twain notably was born on halley’s 1830s pass and died when it next returned. someone check on rivervale’s version of twain pls

- anyway it’s on a 65 yr cycle. the blossom maple maiden old ways ritual sacrifice™️ seems to be on a 50 year cycle (think i got that wrong as 25 yrs before). so the comet is 2022, 1957, and 1892. and the sacrifices were ‘22, 1972, and possibly 1922? does this matter? i don’t think so but now it’s here.

- the hair and wardrobe budget splurge episode <3 i hope they misplace madelaine’s bangs hair piece after this bc i disagree with it. i love all these costumes tho

- 6.01 council meetings echoed in poppy’s parlor. not necessarily this moment, just the meetings in general

- so cheryl-abigail cherbigail? has been helping everyone in rivervale this whole time? tammy asks ‘what would we do without u’ and truly that’s the question

- bc now there’s just nana rose, who is evil

- wait shit. wait

- shit. sorry i’m just thinking about our riverdale cheryl whose nana recently handed her a satanic curse that was the last words of a pissed off witch who apparently is chill with swapping her soul around and also has some unfulfilled vendettas. cheryl honey oh no

- that question i pondered last ep, where is abigail on the spectrum of good and evil,, is the answer to this... she contains multitudes? i enjoyed this ep’s transition of youthful fresh abigail into stressed-but-still-hopeful poppy and finally cold sharp ‘cheryl’ hardened by isolation. or is there a more simple answer obfuscated by an unreliable narrator? more on this later

- i love conspiracy theory ‘alice’ so much. wish we were introduced to this character properly or did i miss it

- 🙈 uh oh i actually wrote about rd and mccarthyism years ago re: early seasons. i was almost too embarrassed to look upon it again in case it was nonsense or misinformed, idk it might be but reading thru it now i’m like, wow who wrote this good job

- alas those innocent days back when i was like, ha ha this is a joke post even tho i’m taking it very seriously, i’m not Actually the kind of person who would write thousands of words of serious speculative rd meta. rip

- ‘alice’ also brings up how wendy weatherbee was just arrested for conspiracy, and tammy’s response ‘are our children safe at school’ suggests that the weatherbees involvement in the schools is the same as in ‘the here and now’

- many questions about the state of segregation in ‘50s era rivervale. the show athletically dodges anything that could be an answer. no acknowledgement of the 2 high schools? riverdale’s tabitha specifically said the diner was always a safe haven to black people. was that in opposition to the rest of the town, or were there other people and businesses that followed suit?

- speaking of dodging, this episode is the funniest one to be missing all the classic cars??? not a one even tho rd has at least two cars that could conceivably fit - betty’s crestline (shop class car she banged archie in) and the car that ford replaced that with in their lineup, tabitha’s fairlane. never let anyone tell u this show can’t be subtle when it wants to.

- a neat tangent to that altho i’m super late, june 12 was loving day, the 55th anniversary of the end of anti-miscegenation laws in america (fewer years ago than one of abigail’s comet cycles). in the 2016 movie dramatizing mildred and richard loving’s marriage story that brought about this change, the couple also drives a fairlane. tabitha’s is prettier tho

- not to be a downer and encroach on ur escapism but since nothing is safe in america, loving v virginia is one to read up on and prepare to defend. even if taking it down seems too much of a reach, it’s been used as a precendent for gay marriage which is surely one of the next targets. tbh though i don’t think it’s a reach.

- but on that dismal note, unfortunately history is not my strong suit. what war in 1892 is james blossom fighting in ‘on the western front’?? wwi came early? the american civil war ran late?

- finn’s (fenn? why couldn’t i hear this name) uniform looks very civil war, very 1860s, very 30 years late. earlier thomasina said her school closed to become a hospital - suggesting that its pre-war days were within her adulthood. i feel like a plumber, like,, see now here’s ur problem. look at this leak

- lol at ‘dearest friend’ ‘how intimately did u know each other?’ ‘war makes all men bedfellows’ i see

- fellas was that gay?

- finally a color filter i’m not mad at. yes it’s red, but it’s soft, fuzzy, dreamy, extremely gay, good job. possibly i’m just happy for a respite from the cyan

- listen, i love the stylized coloring of the show. when it’s not Monotonous. if there’s a treatment of the same color on every scene, every ep, it loses significance and starts to be a distracting annoyance for compounding the brightness visibility problem. anyway

- these gothic shoulder puffs remind me a lot of crimson peak - (spoilers) also about a marriage suitor seeking his bride’s wealth with the intent to murder her like all his previous wives. but the relationship dynamics and domestic abuse are very different so i don’t think that’s a concrete ref, just an aesthetic similarity. mining is a central plot motivation tho. hm

- not that i haven’t noticed that palladium mining is absent from rivervale, right? (...right??) and now that makes sense. here, abigail wasn’t killed in 1890, her land wasn’t stolen for mining, she didn’t curse everyone, and the ‘countless fathers and sons’ that died in the mine collapse aren’t ‘poisoning the lifeblood of the town’ like cheryl was so upset about in 5.19. unclear what difference it makes but there it is.

- come to think of it, it’s interesting to compare That cheryl, who demanded forgiveness (addressed to herself and her ancestor) in order for the town to be reborn properly, to This cheryl (abigail) and her maple maiden sacrifices, literally carving out the heart of a man deemed strong enough to scape goat the whole town. i’m a little confused tho - i think i gathered that riverdale’s cheryl wants an apology in order to break a curse on the land arising from the miners’ greed. but here it seems like abigail’s fondness for human sacrifices is pretty well established, even without the land theft? possibly i’ve just unnecessarily confused myself.

- seriously tho if there’s mothmen here they’re probably real, not blossom-offshoots, and squeaky’s alive bc there are no highway killers bc those started off in the mines which don’t exist here. so What tf happened to rivervale polly

- if this is, as it has so far seemed, a story written by jughead (possibly in this case, a story by abigail within a story by jughead), then how are we feeling about him writing his and betty’s faces onto Another cheating-with-a-redhead situation, and this time he even gets to be mad? it could have been anyone portraying these new characters. of course jack’s also clearly marked as abusive and gets murdered so the cathartic potential is questionable

- also continues to be v funny that archie is fully written out of it. not only that, he’s written dead at cheryl’s hands and now, after a sympathy-garnering story, she’s been granted a happily ever after

- i was slow to notice the andrews phenotype and name are missing from this ep. i’m so puzzled by the choice to leave him out of All of this. the only way i can figure to make sense of this is to question what it means to the narrator presenting these things to us.

- but in the context of the ‘50s era story, why do u think an andrews character is missing? circle one: a) he’s in jail for trying to unionize something (not miners), b) he’s hard at work as a space race engineer, c) he died in a war, possibly korea, possibly wwii this is the real reason jack is so sour, they were in love and now he has no choice but to repress his grief

- cole as antagonist is an intriguing switch up. like, his rivervale narrator has an uncanny neutral vibe that’s very different from both jughead the character + jughead the familiar narrator,, but this is new and shiny

- speaking of, rd said new wlw pairing! but only with the least interesting actor combo </3

- maybe it’s just that it’s hard to shake the feeling that i’m watching versions of betty and cheryl (since their thematic shit, one boxed in + one repressed, hasn’t strayed all that far) and there’s not much between those characters to add layers to this pairing besides the discomfort of their cousinhood, whereas cheryl and toni provide some precedent for abigail and thomasina to rest on. there’s nothing dramatically unresolved (like b&v), no great emotional friendship (like cheryl and v have had). betty and cheryl’s main connection is thru grief over their murderous fathers and shitty family, and lately their dead siblings, but even that only comes up when betty needs enablement. weird choice imo. if they had even just 30 seconds more build up it might have made a big difference, idk. to me this didn’t land.

- on the other hand, logic and emotional impact aside, i did really enjoy the overall writing of the relationships and the way the stories interlock

- i’m also excited about the film refs i’m pretty sure are involved in this aspect

- happy pride to everyone who likes tragic lesbian period drama with women tenderly consoling each other in the isolation and quiet suffocation of patriarchal control over every unhidden facet of their lives.

- first is the world to come, sad but beautiful story. there’s an abigail. no thomasina or finn but a tallie and finney. also no witchcraft or wedding arrangements, just homesteading in 1850s ny state and lonely marriages. the title holds the same sense of hope the 2 romantic protagonists feel, having found each other despite their isolated circumstances, and also the desolation of loss

- they discuss what hope the women of the generations before them must have felt for the futures they were building with their own toil and sacrifices. it resonates well with the ideas thomasina introduces to abigail, to prepare their students - and each other - ‘for a world that might not exist yet but someday will’

- the other film is, u know. lizzie. takes place in this ep’s same year, 1892. the main spectacle 🪓 from the movie is later in the ep but the complexities of the character lizzie, her vulnerability, her resolve, a lingering question of whether she’s sociopathic or not, feel kind of relevant to abigail thru out

- participation trophy goes to the vvitch for possibly lending something to  thomasina’s name + witchcraft i guess. maybe a sprinkle of satanic involvement. we’re missing the whole family thing and most of that film’s themes so i think it’s superficial at most

- lmao at the poppy and velma scene that leads in with poppy daydreaming about her past lover, then she pulls out a sex book for velma that just happened to be hanging out next to the couch and then she pulls some aphrodisiac herbs out from where they happened to be stuffed behind the cushions, like. girl,

- forever alone curse is getting to her

- poppy’s herbs tho. let’s talk about that

- in today’s edition of what’s a given on this show and what am i meant to be questioning: ginger root

- there’s been research on mice that suggests that extremely high doses of ginger does prevent or end pregnancies.... in mice. i assume the dose needed to affect human fertility would also blow out ur entire intestinal tract which bitsy might not find optimal. there’s also research on rats that suggests ‘ginger may enhance implantation in rats in long-term with low dose.’ here’s some more on the whole topic if ur interested.

- i’m no doctor but it should be noted there are herbs traditionally known as abortificients for humans and they are not ginger root. we can assume that abigail knows her herbology and the writers didn’t have to say what she was giving bitsy,, but they still chose to. what ginger is good for is treating nausea, which a person might experience, for example, as one of the earliest noticeable signs of pregnancy

- should i try to read this only on its face, as a sweet scene of two desperate women finding each other with a gift of unlikely problem-solving plants that sound nice?

- or is poppy deliberately misleading bitsy with a remedy that doesn’t perform as described? for what motive? to get any amount of affection in her deeply lonely life? something more sinister?

- a ref at play in poppy’s era is of course the crucible. abigail is the name of the primary instigator of the witchcraft accusations. she and john proctor had an affair until his wife elizabeth discovered them and dismissed her from their house as a maid. as a result abigail jealously wants elizabeth dead so she can be with john proctor instead, even tho he’s rediscovered his integrity and has shut her out emotionally.

- the 1997 movie has a scene between john and abigail where he threatens to kill her if she doesn’t keep his wife out of her witch hunt - he’s afraid she’ll succeed in getting elizabeth killed

- i, like,,, Don’t know how to put into words the overlapping dynamics that jack-bitsy-poppy share with john-abigail-elizabeth. hang on

- so jack’s threat to poppy resembles john’s threat to abigail. there’s an interesting comparison between abigail (trying to get elizabeth killed so she can have john) and poppy (conspiring with bitsy to kill jack, with their affair potentially continuing unobstructed). also elizabeth proctor’s life is prolonged bc her pregnancy (conceived after lying with a repentant john one last time) delays her hanging as a witch long enough for the fervor to end, while jack’s life is prolonged by poppy’s imprisonment until he grants bitsy’s request to have her released for the birth, at which point she’s able to hand over the poison that eventually kills him.

- the thing is, the crucible told from abigail’s perspective would be a very different story than if it were told from john proctor’s. and what we’re seeing of these past eras in the life of rivervale’s abigail are being read out by her from her own memoir. we saw her writing in it as poppy in jail, and we saw riverdale’s abigail writing a similar journal before she was taken to be burned in 1890.

- the abigail of the present conveniently has effective remedies for everything - all her solutions to 6.01′s problems. we’re never given specifics so we couldn’t point out discrepancies, until now with the ginger root. she’s also all about sacrificing men and creating life - revolving around betty, no less. we know for certain that poppy gets the poison for jack correct, so why not the birth control? i question her motives with bitsy

- and what About jack and bitsy? who are these two people?

- we get Some specific names. kellers, tates, weatherbees. obviously a blossom. fogarty and topaz, tho the southside is pretty absent from all these stories. so some lineages are suggested. but the lodges lunas, mantles, and others are less clear. there’s definitely something like fear street 3′s method where the actors of the first 2 films double up as ‘stand ins’ for the 3rd film’s characters inhabiting a 1660s village. hard to explain if u haven’t seen it

- one option is obviously to assume anyone without an explicitly mentioned last name is just nobody. specially cooked up for the story.

- but the ambiguity is fun. and most ambiguous: the question of coopers, smiths and jones.

- so here’s the problems that i see. jack and bitsy have two daughters. in fact, that’s reminiscent of polly and betty. bitsy is short for elizabeth, maybe a family name? they could be the smith family. that is, if the smiths lived on the northside and weren’t involved in the serpents... yet? maybe after widowing herself, bitsy moves south and raises her daughters differently? could the comet baby be alice? is alice that special? idk, it could fit but it doesn’t feel right to me

- despite the resemblance i think it’s unlikely jack is a jones even despite the fantastic hat. jack could be short for anything, but we met riverdale’s fp the first (jughead’s grandpa) and he didn’t seem to mind his name. he gave it to his son. again there’s the northside non-serpent problem. not to mention, again, 2 daughters no son. many reasons why this isn’t it.

- honestly i think poppy’s not supposed to be here and her presence is causing problems. friends how do we feel about paradoxes and plot holes?

- bc my favorite possibility is that, regardless of glaring issues - lack of a son, premature death - jack is a cooper.

- ????

- with their ages in this era, that would make him the son of the blossom man who murdered his brother then changed his identity to cooper to hide the crime. and that of course would mean, if riverdale also has a jack, that he’s hal’s father who killed the conway family when they tried to blackmail him about this secret. thus creating the black hood situation, with his wife’s help - she grooms their son to clean up some loose ends.

- (some notes on that family tree: i crammed info from both riverdale and rivervale in there which is why it says abigail dies in 1890 (dale) then points to poppy (vale). confusing, my bad. i also seem to have mistakenly noted my speculation, that abigail and james were Siblings to barnabas, as what looks like incest. mea maxima culpa. btw i got the name barnabas off the wiki, no idea who that guy is lol)

- also this is obviously limited to what’s known up to 6.04. if there’s new info in later eps and ur inspired to take this tree and adjust it or jump off from it, feel free. just, u know, pls don’t tell me and give me spoilers <3

- anyway, this would also add a lil something to why jack hates poppy so much. blossom rivalry. also explains the murder energy in that marriage, in general. plus the religious values that originated the black hood and set the patronizing attitude of hal in his relationships tho to his credit he was pro-abortion.

- 1.02 (most recently recalled by cheryl’s painting for betty’s highway killer chainsaw thing) + the episode where alice confronts grundy to attack archie and betty mouths ‘i’m sorry.’ i mean, nothing’s here by accident. their relation to betty seems set up to be obvious.

- the only tiny paradoxical problem is, if this is true, where does hal come from. but is that really so important?

- anyway not to set some terrible last words up for myself but i hope this is answered whenever ur reading this from

- now i find myself very interested in what motivated that blossom fratricide bc it’s so bound up in the central plot arc of the show, the divisions and hidden darkness of the town. one brother killing another is a particularly intense example.

- never watched any mad men and i know it’s in the ‘60s not the ‘50s, but the potential for a nod seems ripe considering the kiernan shipka appearance. jack and bitsy vaguely have that don and betty look, even if their dynamic is different. it’s tempting to search for a comparison. something about bitsy and betty draper’s tragic doom as a product of their times. only bitsy decides to kill to survive rather than die out. and if jack is a cooper, then there’s an aspect of hidden identity like don.

- idk. i was interested to learn while checking on this, that cheryl’s ‘very s5 betty draper’ joke was, even back in the show pilot, a self-aware allusion to pregnancy concerns in betty’s storyline as mad men’s betty ‘gained weight’ to disguise the actor’s rl pregancy.

- the boys but evil, i love it

- since they’re here bc of poppy’s ‘interference’ with their wives, the implication is that the man in the hat is tammy’s husband - the original pop tate?? is this before or after he sold his soul for the diner’s success?

- this faux feminist man-hating rhetoric and villainizing framing is almost on the edge of my nerves tho. all wives are helpless and oppressed. all husbands are oppressors. i get it, bitsy and thomasina knew abusive men, abigail suffered 130 yrs of cursed loneliness by the man who killed her brother and her lover, years of grieving and of hating this guy who brought senseless tragedy down on her. at least, according to this telling from abigail’s perspective.

- but her whole thing from 6.01, ‘women must bear children but men’s blood is the seed’ is combining with this in a way that feels uncomfortably gender essentialist to me. it reminds me of some of the rhetoric that made me put caos down after s1 - men are represented as villains who behave abusively, need to be punished for it, but aren’t expected to change,, but women who are equally or more reprehensible and violent are coded as empowered and as role models, or at least are entitled to narrative growth. idk it has been a while since i watched so maybe my memory is flawed. and i don’t think it’s automatically terrible to explore stories like this but i do question the motivations behind it bc it’s so often terfy. like, recognize gender isn’t the root of human evil and tell stories about women without transphobic language and concepts, it’s not even that hard. i don’t find rd as egregious yet but i’m suspicious bc caos pissed me off.

- also, i was going to say it’s weird to have all these generations of blossom women be lesbians. as if it’s trying to suggest sexualities are hereditary or idk, like costumes. it feels put on. or as if the show is saying sure, we’ll have more queer rep, but only as a character-defining trait confined to this one family line. idk how to articulate it better but it smells rotten to me.

- but then it’s averted bc it’s not generations of blossoms, it’s just abigail. still kind of weird but whatever

- i do like that poppy and (our real) cheryl end up having a common experience of repression - but instead of penelope smothering cheryl’s sexuality from within her home and family, poppy is repressed by her conservative and paranoid society not to mention a magic curse. for all that this group of rivervale eps could have felt pointless since it’s not contributing to Our characters’ growth, it still has felt to like it’s adding substance to the riverdale storyline by doing these sort of alternative takes on familiar material.

- sorry for laughing but this slow reveal was extremely funny

- less funny is this counter scene where the layers of context give a strange kind of flavor. rich independent white woman poppy is encouraged to leave the diner by black working class tammy, who has only recently managed to place herself in this business opportunity since her race, gender, and husband’s opinions have kept her down. what a complex moment

- this episode is fun as a window into (some kind of) town history, but in general my opinion is always going to be that cheryl is overused at the expense of other characters. a storyline with tammy and the tate family in this era is a tragically huge missed opportunity. give me That episode rd. we’re told constantly how important the diner and this family is. Show Me i want to watch it

- also tammy is such an interesting name bc it could be her full name, or a nickname for tabitha,, but it could also be from tamara (like tamar) Or from tamasin, or other similiar forms of thomasina.

- jack and bitsy’s wedding rings are featured a lot. jack wears his on the right hand, unusual for americans. on a show like this? that probably symbolizes something - maybe his own infidelities? or hiding a secret like his identity? could even be a religious paranoia about the left hand belonging to the devil. idk

- bitsy’s ring also gets a lot of closeups - whenever she’s with poppy and then with the poison tea. i’m far from certain, but it looks kind of like the blossom family heirloom ring. does that make sense? my gut says no. perhaps it’s just the same style

- is this,,,, trevor stines sitting for a dead james protrait, the dead jason mannequin sitting for a dead james portait, or, photoshop. comment below

- i wonder how far back the farm goes and if james knew about it

- we’ve had several husband-killing black widows. now with finn we finally have the male version, called a bluebeard

- the queen’s gambit throwaway line (poppy’s russian chess tournament, asked to make anti-communist statements) is wild. correct me if i’m wrong bc i didn’t actually watch it, but beth, the chess prodigy protag, gets to the russian tournament bc of the help of many men in her life who support her and don’t take advantage of her. a jarringly different gender commentary than cheryl, abigail, or any of rd generally ever explores. then again, the criticism i always hear about the queen’s gambit is that it’s womanhood as written by men. ..... ...

- they aren’t asking her to name names?

- is a comparison being suggested between signing a communism confession and signing away ur literal soul like last ep?

- lines are blurring here. poppy is pressured to sign a document to get out of (or into) a social trap and appease the status quo. last ep, the closest people to her situation were probably tabitha and pop - pressured to sign a document to get out of the devil’s trap and grant him the means to destroy the town. and in 6.01, altho there were no documents signed, there was a similar kind of deal-making. agree to these terms and you’ll get a reward and everyone’s problems will be solved. but in That case,, , it was abigail herself making the deals, comparable to lucifer or keller. so what’s the message of these stories?

- ‘it’s just ur name’ very crucible, very cruel of bitsy. what does the name poppy mean to abigail tho? the versions of her we meet in these different eras are so dissimilar to each other. poppy may not have given in to keller’s pressure in the ‘50s, but she still loses her name and some aspect of herself on the way to the present.

- the juxtaposition of bitsy’s labor with abigail at the altar was a little weird, dunno how i feel about it. lifting the unwilling abigail’s veil, cut to poppy kneeling between bitsy’s legs... hm. i think i know what they’re going for but it’s giving me a very awkward analogy.

- what they’re going for, i think, is salt of the earth from 1954

- protagonist esperanza, wife of a miner, begins the film regretting that the world her unborn son will soon meet is not yet better or more fair. the larger action of this film is the unionized strike by a new mexico mining community, but the more intimate heart of it is the conflict between esperanza and ramon, her controlling husband, and the evolving gender dynamics of their community as a result of the labor action. she grows increasingly empowered by her successful participation in the strike and ramon is uncomfortable with the change in her and the other women.

- the scene where esperanza goes into labor is intercut with ramon’s violent arrest for being a strike organizer. rd parallels it with bitsy’s labor intercut with abigail’s wedding to the violent finn.

- the dissonance of centering bitsy in this ref is surely intentional.

- first, there’s these totally opposed messages of gender politics. in salt of the earth not only does esperanza firmly stand up to her husband, all the women of their community come together and demand the men recognize that progress requires their mutual appreciation, understanding, and cooperation. in this ep, as is often played with on the show, the genders are starkly divided as if they have nothing to relate about and it’s very us vs them. these controlling husbands are antagonists who would crush all independent pursuits by their wives, the end. jack won’t change so bitsy has to kill him.

- and second, on a meta level this ref is plainly ironic. bitsy knows wealth, security and privileges that esperanza is only dreaming of while fighting to get hot running water in her home and safety measures for her husband. the troubles and domestic violence known by some married white women in american suburbs in the ‘50s were real, but incomparable to the circumstances of impoverished and working class women of color. u might argue there are struggles shared by all women, but the intersections of gender with marginalizing factors like class and race would disagree. esperanza can’t get a doctor for her delivery bc the ‘anglo’ company that controls and limits everything in her mexican american community won’t send one to her during the strike. her husband is in the company jail so she has to postpone the christening a month until he can attend. bitsy’s comfortable in a hospital bed with her request granted to get her friend Out of jail to attend to her.

- anyway, this mystery comet baby. who is she?

- and speaking of babies, baby anthony: still MIA. not at thornhill. at this point i’m assuming betty left him at the river.

- a comedy

- love how this escalates, especially upon my rewatch after i had my sad lesbian movies diversion where u can’t help but wish this happened followed by a happy ending. granted, the lizzie borden ax murder part did happen in the lizzie borden ax murder movie. still, u get what i’m saying

- something about the comet light in the windows with thomasina’s body sitting there was so Horrifying to me. toni and thomasina both been so unfortunate in rivervale, how come :(

- trying to figure out what mary in the bg here means is making my head spin

- maybe it’s just the bangs. i haven’t watched the new stranger things yet but it’s all i can see in that hair piece

- that blossom red bullet-bust look is appropriately threatening

- another point to the jack cooper theory - literally the cooper house. also, if he’s rivervale’s equivalent of hal’s father then he’d be a newspaper man, like hal with the riverdale register.... and coincidentally like jughead. he has a copy of the rivervale choice there.

- in 6.01 betty conceived a child she wanted with archie then happily assisted cheryl abigail with archie’s murder. now, bitsy conceived a child that jack wanted and she didn’t, then poppy abigail assists her in jack’s murder. what does it all mean dot gif

- so there was never a rivervale cheryl. spooky

- was This the neon genesis evangelion connection all along? there is no rei - she’s an empty shell body with a soul injected in

- But There Was A Jason

- they did this to drive me, specifically, insane. his picture is here. his kids are here. jason obviously had parents so penelope and clifford did or do exist here too. assuming he didn’t successfully run away with polly (without the kids?? lol) it’s possible his father killed him here too. rivervale cheryl still calls betty her cousin, so that part of the family tree is shaped the same even if abigail is only posing on that limb

- but the rest of it??? potentially,, , potentially, penelope and clifford had a single baby and their weird immortal witch aunt, who’s been bffs with nana rose for as long as either of them can remember, takes one look at this infant and says yoink that’s my brother now. and then this jason grew up from birth thru adolescence with an adult woman posing as his twin. possibly even attending school with him. and then, even tho she’s a witch with connections and some level of power, she was unable to or didn’t care to prevent his death.

- i mean, i can believe that. i just wonder how fucked up this jason would have been by having an un-aging pre-grown twin sister.

- NO i just remembered they were in different school years in riverdale nevermind we’re moving on

- hey did u hear that??

- he said gay rights

OH i SEE

thank u!! so i tracked the story down here bc i couldn’t find it accessible anywhere

hey u know what would be insane? if, after the goodman goes playboy parody wherein archie sells his soul for sex and money was published in february ‘62, then archie comics responded by immediately the following month publishing their own official comic where archie is instead the victim of both b&v’s soul deals for his affection bc in archie canon when women are predators it’s funny, ha ha yeah that would be nuts

oh 😳

oh no 😳😳

pr management strategies guaranteed to work

speaking of predators, i see that inferno also comes up in, uh. the more recent archie vs predator run, part ii

but that totally makes sense bc the ‘moral’ of that series is like,, the archie characters, namely betty and veronica, don’t always have to follow the repetitive and unrewarding story structure of the old comics, like fighting over archie. their reward for surviving the destruction of their own comics universe is that they’re finally granted a little agency, breaking the cycle exhibited in the original mr. inferno story.

ok, that’s super not what lou cypher brought to 6.03 but 1) this guy is 100% de niro derived, and 2) it’s good advice 😔

i think the funniest part is how, with the agency to break free of his comic restraints that’s granted to him by the mad magazine guys, archie asks the devil for infinite women and he parties right up until his life burns down. and, in the modern continuation of the story, when the official comics b&v have the chance to sell their souls for a reset to save all their murdered friends they instead choose the new freedom that mr. inferno offers,

sorry to say it’s all of them. every film

- There He Is

- love that our perspective this ep starts off from inside the now-blocked closet. yes ty i Would live inside the creepy haunted closet bc look how nice the apartment came together! art on the walls, books and nicknacks on the shelves, well lit, plants everywhere. v lush, good job

- narrator jughead names ‘the devil’s holiday’ folktale. the closest i could find to that phrasing was this video-storytime of a folktale that somewhat resembles the smith and the devil, except this version has the smith outwitting the devil thru sheer don’t-fuck-with-me energy - a little bit like tabitha and pop but with more uhh violence and less divine intervention. in the traditional folktale the smith is a darker character.

- ‘’many versions’ but the one i’m imagining’,, is that sweet sweet confirmation that what we’re watching is his creation. but he’s also sitting inside of it at the same time?? the light flickering that follows lucifer happens to the narrator too

- i’m biting my tongue on a Whole preacher amc-rivervale comparison rn but it might come out eventually anyway

- 2 minutes in and i love everything going on. the narrator, jabitha’s beautiful digs, tabitha and pop having a sweet moment, everything is nice, best episode ever

- until it’s not! what the Fuck leave pop alone!!!

- me catching my reflection in the bathroom mirror with the lights off in the middle of the night

- this guy’s party trick face appears to be homage to both pazuzu of the exorcist (a babylonian demon) and valak the demon nun from the conjuring 2. i wish he’d put it away, i’m so sorry for the creepy image

- there’s a lot of overlap between those 2 film refs bc the conjuring universe itself includes lots of exorcist homage, and this ep showcases some of these elements: pop’s heart attack recalls both ed warren in conjuring 3 and father merrin in the exorcist. both films also see a good man offering to save someone (a child in the films, pop for his dad’s soul + the diner) by taking their place. rd also references the exorcist with the lights flickering and lucifer’s vomiting scene

- lmao but speaking of the conjuring 👀

- Very Excited to report i was wrong in my 6.02 post when i said there was no film ref behind tabitha holding a hammer over jughead. i got so close by noting the conjuring franchise was in play (with la llorona) but i didn’t quite get all the way to the right conclusion in time. i’m doomed to be perpetually behind on horror movie refs bc it’s the last thing i want to watch rip

- i do still feel good about what i arrived at in my 6.02 thoughts tho, that there was an unambiguous call back to what i’ve come to think of as s4′s metaphor for jughead’s heartbreak and betty’s betrayal:

- the jugskull-rocksmash plot throughout s4 was an exploration (from the [regular] narrator’s perspective) of jughead’s doubt in betty’s feelings towards him - on both a literal plot level (could she kill him) and an abstract character level (is she trustworthy). the apartment ghost’s murder could have been any method yet it was set up as a killing blow to the back of the head, plus surrounded by the ships and typewriter representative of a relationship that died first while jughead was going to the length of faking his death to prove betty’s innocence, and died again when betty blindsides him (like a blow to the head) with her confession of infidelity. in short, this^ framing of blow to the head represents jughead’s anxiety about relationships ending. u guys, i love tidy storytelling

- But the actual confrontation scene, where tabitha breaks the typewriter in parallel to the satanic altar in the film lmao and she faces jughead with the hammer, Was a film nod, it brings in new material that changes the framing and advances the story. i made a comparison post that u may have already seen <3

- the funny thing is, i originally interpreted tabitha’s mirror moment as a fear street ref - i see now that the conjuring 2 (the intro scene) probably outweighs fear street’s influence in that specific mirror thing.

- But. i had compared tabitha and jughead to sam and deena of fear street, and it turns out those girls have a striking parallel to another wlw couple, this time in conjuring 3. that scene involves lorraine using her clairvoyance to an effect extremely similar to deena’s ‘possession’ of sarah fier which. is what i compared to tabitha’s mirror thing to. 🔄 i feel like i had one of those ‘used the wrong math formula, somehow still got the right answer’ moments

- no like they’re the same scene

- that’s fear street’s main couple up top, and below is a wlw couple from like, a peripheral plot in conjuring 3

- almost identical shot choices, and same general concept - girlfriends, murder/suicide possession plot, a stabbing, even the casting choices. this piques my curiosity bc these both filmed during summer 2019 and (after covid and other delays) both released in summer 2021. it’s not likely they’re referencing each other so, altho they could just be using the most straightfoward camera solution for action/reveal, i suspect there’s Another film they’re both paying homage to. guess who still doesn’t watch enough horror movies to know for sure <3 me <3

- unfortunately the conjuring lesbians both completely die, but in fear street only one of them does and she gets better. sorry i’m spoiling everything

- the good news is, with the conjuring parallels, the possibility of the jabitha ghost hunting au i briefly dreamed of in my last post now feels that much more tangible :’)

- the warren’s refreshingly healthy relationship, with 2-way communication, respect and authentic affection, does very much feel in a category with jughead and tabitha. even the narrator’s cosy cardigan at the beginning is straight out of ed’s closet

- but the backbone of the film series plots aren’t so refreshing. the whole ‘if ur an impoverished single mother, a wife with a wimpy absent husband, a new home owner, unbaptized, bullied at school, or just generally unhappy, then u Will be afflicted by demons and the Only solution is christianity and recognizing the catholic church’s singular authority. if ur already christian... pray harder.’

- take out the films’ jumpscares and this super trad narrow mindedness is the real horror. still, i’m interested to see how rd utilizes this bc it feels critical so far

- lingering on these 2 film series for another minute, the first conjuring film slots in with rd’s abigail blossom and fear street’s sarah fier, with another witch hanging + future generations plagued by a curse related to land ownership. so my question from this point is, on the spectrum between conjuring’s bathsheba (evil) to sarah fier (good, set up by the real evil) where does abigail sit?

- also of course, the first conjuring film has already sort of been referenced in the blossom storyline - the ‘haunted’ doll (spotted again in 6.01 with nana rose) that was really penelope. conjuring’s doll has 1 or 2 spinoffs, i don’t know 🙉 i assume u all knew this already and i greatly appreciate u not telling me bc i have a No Dolls Pls policy, i barely survived that film segment as it is

- ALSO an aside, arsenic pointed out (ty!) the ‘sam and diane’ ghosts could be a nod to cheers. bro! i had literally never heard of cheers but based on a description this seems plausible to me, especially to enhance the contrast between the ghost’s dysfunctional relationship and ed and lorraine’s healthy one. i’m not qualified to spot if there were other places a cheers ref might have featured in rd, refs are usually tied down in a few places. i will say, a point against it is the apartment ghosts fit the same 70s aesthetic shared by the conjuring 2, the new candyman, and part of fear street, while cheers is 80s. if u have cheers knowledge pls feel free to weigh in.

- Anyway

- back to this ep

- clocks seem to be a motif, behind pop (lit up) and next to veginald’s bed (in shadow). the parallel between tabitha and veronica continues with their outwitting the devil storylines, plus the diner vs casino as ‘ports in the storm’ for the town’s lost souls. also with the comparison of the health of their relationships that last ep showed - doubt erased between jabitha and lingering between veginald

- reggie is such a deep thinker but he never says what’s on his mind. im sad

- he and veronica are an incredibly smooth team, love that. and it seems on the surface like v’s Finally getting a fair deal, genuine love without having to give up or change any part of herself,, , sucks that this is bc reggie is the one feeling shorted. it’s hard to ignore that we often see v at her desk in her office (with the nice big window view) but reggie only gets to visit with the paperwork like a lackey

- but reggie’s soul-bartering betrayal is so !! i’m mad but this is fun. i have so much more sympathy for reggie than for chad or archie for screwing her over. chad was scum tho i loved him and i find reggie’s emotional level more interesting and accessible than archie. he’s very successful at giving the vibe of desperately trying to make it work without knowing how to make anything work

- i know she doesn’t care about this kind of thing but isn’t it a little bit Super unethical for alice to hold her board position while keeping her tv job?

- on my first watch i thought the casino was called babylonia, like the ancient place name. but no it’s named with the -ium suffix of a periodic element, like palladium

- hey do u want another tangent✨

- i’m losing my mind bc naturally i looked up lucifer with an eye out for anything pertinent to rd. usually that means movies. i was not expecting to learn about the taxil hoax. ok so,,

- remember my dreyfus speculation last season? lol rip i loved theorizing about that but i don’t think it went anywhere. yet here we are again. if i had a penny for every time rd made me wonder about connections to antisemitic social controversies in late 19th century france, i would have two pennies?? which is way more than i know what to do with here. i’m stunned

- the taxil hoax, also called the palladium or palladian hoax, was the work of one man, leo taxil, with the help of a couple co-conspirators, who in the 1890s led the french public to believe there was a secret lucifer-worshipping cult within the freemasons called palladism.

- taxil was a disillusioned ex-catholic and religion critic. his purpose was chaos to prank the catholic church (which whole-heartedly believed him and was up in arms) and the freemasons, both of which he hated. after literally years of writing books and articles (under his own name and psuedonyms) perpetuating the lie with more and more absurd details, he finally publically announced that it was all fake and thanked the church for revealing itself to be dumb and insane for believing him. i’m paraphrasing.

- i think this paper sums it up well,

- this one is also pretty good. i especially like the writer of this one - in a different tangentially related paper (sorcery and witchcraft in eurpean history) he includes a gem of a line, ‘it would be unkind to torment this dead horse further, except it continues to show signs of life.’ highly applicable sentiment around here, this is my kinda guy

- anyway, so there’s an unusual connection between satanism/lucifer and palladium (tho i believe taxil’s cult name came from ‘pallas,’ same word origin as the metal but unrelated). no idea if it’s relevant to the show but considering the way they do things i don’t believe for a second that the writers were Not conscious of this when they picked palladium as the town’s metal. especially since that rock just doesn’t grow in ny. maybe they put this shit in just for me, give me something to do

- btw i should mention,, i hope u enjoy my links to weird academic stuff IF u want to, but if that isn’t ur thing pls know there is never required reading here. ur not missing important show details, i’m not trying to leave anyone out, it’s just fun extra stuff that i really like and want to share✌️

- tabitha is the hero of this story, i’m gonna cry :’)

- she (this one? both rivervale and riverdale tabithas i guess??) has come a long way from ‘get off my wifi and no running tabs.’ given what we know now, that was her parents talking. with her independence from them and her grandpa’s support, she’s her best self. And in retrospect we can better see exactly how important jughead’s ‘ur about the only thing that got me thru’ speech last season really was. he humanized for her what the diner means to lost people.

- speaking of last season, the devil’s arrival is a neat twisted callback to the beginning of the time jump - pop’s retirement brought everyone back to town then, and now pop’s soul due date brings the devil to town

- the devil,, , who is named lou. hello?? ras is there something u want to say to me???

- jk, lou cypher is ref to the film angel heart. i will be calling this guy lucy tho bc i’m already lou and i don’t want to worry about spelling cypher

- i’m mad at myself! this film was mentioned last season and i completely missed it even tho i’m pretty sure i laid eyes on its description at the time. at the end of 5.15 the character toots sweet who shows up to talk to josie is named from this film. i took him to be part of a candyman ref (via baby anthony + mccoy). now we have both films being ref’d so either i was half right or i got lucky cursed crystal ball still rolling around in here

- angel heart is a noir story of a detective on a case that keeps getting more and more supernatural and uncomfortably personal, and also robert de niro has a fabulous manicure

- i don’t want to go too far and spoil it but i will say, the film’s plot is not very replicable in rd without getting a lot wilder than this already is, but the spirit of it is probably most embodied in veronica and reggie’s storyline this ep

- the clock motif i mentioned lines up with the placement of ventilation fans in angel heart as part of a metaphor for the devil’s claim on souls. this metaphor in the film also plays with going up and down staircases and it eventually wraps up with a ventilation fan in an elevator going down to hell

- rd’s lucifer also might be built on homage to alias nick beal, a movie wherein the eponymous devil character is similarly tall, slim and suave, and appears and disappears slightly less dramatically when dropping in. nick beal only targets one ‘soul’ in the film but he plays people against each other, kind of like lucy does with reggie and veronica

- rivervale’s history Must be different bc if great grandpop tate sold his soul to ensure the diner’s success then rivervale’s diner must not have gone thru shit like being called ‘death diner’ or countless riots or almost burning down. at least i feel like that’s how it should work but i guess deals with the devil aren’t venerated for their fair outcomes

- wait speaking of history, lou cypher may borrow a little from angel heart and other films, But there’s a longstanding basis for his arrival and this soul-selling scenario within the archie comics

- sort of

- in 1962 comic writer & artist duo kurtzman and elder (of mad magaizine acclaim) published a comic, goodman goes playboy, poking fun at hugh hefner by suggesting that the wholesome archie characters (u know, archer, joghead, roggie, veromica, the totally normal gang) would attain his lifestyle if they sold their souls to the devil, who is of course hanging out at pop’s

- obviously archie comics sued (after having tolerated the pair’s first archie satire). it won the copyright to the comic, which i think technically makes it comics canon, tho they did later let it lapse into public domain. this is The original archie lawsuit, well before archie’s weird fantasy made him gay.

- it’s extremely funny that archie is dead for this ep bc it feels like a tongue-in-cheek nod to the, like, red tape that has protected him from being pushed too far outside safe conservative values. rather archie be literally dead than doing anything un-christian.

- the frame character in the comic, goodman beaver (saying ‘it’s archer’s soul!’ in that second panel), is interesting too. his name and attitude have puritanical vibes, plus the artist, will elder, took style inspiration from dutch painter bruegel. bruegel also used satire in his work - quick history refresher, he lived during the protestant reformation and tho he remained catholic 4 lyfe he became critical of the church.

- anyway That’s interesting bc cheryl’s storyline has brought in bruegel imagery via the s5 wicker man film ref with the beekeepers like he drew. cheryl also seemed to take her own inspo from his work per her paintings that appear to be of the town’s early settlement. and That’s interesting bc it suggests dutch or similar european colonizer origins instead of anglicans or puritans or whatever. which,, i don’t know about u but my big question is:

- what is the denominational background of the town? bc the northside is pretty waspy (Alice and hal s1?? bro.) but elsewhere catholic elements absolutely dominate the story. the tears of the virgin mary, as just one example.

- anyway

- speaking of comics, i poked around on the sabrina wiki for a minute bc i remembered, from the 1 season of caos i watched, that lucifer was mentioned there (in the mines i think??). idk, i didn’t linger bc it does seem separate and tbh i don’t love that show’s aesthetic (tho in retrospect i can now see some angel heart influences which is fun. homage works just as hard in caos as in rd).

- But this led me to almost fall down a rabbit hole to the 2017 reboot comics (that i also don’t like lmao i’m picky) which i gather this ep borrows some concepts from for pop’s storyline. i didn’t read the actual relevant issue but the page’s trivia section is fun. it mentions archie’s weird mysteries, a whole ass ‘90s cartoon series i never before in my life heard of. some of the synopses sound promising: ‘archie refuses to continue his family traditions, until he learns it is the only thing preventing a giant worm from destroying riverdale.’ ‘with prom around the corner, ethel enlists archie’s help upon finding a swarm of humanoid bees.’ see, ras’s vision has always been tame.

- the busted typewriter with duct tape all over it lmao. Where is this man’s laptop? this thing is to jughead like what jason’s charred and rat-infested corpse is to cheryl. pls heal

- on that note 😭😭 when u come home needing a hug and it’s waiting for u right at the door

- truly cannot overstate how soothing the vibe of this ship is. of all the things i could ask this show to deliver on, domestic jabitha was not something i expected to actually get but i’m very glad. their power is that even in this bottle episode of storylines keeping characters in separate spaces, they still get this moment of overlap

- let’s see lou cypher’s business card

- ‘lou gopher’

- i love this font, graphic design is clearly his passion. he’s from Hell USA, we should ask betty where that is and if it’s under the constitution like she thought riverdale wasn’t. rip i was kidding when i first wrote that but then she really asks him where it is later. betty why

- jughead immediately thinking ‘hey i should go interview this guy’ is extremely s1 jughead resurfacing, the jughead who wormed his way into sit-downs with any and every authority figure. been preparing for this his whole life

- kind of hate the casino uniforms color scheme but that’s just personal taste (that blue.... eh.) the church stained glass + mesopotamian designs are very on the nose fun tho. i Do think that what rd has been missing is some gilgamesh refs and maybe a flood

- i love reggie’s red velvet (?) jacket and especially veronica’s dress! they seem kind of familiar tho?

- s1 episode 9?? that’s not a cheap wardrobe repeat, they’re all new items, so this comes with intention. not kevin tho - pretty sure he’s rewearing something from one of the musical eps but idk which one. i wanna say the one where someone dies but i’m not sure there’s any where someone doesn’t?

- i’m more interested in what this episode and 1.09 offer to each other’s interpreations. selling out is the theme

- for one thing it reminds me that this show’s core plot has circled around land ownership since the start. rivervale is in soul real estate at the moment but cheryl’s secession and the reincorporation are fresh in my mind. in 1.09 the blossoms and the lodges are still fighting over the drive-in land, with fred and his livelihood caught between them.

- jughead’s opening narration in that ep was: ‘the death of jason blossom precipitated a crisis. with the heir apparent gone, who would inherit the family business? certainly not cheryl. it was a question that brought the wolves to riverdale. and now the blossoms were circling the wagons against possible attack from within their own ranks.’

- archie and cheryl are both starkly absent from this ep. but in 1.09, cheryl bullies invites archie to her family event (for shareholders? i forget). a slew of motivations surround the invitation - cheryl wants to believe archie is nice to her without expectation of reward unlike everyone else who uses her (that’s the scene with these outfits). betty uses him wants him to go check on polly, who hasn’t ‘switched sides’ but is investigating jason’s death on her own, to alice’s relief. archie himself, against his dad’s advice to work for things, is hoping for rich people perks from the blossoms in return for ‘controlling’ cheryl and completing a desired red-haired patriarchal image, a kind of devil’s deal. ultimately archie realizes that selling out and taking shortcuts is pretty low,, but his then-girlfriend valerie is already sick of his lack of integrity and dumps him

- i only rewatched a tiny piece of 1.09 to grab the images so i wonder if there’s more to it i’m missing. parallels for veronica and reggie, & more, are definitely apparent here tho

- rivervale so far feels very much like an almost allegorical retelling (or... pre telling?) of dynamics that have been (will be??) important and have defined the overarching series plot. i feel dumb saying this here bc probably if ur reading this ur caught up and u know i’m either way off or i’m saying something so obvious it’s not worth writing out. lol oh well✨✨

- this casino is in veronica’s apartment building right? is the building zoned for this? i love that she’s opening it literally in her lobby. like a progression of the 1920s speakeasy thing but more true to a modern spirit of above ground unhidden sleazy excess than the bon nuit could ever be

- how does smithers feel about it tho :(

- kevin’s clown bowtie is expressing his deep clown sadness

- is it a kevin thing or a casey thing that kevin’s face-emoting literally never matches his singing? if it’s an acting thing then yikes. but if it’s a character choice that’s actually so funny. maybe there’s a good reason kevin doesn’t have a stage career

- lucy erased fang’s hard drive and reformatted him to be kevin’s accessory, terrifying. and he can just do that bc toni is in the river rn and no one else will notice. rip fangs, kevin doesn’t even hesitate. how is this deal possible when he already has no soul

- btw after Everything toni went thru to protect her son last ep, where is that baby now? betty sure isn’t taking care of him. fangs just got yoinked out of his life. alice is busy. does cheryl have him?? Where’s The Kid

- i know i dissed it earlier but love the flourishy contract stationery. ‘the shadow called my soul’ is a neat phrase in the document that might be another indication toward jung. i’ve been wondering if riverdale’s ‘town reintegration’ might have any metaphorical parallel with rivervale’s jung thing - reintegrating ur shadow is a whole thing. plus the fact more and more characters are missing adds a little something, like missing archetypes

- not to get sidetracked but there’s a lot about jughead and tabitha together, both in rivervale and the normal narrative, that i feel connects back to shadow integration too.

- their ‘perfect for u’ thing, acceptance of each other’s good and bad qualities and promise to work thru problems together (literally helping each other in the shadow integration process). and also jughead’s writer’s block + his over-reliance on writing for his self-esteem, and how these come from the emotional damage betty and his other friends’ rejections dealt him, indicating unresolved negative feelings there. idk how to organize this thought lol abort. on another note, it’s funny that the character with one of the most mellow egos is also the one with a form of his ‘ego’ walking around as the narrator. would be a very different kind of story is it was anyone else’s telling

- all the vowels died with archie and antoinette not me forgetting elizabeth 🙊

- i continue to be completely fascinated with jughead’s relationship to his other name. later his contract does say forsythe pendleton but he still signs with ‘j.’ is ‘jughead’ so True for him that, despite not being legal, it’s attached to his soul?? that’s sick

- veronica takes no shit and looks so glam this episode, why didn’t i take more screencaps of her :’(

- the devil targets betty right in her arrogance: she alone is the serial killer whisperer, no need for her to question the logic of this situation

- it couldn’t be me tho, i’m boggled at how she really thinks the fbi picked up tbk and dropped him in her office with no guard or supervision And left his mask on.

- i’m also reminded of her 5.14 interrogation of mr. chainsaw. while she’s chasing a bad guy she’s all about ‘justice’ but when it comes to getting a confession from them that would help get justice thru legal methods, she instead would rather let her guard down and hunt for answers to personal philosophical questions

- hey, the psycho shower scene. but emotionally reversed

- in the film’s shower scene marion is happy bc after a philosophical chat with norman (who she’s unaware is a killer) she’s realized her redemption for robbery and flight is attainable if she just confesses and faces the consequences. super opposite of betty - both in her past behavior and in her choice to hide her murder by end of this ep.

- i talked in my 5.19 post about some of betty’s psycho parallels that i’ve noticed,, gonna continue my campaign to get everyone to watch that psycho film analysis video i mentioned there

- how rough for her tho. ‘tbk’ says evil is all over her, it seems in the context of her nature and character. but she also just told him to literally ‘sit in his own filth’ which, from what we’ve been shown, is what he made her do in that pit. her intangible ‘darkness’ is now complimented by a tangible befouling experience too.

- her needing to wash, i also can’t help but think back to her s2 cleaning frenzy with alice after,, was it the shady guy murder? that occasion was an early cue for unsubtle biblical themes, what with her first experience of sex (with a serpent) immediately being followed with apples (tree of knowledge) and murder (loss of innocence) and cleaning imagined fingerprints and blood off the apples. and it was happening bc she had sought out alice’s unaborted out-of-wedlock child (again, with a serpent) who was raised by a catholic orphanage,, and who turned out to be a murderer and not her real brother, who is also a murderer and also they’re gay married now.

- love this show so much <3

- much to say about this. the ‘brick’ wallpaper. the plethora of lamps, yet he’s still sitting in the dark. he has a basement office like her but his desk somehow seems way fancier. thank god someone finally said that to her. rip king

- rivervale jughead Not being glued to pop’s and tabitha’s sides at the hospital could never happen in riverdale, jughead is always the first person to show up for these things. but i’m glad it’s like this here bc tabitha and pop having their own storyline at the heart of this ep is !!! i love their interactions and, much as i love jughead with them to complete their little family, having this be just between them is important and special for both of these characters. pop is The soul but he’s too often been peripheral in past eps

- veronica’s solution for saving reggie’s soul from damnation echoes betty’s response to the black hood’s demand that she provide him a victim to prevent her loved one’s deaths (was it polly?) - same victim and all. i don’t think i ever really grasped what that s2 plot was all about, i wasn’t paying as close attention as i am now and i still haven’t watched most of s2′s film refs. but it’s interesting that directing the bh’s attention to nick and becoming ‘just as bad’ as the serial killer was a source of great guilt for betty and now, years later, betty is in a different mind game scenario with a different killer and Still going thru the same feelings that she never resolved

- meanwhile veronica’s like lol bye nick <3 and she’s right

- that s2 storyline also involved veronica noticing something was up with betty, which is impossible now bc betty never repaired their friendship and they don’t talk

- love this nebulous tonal zone between drab horror and gag comedy. the vibe is mockery, as opposed to sincere heartstring pulling

- this answers what i’ve been wondering since 6.01, whether the black hood stuff happened in rivervale or not:

- hm, moving on

- extremely typical of jughead to agree to something immediately without thinking it thru and leave all the problem solving to future-jughead. this may be why he almost dies so often

- lmao at his fork-in-the-toaster look in reaction to ‘all the universe’s mysteries revealed.’ face of a man who knows too much

- rivervale jughead Does still have his laptop. b a b e

- pretty sure his desktop bg is a different picture from last we saw it but, ,,, it’s still the typewriter lmao. at least there’s autosave on this thing

- the rivervale choice (lol issue 1666 vol 2, so this paper has been around a lot longer than in riverdale? or do issues carry over with a name change? idk) front page says the town council wants to mandate shops to stay open on sundays (opposite of puritanical blue laws) which feels right at home against this satanic interview backdrop.

- however, later the published issue shows that the town, tho suffering, has decency. headlines like ‘local lottery winner donates thousands to homeless shelter’ ‘cleaning up the town: who is responsible for the mess?’ and ‘council member fills potholes on own dime’

- reggie thinks his soul didn’t rate 😭 and it’s not even true. it’s his name on the list, not veronica’s. he was just used to corner her into making an additional deal to protect herself. could all this have been avoided if she wasn’t treating him like a secretary instead of a life partner?

- or is he just like that lol. this delivery is shakespearian, i love it. charles is one of the best comedic actors on the show

- speaking of which,

- i’m dying. walking into his own scene to roast himself

- do u want to know my favorite aspect of the narrator, the thing that really draws my attention?? part of it is that he’s unbound by normal narrative laws and tethers which, come on, that’s cool. but it’s really that the double or doppelganger trope is Top Tier for me. i love rd for encouraging me to watch more movies bc before this i literally just watched like, primer, moon, and the prestige on repeat (idk i was having a weird time). forget man vs man or man vs nature. man vs self is it babyyy

- does ruining a life to achieve a cause count as bad if it’s ur own life? can it be as bad as harming someone else when ur consenting to the damage? even if ur self is an external other? idk, maybe i can’t explain my fascination. it’s more than just self destruction.

- also tbf jughead the character and jughead the narrator aren’t positioned as equal ‘selves,’ there’s too much of a power difference here. not to mention different like, metaphysical existances. looking the same doesn’t fulfil the trope

- but listen. jughead suffers and even dies constantly. jughead also appears to be the writer of the whole story, thus the designer of his own suffering. granted, he could just be ‘telling it like it was’ as an objective observer of ‘his’ life (as in this scene) but i think that’s dishonest of him. at the front of the ep he claimed he’s imagining these events - it’s his creation.

- and his masochism is undeniable. here’s the narrator audaciously strolling - as effortlessly as the devil himself - onto the scene where the character’s downfall has just tipped over the edge, and he’s looking right at us, inviting us in to laugh at or judge his character-self at this moment when he realizes the consequences of his mistake.

- i’m not sure what to call this but it’s deeply uncanny and i love it

- interlude: this is The prettiest lighting for the diner

- speaking of doubles, veronica’s portrait of herself on the wall across from her desk in her meeting with alice,,, idk if i’m supposed to be reminded of the picture of dorian grey but i sure am

- lol at alice doing some quick hand sanitizer at the door. why do all the pandemic lampshades hang on her

- it’s nice to see alice back to her old self. better than the pit of despair she spent s5 in but also wow i forgot how she. is.

- of course veronica’s not ‘all bad’ like, Bro she’s negotiating some dark shit But she was the only person offered a deal who actually hesitates to do it (jughead jumps the gun and screws himself over, kevin thinks with something much quicker and less complicated than his brain, reggie fucked all the way up, and betty is provoked to murder). in a way, after tabitha, veronica is the best of them. but lmao she also ends up committing the worst evil, a mass soul deal to cover her ass. she better keep the casino open a long time.

- what veronica achieves is the absolute opposite of what tabitha manages this ep, securing the diner as a permanent safe haven

- head empty, just tabitha being beautiful and snarky and pop fully recovered and throwing a whole guy out

- u know, the first time i watched this ep i didn’t even question that tabitha has a guardian angel? of course she does. i love her and she should have everything no matter how absurd or unlikely it is for this show’s typical canon of only bad things happening. but more importantly, the narrator loves her and, not to wear this record out, if it’s his story he’s obviously going to give her every advantage. besides that, she and pop are the only ones earning the boost with their altruism.

- autocorrect software would clean that right up, my guy. but tbh i would read a book like that. don’t worry i would translate it for u guys. it’s not even that bad.

- it’s been interesting to track betty’s outfit choices across her tbk sessions. she doesn’t start off with her usual sterile ‘i mean business’ fbi jacket and hair back. instead she meets him with a low cut top, loose styled hair, and a taunting attitude. does this reflect her arrogance? or maybe signals the dominance she feels over him as her prisoner?

- all the way back to early s1 she’s had a pattern of wielding her own sexualized image to get things, especially from men. flirting with trevor for info, luring chuck into a trap to punish him and extort an apology, doing the serpent dance to try to gain access to jughead’s new gang life, learning about camming to get closer to chic, ‘fake’ dating archie to somehow prove jughead’s death, her affair with glen which, lacking scene proof of pleasure or romance, seems to have been just to influence the assignments she got. and most recently pretending to be a sex worker/horny trucker in order to make contact with the highway killer.

- but i was surprised to see her possibly bringing something like that here since we’ve heard tbk call her ‘pretty betty’ and can assume that dynamic plays a part in her trauma. at the very least, her starting point does make more noticeable the contrast when ‘tbk’ begins to affect her and her guard goes up.

- her getting assigned whore of babylon by tbk only makes that even more interesting

- let’s shorten that to just babylon - she forms a metaphor in revelation that’s super misogynistic and i’ll try to talk about where i see her relevance to betty without transferring the text’s aggression onto betty

- first, i found and enjoyed a video series (~12 videos, each 10ish minutes) of 2 bible scholars (hebrew & new testament) discussing women in the bible. very chill, no proselytizing, helpful in explaining context which i need bc i have zero religious education. the website is under construction (it’s back!) as i post this but the videos are all on youtube under, fittingly, yale bible study.

- their whole conversation is interesting but here’s the segment on babylon.

- and for fun here’s one on tamar - u might recall a painting of the rape of tamar once appeared alongside penelope (5.17). this adds another dimension to penelope getting with her brother-in-law. and maybe a lot of other dimensions too, idk

- anyway. babylon is a contradiction. she ‘sits as a queen’ empowered, and she’s marked as a brothel slave, vulnerable. betty’s also contradictory, good girl with a dark unhinged side. fbi agent & near-victim of multiple serial killers, and also a violent vigilante on the verge of being a killer herself.

- babylon rides a scarlet beast - not to be crass but, well: archie - then this beast turns against her? revelation is written like a prophecy and that vibe is reinforced in this ep by tabitha’s angel visitor telling her what’s to come. archie’s dead in rivervale as a direct result of betty betraying him and leading him to his murder. if any of this narrative translates over to our normal riverdale, there’s potential for her to give him a reason to turn on her.

- babylon is a satirical condemnation of corruption and abuse of power, which is. an Interesting betty take, considering she’s having this conversation with ‘tbk’ as an fbi agent but in an off-the-record totally unclean way. babylon is also understood to be a representation of the city of rome, which persecuted early christians. her violent destruction is intended to be prophetic of god bringing justice and judgement against rome.

- does betty represent the town of rivervale? are she and this town doomed?

- there’s a big flashing juxtaposition in this ep between betty’s ‘evilness’ and tabitha’s divinely recognized goodness. that feels relevant right here bc in riverdale, as the diner, pop, and jughead have all at separate times been called ‘the soul of riverdale’ it’s fair to assume that tabitha does or will share that mantle of ‘representing’ the town. also potentially being its salvation.

- while tabitha continues her parallel with veronica, her contrast to betty is just as important. partners to jughead is the obvious point of comparison - jabitha are emotionally intimate but still pretty chaste, reminiscent of s1 bughead: a relationship still growing and focused on building a foundation of comfort, support and stability - everything that betty tore down between herself and jughead. as characters, tabitha isn’t similar to betty - she has a little chaos when she needs to burn something down but her angel sponsorship proves she has zero darkness. she meets evil this ep and there’s no moment of like, u know u remind me of me.

- tabitha’s ‘purity’ has also been made significant in rivervale - jughead is the first partner she’s lived with. she’s handed the tears of the virgin mary to use.

- babylon carries a goblet of her iniquities. she’s had sex with ‘all the kings of the earth’ and is a mother of whores and abominations. betty’s reputation isn’t what would be called pure. she’s narratively associated with ‘deviant’ sexuality, prostitution, infidelity, and violence.

- the motherhood aspect is what’s most interesting to me here tho. part of babylon’s destruction is being made barren. that ‘women in the bible’ video series i linked makes a mention of how in biblical context, a pregnancy can be seen as a blessing and indication of acceptance by god - in other words, redemption. was this betty’s motivation? conversely, barrenness is a sign of being without god’s favor. betty’s barrenness is first alleviated by appeasing cheryl’s maple maiden goddess, then she loses the child to a vengeful mother spirit, and now she’s compared to babylon who was made barren, then ‘torn to pieces’ - tbk’s m.o.

- here’s a really interesting paper (sorry it’s the worst pdf on earth, here’s a more readable but incomplete version) where the author compares babylon to frankenstein’s monsters (from shelley’s original text + film versions). it discusses how the female monsters of the frankenstein franchise are designed around the prospect of sex for the desire and pleasure of the male monster - like prostitution - but they’re feared and reviled by humanity for the possibility of their reproduction.

- i lost track of the paper this quote is from rn, but it’s on topic: ‘[babylon’s] body represents a very real threat in the literal narrative of the book of revelation; unbridled procreation with a woman who is penetrated by everyone, rather than controlled creation from the divine.’

- i have no conclusions here, i’m just curious to see where this thing goes

- stabbed again, glen is so unlucky. that balenciaga gimp mask is probably worth enough to pay the hospital bills to fix him but she takes the scissors to that too 😢

- but glen is not my boi tbk. i still have my fingers crossed for my guess bc it would. just be so good. assuming it’s a character we’ve met and not someone new, obviously. wait has it been revealed yet? don’t tell me. this is the dumbest awkard situation i’ve put myself in lmao

- polly’s ultimate fate being a trigger for betty is so !!

- idk if i ever managed to squeeze my most essential polly thought into any of my last posts but i think about her so much. esp with regard to betty’s s5 search for her

- i think we don’t know polly except as a part of betty (and occasionally as a part of alice). the real polly has always been obscured from us and filtered thru betty, who loves her sister but views her thru the same lens of judgement that betty hates to be viewed thru herself.

- but more than that, betty carries her idea of polly inside her as dark betty. she based her ‘dark’ persona on her idea of who polly is, what polly does or ‘gets away with’ as the older rebellious sister, and what [betty thinks] polly wants. this is acknowledged, literally, at dark betty’s intro, when she tells chuck to address her as polly, and it’s also carried out across the narrative as betty chases after polly’s shadow, to the sisters of quiet mercy, to the farm, to the highway, and always ends up inserting herself into whatever polly went thru there as if to see what she’s missing out on. it’s that apple of knowledge thing.

- polly, as dark betty, is a costume that betty can put on to gain access to ‘unrespectable’ spaces and behaviors that the good girl next door is excluded from. and betty can take off the costume and deny her involvement to escape the consequences that polly herself cannot.

- in short, no doubt betty loves her sister and she’s probably partly driven by guilt over her death, but i think the main reason she’s moved to murder after hearing polly ‘burning in hell’ is bc betty identifies with her, part of her is polly. if polly is damned, so is she.

- betty rocking by the fire with glen underground sets off my film ref sense but,, i got nothing. i also wonder if he’s literally under her floor or if this shot is just a condensed way to show she buried him somewhere bc 1) it’s dumb as hell to bring the body home, and 2) u want that in ur house??

- the matching shots of her, with a victim (possibly the last guy in rivervale who might’ve loved her), and jughead, with the typewriter, sitting in front of their separate fires and contemplating their damnations feels particularly unsubtle

- to reiterate my thoughts from what last ep showed: jughead’s typewriter specifically represents how his self worth is tied up with his image of himself as a writer. when signing over his soul to regain the ability he literally says ‘i’m nothing if i’m not a writer’ which speaks to the insecurities he admitted to tabitha in s5 before she reassured him and encouraged him to prioritize his wellbeing above all. this understanding was missing from their dynamic last ep when he built that writing shrine around the typewriter,, until tabitha destroys it

- now the duct tape on this ‘gift from betty’ is like the soul-selling patch on his writer’s block, when the answer is, i think, to address his lack of closure from betty on whether the relationship he based his self esteem on meant to her what it meant to him, or if she was just using him, always with intention to discard him

- on the other hand, u can wrench my busted and much-repaired decades old appliances and tech from my dead withered hands. i don’t mind if it’s in pieces if the pieces still work so like, i get it

- hannibal refs still persist for betty, but they’re kind of cheap shots. she gets a call from ‘foster from agent scot’s office’ (potentially making room for refs to real actual jody foster’s upcoming true detective series? likely only in fandom dreams lol). plus glen being married really brings back the krendler parallel (rip ray liotta, i’m sad about that one), tho glen actually caring about betty positions him closer to starling’s superior, agent crawford. meanwhile, in retrospect betty sure did participate in cheating at least twice

- does murdering the person u committed adultery with cancel out both those mortal sins? practicing catholics pls advise

- and what’s the state of betty’s soul?

- the ambiguity feels pointed. i don’t think we see her name crossed off the list? on one hand, she refused the deal offered - her father’s or polly’s soul put to rest - but on the other hand, she asked for proof and the answer she got provoked her to murder, which feels damning in itself regardless of signature. and since it’s the devil, probably the intended trap. being or becoming ‘as bad’ as the villain ur facing is one of the core themes of slasher horror and also of each of betty’s investigation narratives. no surprise to see it here

- does this mean she’s evil, absolutely as lucy suggested or even partially? i mean,,, , i think the point is more like, can she redeem herself or not. how bad can u be before there’s no coming back? how big a mistake or how many can u make before u can’t make amends? what does that mending look like?? the consequences for doing harm are unpleasant. penance, since we’re on this catholic thing, is difficult and requires owning what u did, humility, and a commitment to changing ur behavior. betty seems to be betting it all on catching one killer while doing nothing to address her own problematic behaviors.

- lol then there’s this guy, possibly based on elder’s comic character design or possibly daffy duck sinestro ADDENDUM: I’ve Been Set Straight

- aaaaaaa there’s one thousand film/tv references wound together and thru this one and i have no idea which thread to pick up first

- u think it’s just the sopranos (and nevermind riverdale forcing me to consider the thematic overlaps between the sopranos and nge, we’re Not doing that rn), but no it’s ghost stories so it’s Also candyman and fear street and those thematic overlaps (unjustly persecuted innocents, generational trauma, possession, and like. how ‘the image’ of ‘evil’ haunts a community??? idk how to say it? candyman and sarah fier, u know what i mean?? la llorona functions the same)

- sure is an image heavy episode tho

- hey archie has a birthday now. july 1, which means he has a star sign. i feel like they chose that date for its proximity to fred’s death, but it’s uncanny how well cancer fits him. revealing that he’s a cancer in This ep in particular is funny too bc this sign is known for being ‘motherly’ and intensely protective but he’s like, not here. rip archie

- btw who is watching vegas now? i know it’s not pet lover betty

- ur gonna get sick of me really fast if i say how much i love the narrator format. do u think he’s picking up a paycheck at pop’s or is he helping out for free? is it one of those things where ur not an employee but u get a uniform somehow and show up to make trouble?? trickster god vibes

- serpents vs ghoulies, sandra and danny, hm. i’ve never seen grease but even i can guess something is off here. is it more west side story? also never seen any of those. tragically both these kids end up dead by the end so maybe it’s on the bloodier end of the shakespeare spectrum idk

- i barely recognize darla in her new fashion lewk. did she become a ghoulie in riverdale and i forgot, or is it just here? i remember penny switched over. ghoulies only recruit from the spare villain pool. if i let myself think about this too much it’ll piss me off

- not the first person we’ve seen toni accidentally kill to protect someone

- i like dr. whitley, i’m glad to see her back. i guess she’s a full time therapist here and not a, uh, anthropology professor like back in riverdale? the uncanny is mundane in rivervale so maybe there’s less of the unknown for her to study

- dying fr at the jughead and tabitha domestic lyfe. even if this isn’t as blissful as first glance suggests, it’s still feeding something in me <3

- not reggie’s dad tho oh no! speaking of tropes i’m weak for, running out of time to make it right with someone before it’s too late always gets me. i’m hungry for more development of reggie’s family dynamic and i’m sad he and veronica spend the whole ep avoiding discussion of this topic

- it’s frustrating to have this tantalizing glimpse of depth for reggie’s character,, without actually getting in that water :(

- we don’t get to know what his dad’s illness is or how long he’s been sick. and in this episode emphasizing motherhood where is his mother? is she still living? is she in town? are his parents still married or not? is she visiting at the hospital too? what is reggie’s relationship to his mother that he would still be retreating to a fantasy of a nurturing replacement parent figure instead of speaking to her?

- i don’t mind being presented with all these questions but i hate that it feels like the show will never be interested in exploring any answers :(

- love the cut from the beautifully dramatic shot of the mantle motors interior to... the exterior with those windy tube men flapping around. the kind of tone whiplash i’m here for

- tabitha describes a deal with jughead (she goes out and works, he stays in and writes) that’s contrary to what we’ve seen between them in riverdale. in our normal narrative tabitha encouraged him to take whatever break from writing he needs, and he made a promise ‘to be here’ for her in emotional matters. their time here is spent very disconnected after we saw them hang out together pretty much constantly for a year. not to mention jughead’s not teaching. so in this story they’ve moved in under very different conditions.

- when tabitha left, jughead was watching everyone’s favorite bicon vincent price in the house on haunted hill. when she comes back it looks like it’s something else....

- ...but idk what. in a trench coat like that the man could be bogart or milland? i could just be imagining a resemblance bc the two mrs. carrolls or the uninvited share so many elements with the ep and the other media refs present: absent mothers, men who are painters, death, etc. anyway i don’t think it’s important, i just really like details like this

- rivervale’s tabitha has considerably worse aim than riverdale’s. her ‘measure never, smash once’ technique is relatable tho been there

- she’s so pissed at jughead’s stagnation that she cracks open a doorway to the little closet in his mind that can’t let go of the past. the fuckin ship is back lmao. at least it’s not one of the paintings they plan to hang up or is it oh god

- these little ships and jughead’s obsession with them tho. they no longer float but are preserved in place of alcohol while fulfilling the same self harming/self soothing dependency. and when something is safe behind glass u can ruminate over it, turn it over, examine it without disrupting it. something irretrievable.

- if toni’s llorona story is the A plot, then the ‘haunted’ veginald and jabitha stories are the B plots balanced against it and parallel to each other. in both, obsession with the past is not so much a threat to a relationship but rather a symptom of the condition: fear of trusting the present, fear of relying on who u love

- reggie doesn’t know how to grieve for his father when he hasn’t fully processed and forgiven him for his abuse, so he’s avoiding v’s encouragement to face it. jughead is struggling with his writing process - he doesn’t know how to untangle it from where it relied on support from a relationship that’s now dead, so he can’t bring the process into the present with tabitha.

- who is updating that rivervale sign every day?? archie is dead and who else has the time?

- ok this is where the first title card break hits, which reminds me,, so i watched the first fear street movie before starting this ep. and then i watched the second fear street. and then, against the priorities of my sleep schedule, i watched the third fear street movie lmao. they were fun

- they’re also uhhhhhhh Definitely significant to this season. some spoilers for all 3 films scattered thru the rest of this post :)

- for anyone familiar with the trilogy this homage will probably have been apparent since 5.19 but bear with me pls

-  actually, i feel kind of vulnerable doing these thoughts while i’m so behind on canon, and it’s exacerbated by my own pathological avoidance of spoilers for anything i want to watch for enjoyment (as opposed to research lol)

- all i knew going in to fear street was that it plays with horror pastiche similar to how rd does and that it takes place in two neighboring towns called shadyside and sunnyvale (vale being the reason i finally watched). but there’s a whole ass witch i didn’t know about??? rd’s drawing on a little bit more than just that tho. again, ur patience pls if this is all old news or obvious to u, i have only just arrived and there’s already so much to observe,,

- rivervale’s title card scream is the first clue, borrowed from the film’s 1994, 1978 and 1666 title cards. compare the heart removal of a sacrifice victim + ‘the town with heart’ sign in 6.01 with the satanic beating ‘heart’ living underground in fear street - in both, the victims die to grant good fortune to those in on the deal. tabitha’s all-blue look at the fair was reminscent of cheryl’s typical all-red, and together this calls to mind fear street’s red vs blue ‘color war’ kids activity between the two competing towns. and then there’s also lesbians, but hang on to that thought

- here in 6.02, a curse originating from a woman’s wrongful murder leads to further innocent lives taken, which is what appears to be happening with fs’s witch

- the la llorona plot has a few specific parallels - the visual of her rising from the water is similar to how fs’s undead killers form, and baby anthony and any children along her path being targets is similar to how fs’s killers attack only the marked

- and oh boy, there’s more but we’ll get to that later

- for one amazing moment i thought polly was alive and living at thornhill with her kids, but alas. i felt very rattled going from that to the next scene where betty is cheerfully considering her dead sister as a baby name across from kevin who is mysteriously dressed up funeral casual.

- rivervale cheryl is correct about everything and i love that for her. like, she’s exactly the same as her counterpart but conditions finally match her convictions

- this ep has all the girls wearing the heaviest pinkest blushiest makeup and i’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a meaningful character choice or if it’s a preemptive attempt to keep them looking alive after this fucking cyan dread is splashed over it all

- related: riverdale Please, i love a little mood lighting and tone setting but it’s not watchable if it’s Not Visible

- v and reggie talk about happy memories :’)

- reggie and jughead are both seeking reassurance and comfort in the parts of the past that felt safe, especially from a time of more stable identities. a cool car for a cool jock, admired by the ladies and the bros alike. a quiet writing nook for a successful novelist. but returning to past selves and past coping mechanisms means giving up ur growth, avoiding dealing with change, and withdrawing from the good things u have in the present.

- i lost my segue here idk what it was supposed to be lol

- one of the films i’m certain is influencing this haunted apartment storyline is candyman (2021), sequel to the ‘92 original

- the last time candyman came up was i believe the end of 5.15 when josie and the pussycats depart from pop’s but first meet newborn baby anthony. anthony mccoy is the name of the baby in the original candyman and he grows up to be one of the sequel’s protagonists. speaking of which, can we place bets yet on whether toni’s child is going to be called baby anthony his whole life? it seems likely

- anyway,

- in the 2021 film, protags anthony and brianna have recently moved into a nice new apartment building that was built where cabrini green, the setting of the first film, used to stand. brianna’s brother tells the couple a ‘ghost story’ about how shortly before the projects were gentrified and re-developed, a white woman grad student who was investigating the local candyman urban legend suddenly snapped, went on a murder spree, and abducted a baby (the original film’s events, distorted thru a mundane lens)

- both are unsettled - brianna, like tabitha, finds it ghoulish while anthony becomes increasingly obsessed with the story and uses it as inspiration for his paintings, like jughead

- i know it can be hard to discern under the crushing weight of this season’s cyan blanket so far, but the interiors of both jughead and tabitha’s place and veronica’s apartment are this very same color of anthony and brianna’s bedroom walls. paintings hanging are significant in candyman, since both anthony and brianna work in fine art - veronica’s walls feature a lot of art, and tabitha wants their home to have this too. anthony has a studio work space in the apartment but separated, like jughead does - tho finding the closet thru a hole in the wall is more reminiscent of the original candyman’s association with secret spaces inside and behind walls. like tabitha, brianna eventually intrudes on this private space looking for answers about her partner’s behavior, which transitions into an argument, similar to rd tho it goes v differently - but i’m getting ahead of myself

- what’s Super fun about this is it ties back into other references made within rd’s story

- the candyman and fear street series have several overlaps of theme and motif, and premise: a location in the present is haunted and attacked by the vengeful spirit of someone who was unjustly tortured (their hand cut off) and murdered by the community that lived on that spot in the past - all bc of a romantic relationship deemed socially unacceptable. this becomes a legend that traumatizes subsequent generations, which in turn feeds and strengthens the legend. an individual sacrificing their life can set it right briefly but the evil power behind the curse doesn’t ever really go away.

- a community hunting down and unjustly killing an innocent, begetting a spirit of vengeance that weaponizes the cruelties used upon themself against anyone who wakes them also resembles rd’s take on the llorona legend

- also, while fear street’s historical setting is 1666 (safely within the witch hunting era), the ‘21 film reveals that in the candyman universe, the legend originated with the murder of one daniel robitaille in the year 1890 - which if irc is the year that rd’s blossom ancestor is burned

- oh no honey that’s dead

- the color filter killed it

- i checked out the list of films involving la llorona and was too overwhelmed with options to properly watch any. just going on the description and trailer, rd’s llorona seems to have the most in common with the curse of la llorona (2019) with toni more or less in parallel to anna and darla to patricia, plus elements like a social worker welfare check, a grieving mother calling on la llorona to carry out vengeance, and imagery like water dripping from ceilings.

- also maybe worth noting this film is part of the conjuring series all of which owes something to the exorcist, especially with the whole priest thing

- i watched the exorcist for the first time just before starting s6 and it’s only now occurring to me to wonder like, where is penelope and what happened to cheryl’s church? she has her girls school but did rivervale cheryl ever have a congregation? lol did she just dump them all?

- also, just for fun: my familiarity with la llorona is only from the folk song, like we heard in 5.12 at hiram’s father’s funeral. so,, speaking of isabellas, lesbians (à la fear street), and la llorona, here’s this. tho my personal favorite version is lhasa’s blend + while we’re here, her album inspired by the concept. lol this has nothing to do with rd. ok

- did u know the credits list squeaky in this episode?? is this her? idk where else she might be. am i missing something obvious? what does it mean that she’s alive here but polly apparently isn’t? does rivervale have serial killers or not?? is she a ghost too?

- anyway hi squeaky stay safe

- i knew that landlord was evil in more than a normal landlord kind of way what am i saying? this is normal for landlords. update: real estate agent, tomayto tomahto

- jughead and tabitha’s ghosts are sam and diane. fear street’s couple is sam and deena: more on this particular point later.

- feel like ‘diana’ is now a firmly established rd motif so maybe worth noting how the roman goddess could relate here + recalling she and greek counterpart artemis are symbols of purity and protectiveness as well as fertility and childbirth

- the frenzied dissociated way jughead is typing in tabitha’s nightmare is Exactly how i write these posts in case u ever want to picture some behind the scenes

- her nightmare awakening is another candyman nod. also their bed frames?

- tabitha makes up for not being allowed to change out of her work uniform the whole ep by displaying a diverse wardrobe of pj+robe combos. jughead is working hard to support my theory that he only writes while in a state of undress

- what was i literally just saying about jughead’s toothbrushing motif lmao

- Listen,, it dates back to s1 the last time he was in a closet. the past offers solutions:

- shout out pop for trying to set tabitha’s mind at ease by mentioning the time someone died in the deep fryer at work and then implying she should break some windows at home. that’s a lil fucked up. be worse than what’s haunting u is fun advice tho

- aliens, ghosts, u name it, he’s seen it. i forget what page of my brain i’ve been keeping the list of every riot he’s mentioned, so i’m not sure where an 80s occasion lines up. pop wouldn’t lie tho right? he wouldn’t just make up a riot whenever he wants to dress up a story, right? pop? ??

- i’m rooting for them together and yet,, the veginald jealousy argument is delicious. the pettiness goes down so smooth. and at the same table v divorced chad at too

- these anxieties coming thru between them and also elsewhere with jughead... who will love u enough to put up with ur horrible little self? the private u, all ur quirks and kinks and bad habits, the things u don’t want to confront about yourself. this is also delicious, in a different way

- jughead’s process works?? adhd babes, there’s hope for us

- is this sustainable tho? he closes himself off in a limited version of the past - a safe familiar closet where he’s taken the alcohol he once drank for relief from betty’s betrayal and replaced it with representations of their former relationship, and surrounded himself with these like a reliquary while he writes on the machine betty gifted him while they were split so it has become a symbol of now-unattainable reunion,,

- and the result of this is a story about the past that he doesn’t yet feel comfortable sharing with the person closest to him.

- i mean, it’s progress

- jughead’s asking for trust and tabitha’s asking for communication in return <3 without murder-suicide ghosts this might have gone smoother

- on the other hand, reggie and veronica are asking for essentially the same from each other, but they don’t have ghost possession to offset their conflict when it devolves into personal attacks.

- the reference behind reggie’s ‘ghost’ isabella soprano is a nearly impossible to solve puzzle but if ur extremely cunning u just might be able to figure it out. not all the homage can be obvious i guess.

- baby’s first sopranos viewings✨ i watched the last 3 eps of s1 for this post, despite my entire childhood being chased away from any tv showing this when it aired. all my unico relatives are dead but i can still feel them right behind me, reaching for my ear. something in the shadows in the corner is whispering ‘shouldn’t u be playing outside with ur cousins’

- so in this sopranos ep, penultimate to the first season finale, tony is in a depression, heavily medicated, and experiences a profoundly comforting hallucination that, thru the miracle of psychoanalysis, helps bring clarity to his situation.

- he meets a beautiful and sweet young woman, isabella, who tells him she’s an italian exchange student studying oral tumors in dental school. despite being in a slump, he invites her to lunch where she encourages him to visit his ancestral town in italy and he has a vision of her nurturing and nursing a baby.

- so right off the bat, this meshes with more in rd then just reggie. the baby’s name is antonio, tony was fantasizing about himself being taken care of, but we also have toni’s son baby anthony and also anthony mccoy in candyman, who was the baby abducted by a vengeful spirit in the first film.

- i feel like tearing my hair out or something for saying this but. this also overlaps with the neon genesis evangelion ref (tho that’s not doing much in this rd ep). nge was written with jung basically as a guide book and it has things like an episode titled ‘oral stage,’ a confusingly attractive and sexual psuedo-mother character (misato), and a whole oedipal nightmare swirling around absent mothers and parents trying to kill their children

- ah, i almost forgot the rest of the sopranos thing

- during his depressive episode, tony soprano is supbconsiously processing the fact that his own mother is vengefully trying to kill him, while cushioning himself in a hallucination of an ideal mother

- this rd episode is assembling a pile of mothers, especially around la llorona. protective, apathetic, nurturing, vengeful - against others and against her own children. but what is rd’s ‘ideal’? idk but toni’s serpent version of an ideal mother is one who would do anything including sacrifice herself to save her own child.

- i feel like this also sends a ripple of acknowledgement back to candyman. interesting that this ep ends with a reversal of the original film’s resolution - instead of the white woman confronting the spirit who abducted a baby and sacrificing herself to return the child to his mother, a black woman, here the black mother confronts the spirit and sacrifices herself to retrieve her own abducted child who she must leave in care of the white woman.

- add to that how in nge all the kids’ mothers sacrifice their souls to become absent but ultimately protective ‘unfettered feral’ forces, like,,, this is what i meant at the beginning about how the pastiche is so tightly woven i don’t fucking know where to start or how to proceed. how did they write this

- fuck wait, another thing with the sopranos and reggie,

- in the episode preceding the isabella one, tony was dealing with a situation with a helpfully informant cop detective who, to make a long story short, trusted tony enough to share that he was personally traumatized as a child by the abuse in his home and found refuge with the madam at a brothel. this is not directly related to the isabella storyline in the next ep, but i think there ended up being a punchline in here somewhere

- i love pausing on curdle’s office and wondering about the weird fucked up stuff in the bg

- is that? 2 taxidermy snakes fighting in front of a cross?? no no it’s fine doctor, that’s very normal. i was just curious. happy easter

- how long has it been since the events of last ep?

- per the milk container, archie’s been ‘missing’ since sept 15 which is useless bc we don’t know what month it is now. three months before now toni killed someone, but again that’s not helpful bc we don’t know if that occurred before or after last ep. it doesn’t seem like jughead and tabitha have been living in their place for 3 months, then again i have a painting i’ve been meaning to hang for about year now so that’s hard to measure too

- what i’m getting at is, i love the possibility of dr curdle, who is definitely one hundred percent for sure a licensed and degreed medical professional, giving betty three months of prenatal care and then looking her dead in the eye and saying we both imagined it. tbf it could just a easily have been only a week. who knows

- actually it might make the most sense if this was occurring around the day of dead, about six weeks after archie’s ‘disappearance’ mid-september. but if there’s any indication other than autumn weather and a latino folk tale to confirm this, i missed it

- things sure do have to personally affect betty before she believes them or takes them seriously

- but also, betty’s surprised pikachu reaction to the loss or lack of a pregnancy she seemed to really want: sociopathic? she’s a sociopath <3

- betty does say she’ll try to help lucinda, the mother being charged with murder, but we never find out how that goes. that’s also such an interesting contrasting flavor against how no one is concerned about hiding archie’s death, least of all betty (the one writing fbi reports). the only one looking for him is mary

- speaking of sociopath betty,

- what comes to mind when she’s talking to tabitha in the diner:

- idk that betty is doing this on purpose but she has a pattern

- tabitha being sensitive about being outside in the cold for jughead’s writing process :( baby girl, make the connection. he doesn’t let anyone read his stuff because he let betty in and she broke his heart :(

- hm this child protection stuff?? cps inquiring about toni’s care for baby anthony, likely part of darla’s vengeance against her. and then veronica acting out her jealousy for reggie’s complete attention by destroying the car that’s in part a symbol of an inappropriate relationship he had as a child as well as reminder of his abusive father. and the cherry on top, no one misses archie but his mom

- also what about archie?? some characters here have this opportunity to air insecurities and fears in a very no holds barred atypical narrative consequences kinda way, but we’re denied this insight into archie. bummer bc i need help with him! some people are easy to read and some are like, i look at him and i just see static white noise

- anyway

- rip rivervale’s marty mantle and rip that car

- i don’t think it’s insignificant that an explicit parallel is drawn between the typewriter and the car that reggie’s abusive dad once gave him. these are items that made jughead and reggie feel special to people they really wanted to matter to but who seriously traumatized them. and these items are attacked by tabitha and veronica in outbursts of frustration about their partners romanticizing the harmful past.

- ‘i will not allow u to romanticize an abusive relationship’ hits hard coming from veronica who witnessed the effect that music teacher had on archie as a teen and who has navigated the complexities of hiram and seen her mother do the same. and she’s right, no matter how helpful and trustworthy an adult seems to a child, that photo signed xoxo was a red flag.

- but veronica’s also very scary here. property destruction as a form of abuse aside, it’s the ‘it’s just u and me, as it should be’ that’s terrifying. and then replacing the car that represented both his dad and another woman comforting him about his dad, with a new car coming directly from her? with the keys in a box like an echo of hiram’s gifted pearls??

- reggie’s dad just died, removing the possibility of fully healing their family relationship, and altho veronica has been present and offered her care and attention to him, she’s ended up channeling hiram and drawing the focus onto herself and her control over him

- he’s even doing his best unhappy trapped hermione impression in that dinner scene :( at least they weren’t sitting one thousand miles apart at the table tho. it’s the little things

- an aside: where’s the line between abusive and simply disfunctional? where can u find that line in a piece of fiction where logic necessarily bends around story devices? in past seasons i accepted some characters in toxic dynamics bc the narrative seemed to excuse it as fine with handwaving. adjusting my understanding to look past the handwaving has made this whole show, from beginning to now, feel more cohesive than i ever realized before. idk i’m just pondering this.

- speaking of little things, there were some seriously gorgeous shots in reggie’s storyline this ep

- brief but beautiful

- tabitha and jughead’s fight is so fun, Let’s Go

- to start, this resembles something from that sopranos ep, an exchange between tony and his wife carmela,,, or so he believes at first

- during his depressive slump, carmela catches him peeping at isabella thru their bedroom window and she calls him out - he’s wallowing, lying around in a houserobe, not working or helping her with the household or the kids, and yet he has time for distractions like taking a beautiful young stranger out to lunch even tho he hasn’t taken his wife out in forever. she feels like he’s making a fool out of her and, tho she doesn’t brain him with a hammer or break his stuff, she threatens to ‘cut his dick off.’

- but tony soon after realizes that all of this - isabella And carmela’s call out - were part of his hallucination. his therapist helps him decode what his subconscious is telling him. he feels shame for being in a ‘weak’ emotional place and needing care, he feels guilty for neglecting carmela and their family

- and the castration anxiety, a recurring nightmare of his, is connected in this storyline directly to his ‘odd duck’ mother who, u may recall, he’s realizing is trying to kill him. tony is confronting aspects of himself and his relationships at a low moment when he’s lost the will to live. this hallucination, along with a ‘kick’ from almost being killed in an assassination attempt via his mother, helps him turn it around and return to his power, so to speak

- in a similar way, tabitha’s callout of jughead has to do with her own frustrations with his passivity in their relationship and neglect for her needs (which gets especially interesting if what we’re watching is a piece of jughead-the-character’s writing, coming from his perspective with his own anxieties about this relationship, as that most matches tony), but the argument is driven by a different relationship altogether. in tony’s case, his evil mother. in rd’s, the murder-suicide ghosts but also, on one level, the spectre of betty.

- i still feel that whichever narrator is delivering the overall story has shifted his position on betty to something less familiar and more critical. but the character jughead, or This one at least, is still clinging to an ideal that takes betty’s shape

- but ghost stories are pretty much always about overcoming the past, finding ways to put it to rest.

- the idea of betty that jughead is unable to let go of is as much a ghost as the dead couple haunting them, tho she is less animate and less involved and possibly even less real than than the actual ghosts. that makes her harder to banish bc she’s more like an unanswered question - was it ever real? - than a poltergeist or something u can fight or scare off

- i relish tabitha getting to be unhinged for once. she contains multitudes <3

- huh wonder what that means

- probably nothing lol

- who’s going to let tabitha know the significance behind jughead writing about a past couple where the woman bashed her partner’s head in with a rock? like, i’m so serious baby girl don’t worry, he really is just working thru something. none of these film or tv refs introduce a hammer motif, that’s a rd original idea™️, or rather, an update on an older idea circa s4 <3

- The Mirror Thing Tho

- she looks at her reflection and sees the image of the person possessing her

- that immediately brings to mind candyman. in the original, the spirit of candyman is summoned thru mirrors and is generally only visible within them. that’s taken a step further in the 2021 sequel where anthony observes his own possession by the spirit in mirrors. his possession, or perhaps better to say his incorporation into the ‘hive’ of candyman spirits, is a slow often-interrupted process that creeps along with a kind of inevitable unstoppable dread. unlike tabitha, he doesn’t have the choice to say no - altho his love for brianna does protect her and helps her survive, like tabitha’s love for jughead (and vice versa) triumphs over the ghosts

- fear street plays with possession and reflections too but in slightly different ways

- first: possession-by-an-evil-force is how the antagonists operate throughout the series. sam (of fs’s sam-and-deena) is possessed in this manner as part of the town’s curse and attempts to kill her gf deena. victims of this possession are normal until, same as how jughead describes diane (of rd’s sam-and-diane), they ‘just sort of snapped one day’

- the possessed sam thing could have gone way super worse:

- instead we get them saying i love u to each other and kissing over the busted remains of the typewriter and broken glass??? their conflict isn’t really Resolved and it’s not our jughead and tabitha anyway, but We Do Love To See It !!!

- wait but second, fear street’s use of mirror reflections:

- sam’s possession is never explored in a mirror, but deena experiences her own type of possession which does feature a reflection:

- hm maybe not easy to tell but those are 2 different people ^

- instead of the vengeful ghost of sarah fier possessing deena, deena possesses her and lives thru sarah’s final days from her perspective. again like anthony in candyman, deena is powerless to affect a change - she’s only a witness, but she’s a witness to the truth which, combined with her determination and her love for sam, allows her to finally stop the curse

- altho rd doesn’t follow that narrative here at all, this moment from the start of deena’s ‘sarah experience’ is what the mirror aspect of tabitha’s possession reminded me of.

- i was kind of joking about lesbian jughead before but here is Yet Another piece of lesbian media applied to him and tabitha while jughead is literally hiding in a closet so like, is the joke on me?

- anyway, what would i do for a jabitha idiots to lovers ghost hunting au? what wouldn’t i do??

- question: are they getting their deposit back after tearing down a wall to reveal an extra unreported sideroom and then boarding it back up again? can they renegotiate their rent??

- also once again there’s a parallel between tabitha and veronica. both smash up something of great importance to their partner, something that’s taking attention away from their relationships in the present moment - altho tabitha has ghosts driving her violence while veronica is tapping into a narcississtic level of protectiveness and jealousy

- if we can make assumptions about tabitha’s upbringing based on the apparant similarities between her parents and the lodges, then we can guess she grew up controlled and limited. now tabitha finally has things of her own making, by her own choices - the diner, her love for jughead, their new shared home - and it must be frustrating that it’s not automatically a perfect happy ending. like jughead says, love is a series of tests

- was this an example of what riverdale’s tabitha was so afraid of in 5.18? in her anxiety about jughead slipping away from her, she drinks like she doesn’t want him to drink. and in her fear of not comparing to the ideal of betty, she makes a very betty choice to invade his privacy and attack him with it, like the manuscript with jess. jughead knows better about keeping secrets like this too. he treated tabitha exactly as he hates being treated himself.

- can they find a balance between jughead’s past-oriented hang ups about not being enough and tabitha’s future-oriented hang ups about also not being enough, and learn to communicate and be fully in the present moment with each other? i mean, i think they will lol

- so toni’s storyline started with her feeling like her past actions were too terrible for an apology or attempt at communication to matter. and this and everyone else’s storylines resolve, more or less, with communicating about the past.

- darla’s name is familiar to betty - is it only from toni’s recent run in with her, OR,, did darla’s cooper home invasion happen here too? but that was tied up with the chic and blackhood plots and it doesn’t seem clear if that happened here either??

- also perhaps darla’s sons would be more alive if she didn’t involve all of them in batman villain type schemes :/ i wonder if this toni would have come to any conclusions, if given the chance, after seeing darla lose all her sons to gang violence and then almost losing anthony. like, maybe reconsidering raising her own child in a similar gang?? feels like a possible takeaway u know?

- i’m so scared of toni’s fake plastic baby. i don’t think babies should be on tv in any form. also despite the grave tone of this confrontation i am unfortunately losing it at the little bear ears on the baby hoodie. look at those!!

- did she just give fangs’ son away to betty....? ....??? there’s only one baby allowed in this town, like a hot potato, and betty currently has the baby ticket?

- now there’s been two sacrifices, one nonconsensual forced by a community for the greater good (archie). and one given by a parent out of options, toni. innocence is also highlighted. toni justly gives her life to correct the imbalance she created by taking a life. archie was, if i understood correctly, chosen as a sacrifice because he was innocent. did that create an imbalance too?

- also, cheryl’s seance reveals la llorona’s name as martha mallon. names are rarely meaningless in rd so i wonder if this introduces a question that martha carried some responsibility for the deaths under her care after all??

- love this dramatic location

- There He Is. this rod serling style thing is so good but what i’m enjoying most is how he moves without narrative restraint or boundaries. actually he’s in every scene in my heart

- river styx u say? yeah, stygian is the fuckin word! at this rate next episode is going to be lit like the bottom of the ocean

- styx means this definitely isn’t purgatory or anywhere heavenly. maybe not earthly either. the greeks said this river separated earth and the underworld, or life and death. dante places the styx in hell around level five (the wrathful drown in it forever, like me suffering this cyan filter) where it separates the entrance to the rest of the descending levels.

- my inclination to roast is battling my desire to be kind and drama-free,,,, , , but,,, betty really swerved directly back into go girl give us absolutely nothing. what matters to this betty? does anything? wtf?

- betty’s non-reaction to her pregnancy loss and her inaction this ep (doubting the danger leading to her own loss, unwilling to risk nana rose’s life for the answers they’re looking for) juxtaposed against toni’s mission to understand and stop la llorona resulting in her own ultimate self-sacrifice is really interesting to me. the narrator immediately emphasizes that what’s going on is safely contained within rivervale, but it’s apparent that these events reflect on our regular characters in some kind of way. motherhood and passing along legacies must mean seriously different things to toni and betty

- rivervale so far has neatly avoided clarifying whether or not the cooper family has a murder problem (i mean, other than the archie-sacrifice-thing bc obviously everyone here is at least that amount of fucked up) and so also avoided addressing whether this betty feels any type of way about passing her genes on.

- but how would our betty handle that? would a desire for motherhood and a child help her finally confront her own ‘darkness’ in a meaningful way? would she figure that no offspring of archie could possibly be a bad seed? i’ve never got the sense from the overall story that motherhood is something betty personally wants, but the question is still central to her character bc of the complicated identity tangle she’s part of with her mother and polly, who both had unplanned pregnancies that altered their lives and, according to certain social values, reflected negatively on them and their family

- it’s funny how things tend to work out on this show. i’m always impressed at its adaptability. toni’s motherhood storyline is a direct result of the way the writers chose to accomodate vanessa’s rl pregnancy.

- and of course the natural progression of this storyline includes betty. it fits so well bc toni was introduced as a sort of foil to betty - her staunch southside allegience and serpent-by-blood-and-choice upbringing vs betty’s privileged northside upbringing and ‘illegitimate’ serpent connection via alice’s rejection of the gang and conversion to a middleclass lifestyle that was only accessible to her thru her whiteness, her ‘upward’ marriage, And by giving up her out-of-wedlock southside baby.

- It’s Him

- It’s Narrator Jughead

- But. is that the same narrator as the one who’s been taking us thru the normal narrative, or is he another character created by that narrator too?? this does feel kind of like jughead had a burst of inspiration after last ep and this is what he’s writing as a result, which i love as a concept. but then,, is this narrator a character created by our character jughead, completely separate from the main narrator?? turtles turtles turtles all the way down girl Help

- i have not seen any fear street yet but i know enough about it to have my eye on it regarding this vale thing

- i love her so much and so does the narrator

- veronica and reggie giving american psycho vibes. or is it the narrator giving those vibes while they give wolf of wall street?? this format is insane i love it. i want this narrator to be in the back of every scene

- The Painting is now.... a pastoral stream

- that could jibe with the weird earthly garden part of dante’s comedy??

- kevin back to his old tricks: finding dead bodies in the woods. reasons he gives in this ep for spending so much time alone in the woods include ‘jogging’ and ‘forgot his shovel.’ a likely story

- it’s a comfort that police investigations are just as diy in rivervale as back home, and also that kevin avoids talking to his dad here too, bc why tf was betty his first call. she’s not 911

- cheryl’s mention here of st sebastian, who recovers from being tied to a tree and stuck with arrows, possibly bodes well for archie. it might also be subtext indicating that archie and betty are also gay men. i’m not sure

- oh my god that’s right cheryl’s school has that neon genesis homage. no thoughts on that yet, head empty

- it’s Him

- my darling my beloved my boi

- meme format energy

- the luscious hair is a wonderful shock. he’s thriving, or he would be if he was allowed to freely practice toad medicine

- wait is he not a mortician here?

- she’s normal <3

- ‘what about u and archie? are u all in’ tabitha asks betty as she carefully slides a Giant knife into the block

- this is my favorite show ever

- i also love that the fridge matches the old jones’ trailer. whole cyan episode matches the jones trailer

- ‘one of the biggest questions’ of this betty’s life back in hs was which boy she’d end up with, ,, so did all the murder and death and questioning if she was a bad person or not, like, not happen here? or does that just not rate

- these are not the same characters we just left in riverdale, but what and how much do they have in common?

- the not-matching jughead and tabitha dressing gowns are v cute. i’m with tabitha, do not kill bugs! not bc they’ll put a curse on u but bc they’re just little guys :(

- so true nana

- cheryl hated coping with the guilt of her genocidal predecessors so much, she’s trying to rewrite the indigenous inhabitants out of the area’s history. or i guess it could be different in the vale (/doubt). it’s hard to remember to separate them

- also like. how forgotten are these ‘ways’ if they were last performed 25 years ago which seems to be the intended cycle anyway?

- vegas??? boo boo u died??

- i apologize that looks so creepy lmao i just wanted to make him big

- i can’t get over Definitely Not Suspicious Doctor curdle. he‘s all dressed up, pls take him seriously

- i took this cap for her wall art. but also. money as ‘cold hard proof’ of love and appreciation? also archie and betty’s baby to seal a relationship? is this a commentary on modern replacements to the tradition of marriage?

- i thought i was imagining it at first but no. the cyan filter really is happening. i’m being taunted i need to go sit quietly in a corner and think about what i’ve asked for in life.

- archie reading a baseball magazine (chuck clayton on the cover lol good for him), is he literally trying to become his father? no wait, or is he trying to attain fulfillment? he has everything he could possibly want at this point in life, but it’s not enough?

- ok, see,, , now they’re acting like people in a relationship, even if it’s a suddenly unfamiliar relationship. so the capability to not be wooden is there?? even later while betty is deceiving archie. hm. so now i’m inclined to think that in the main narrative, the stiffness is intentional. this thought is still developing.

- the resistance i personally have to hearing betty say ‘i want ur baby’ to literally anyone, when my perception of the character is that this is against everything she wants for herself, is a different kind of stiffness for me to figure out tho. it’s weird to be able to feel ur own subjectivity blocking ur understanding of a story. i think the only solution for me is to be patient, to try to go easy with assumptions in either direction, and to practice holding the big picture in my mind in as whole a piece as i can manage.

- tabitha :(

- her cute pajamas tho :)

- this is, i think, the third time we’ve seen jughead brushing his teeth on this show, which means absolutely nothing but it’s also three more times than we’ve seen any other character ever doing that so my brain is still like ?? what does it mean

- The Domesticity :)

- the, bug curse :’)

- ‘it’s scabies’ girl ilu but calm down don’t worry, it’s just commitment anxiety

- tabitha having long term anxieties fits well with her forward-thinking tendency to plan far ahead. like how she has big plans for the diner. (a side note to that, jughead as her partner neatly compliments her nature bc he’s so adaptable to sudden change. he’ll take the shittiest living conditions and ‘figure it out’ to survive.) in our normal narrative’s reality, tabitha isn’t ruled by this fear about future uncertainty - especially with jughead’s influence. she has the flexibility to drop her insurance to pay her workers and to romantically commit arson. but rivervale’s characters do seem to be ruled by these undercurrents of fear

- altho maybe not so much this jughead?? it’s interesting that in this ep jughead the character gives us no insight into any anxieties he may have. even when he finds the cockroach cereal box prize, i think that was more to show it’s not only in tabitha’s imagination. he’s more oriented around comforting her than showing his own internal situation. maybe everything happening here is such an improvement from his Before, he can cope with some bug bites if he has a roof and a loving partner. or maybe this jughead is really that untroubled.

- meanwhile the narrator displays more affect than either our normal narrator Or our normal character, but it’s all directed outwards in bemusement at everyone else. he’s like, lively but opaque

- this episode is just, adult commitments: metaphorical anxieties edition. to go along with tabitha’s trepidation about moving in together, we have betty and archie’s ticking biological clocks, fangs and toni’s regretably irritating baby, and reggie’s self esteem haunted by v and her past relationships.

- these are all very plausibly coming from within the characters psyches but i think it’s also funny to wonder if this is cheryl projecting her resentments for everyone else’s relationship milestones into the form of various curses. we need minerva back

- the creepy soundtrack of this episode is very fun

- poppets and neon evangelion and some kind of goddess mother figure, this will end fine i’m sure. does this mean cheryl is like gendo...? i don’t think this homage is done cooking yet

- something jumping out to me about the archie-cheryl maple conflict is that both are trying to create life, but one is about future generations and one is about reviving the ‘old ways.’ archie is fixated on his father and cheryl is fixated on this maple maiden mother figure

- jughead calls rivervale the ‘shadow town’ of riverdale which sounds a whole lot like jung. in that context the cheryl-archie thing feels like a battle between anima and animus. i’m not going to pretend i understand anything about jung’s theories but like. there that is. is the feminine/masculine division in town there for a reason??

- oh wait is jung the nge connection?? i’m not equipped for this one lmao

- i feel like now that i’ve mentioned jung i have to also add a cautionary warning for anyone unfamiliar with him who wants to go look him up now - pls take care not to get sucked into any jordan peterson type life-healing guru shit. i’ve found that most people who make [the most accessible] content about jung’s work do it not with the focus of explaining for understanding, but with the presumption that viewers or readers want to (and even should) apply these concepts to their own lives. that shit can eat u alive, watch out

- god is that a real baby? that scared me i was expecting plastic

- this was too funny. the vibe is ‘running into hs classmates u don’t actually want to talk to.’ anything to escape

- on a related note, my heart is honestly moved at the easy going friendship betty and veronica display throughout this ep

- hard no to ‘tabtab’ but veginald i will take. and madelaine’s delivery, delightful

- jughead’s pancake-drunk love confession? guilt? last chance to say it? gratitude for a bro taking one for the town? unclear lol

- tabitha’s blue look!!! it’s lowkey awful and i highkey love it. first, her unique jacket collection to rival jughead’s. plus her boot collection, which we got to see a few more examples of this ep. i’m happy

- sadly i don’t have time for blingees this post but, i am still mainly watching:

- Them 👀

- tabitha’s blue vs cheryl’s typical red™️ is interesting

- the way i’m convinced both of these people are color blind tho

- i like how this situation dissolves into archie’s perspective of a world that’s making less and less sense to him

- the camera has been doing hallucinogenic midsommar things, very fun

- comes across better in motion tho tbh

- and then there’s a full transition to a horror movie

- since responding to 5.19 i’ve been rethinking what i said in my 18 thoughts about veronica’s elaborate meal and archie’s cooking abilities.

- it’s true we see him in the kitchen frequently but we don’t see him and his man collection sitting down to eat very often. most meals we get in the andrews house happen casually at the kitchen island. so perhaps veronica’s dinner was awkward less bc of her cooking and more bc of her expectations for the formality?

- veronica loves a display, like ‘making it on a bed of money’ she imbues meaning into her attention to detail (also why reggie was so right to be upset at her overlooking his casino office)

- archie on the other hand doesn’t have time for formalities like sit down meals, or dessert at the table. he has too much jogging to do. betty is compatible with that, both this uncanny version but also our betty whose attitude toward conventional family meals i shared my thoughts on in my last post

- how many phone calls do betty and archie get from kevin? in this episode but also just in general? sitcom gag

- this is such a perfect blend of midsommar and both wickermans. the original wickerman deals with barren land and the remake has the same but adjusts it to be a female-led cult that’s very concerned with reproduction (like a colony, hence the bee motif) and uses deception to not only draw in sacrifices but also to get viable ‘donors’ so to speak. and what midsommar shares most in common with the wickerman films is the evident trap that a whole community slowly draws one man (or more, in midsommar) directly into

- my read of midsommar is that it’s about how trauma or insecurity makes anyone vulnerable to manipulation, which cheryl provides here. i’m still confused about the starting point of the bad shit tho - some things, like tabitha and jughead’s bug plagues and baby anthony’s colic and especially betty’s infertility, beg the question: were they caused by cheryl to create openings for her plan? or are they really the result of the displeased maple maiden? but then other problems, like reggie’s self esteem and frank’s dead family (bro... has anything in ur life gone ok?), seem more like situations cheryl was just happy to take advantage of

- does this distinction even matter or am i looking too close, hm

- anyway aw look at that, it works. even the tree on the sign gets its leaves back. since cheryl said she’d only rejoin her land to town ‘over achie’s dead body’ does this mean she’s back now?

- also i don’t remember where this fits, but when betty is looking at the cold case of what turns out to be the last maple king sacrifice, there’s a morgue report in the shot. it lists cause of death as ‘organ failure’ which sure is a way to describe having ur heart removed.

- ty for sending this in, anon, ur timing is great. i wasn’t sure how to answer at first but then i watched this episode !

- so here’s the thing. ‘jughead has resentment toward betty and archie’ is mostly just a vibe i have (maybe many of us have?) based on gut feeling and supported here and there by things like film refs. including the oblique ref to secret window. it’s hard to elaborate on it bc ur right, altho there’s quite a bit re: betty, the show doesn’t always appear to do much with this for archie.

- the things about secret window that make me wonder are similarities like the opening shots as i showed in those gifs, plus the writer protagonist - mort - who’s suffering writers block and is emotionally hung up on a bad breakup with his (now ex) wife who cheated. the story is very different from s5 but the topic of plagiarism, the presence of the author’s agent, and an act of arson also all contribute to this feeling that there’s something to compare

- the biggest thing probably is in the crux of the film (spoilers) - mort is being stalked by a malevolent man who could be very loosely compared to jughead’s mothman apparition. but where jughead’s mothman is, i think, a projection of his complicated feelings about his friends’ betrayal and abandonment, mort’s stalker is a hallucination with more power than just haunting him.

- the man is an externalization of mort’s own violent resentment toward his ex and for his loss of control over his life. this external figure is, wouldn’t u know it,  a jungian-type shadow - like a dark half of himself - that confronts and tries to dominate him. mort is experiencing a break with reality so he’s not consciously aware that he’s the man. all the terrible things happening are his own doing as a result of how deep and active his negative feelings toward his ex and her new lover are. in s5 the closest jughead comes to that is the rat king experience and a voicemail to betty he doesn’t remember sending.

- again, this is all mostly focused on betty tho. u asked about archie

- jughead isn’t psychotic. and i don’t think he’s harboring murderous and vengeful rage toward archie. but there’s Something. i also don’t assume jughead-the-character understands all of his feelings or that Our narrator or This narrator are reliable in expressing reality. our narrator is the one who once said ‘there were only three people in the booth that night’ and then says he’s certain bc he ‘was there’ even tho he doesn’t count himself. our narrator doesn’t describe a clear picture of reality - he bends it around his own emotional reality.

- the way i prefer to watch this entire show is that it’s a story designed by jughead looking back at these events. as narrator of the main narrative he at least pretends to be objective, tho let’s be honest. no one can keep their biases out.

- and now, with riverVale, we have a break in the familiar narrative and A narrator jughead, whether it’s The narrator or a facet of him or something else, is guiding us - with far less objectivity and far more snark than our regular program - thru an uncanny short story that interrupts ‘normal’ events Right When the two people who hurt jughead-the-character have made the choice to evolve their affair into the relationship that child-jughead always felt threatened by despite their reassurance it would never happen. the ultimate destination of this narrator’s intro tour is basically right outside the room where that was/is happening, and he wants it to ‘sink in for a minute.’ later he reappears to call archie’s maple sapling plan boring and call more favorable attention to what cheryl’s cooking up against archie.

- betty’s boon from the ritual closely resembles the part in midsommar where a cult member has sex with protagonist dani’s boyfriend - from dani’s perspective he’s intentionally cheating on her and this is what spurs her into the emotional final part of the film where she decides her bf should die

- rivervale interrupts the narrative where betty and archie were banging lmao bad pun with a story where everyone collectively drops their morals and any personal reservations and decides that the best solution to all their sundry problems is if archie died for the greater good

- jughead is a writer, not a murderer

- the tension i feel between seeing the comforting normality of jughead writing in the diner vs my new lifelong paranoia about indoor dining, mm

- sad for reggie’s unattained wall street dreams but ! veronica’s face when he asks her about archie LIKE,, oho y do u ask sir

- i think v needs a scheme-collaborator above all as her romantic partner and no one’s better at scheming and collaborating than reggie so i love this abounding potential for them. they share ambition and i’d love to see them talk out their father issues with each other

- but it also feels like v still has no idea where she’s going in life. she can say new york city as often and as loud as she wants to, but the bubble the show lives inside says she must stay in town, at least until the story’s done. so until her answer lines up with the narrative, she comes across as very lost

- speaking of lost,,

- wowee day drinking jokes just don’t hit right from the two people who betrayed and ditched jughead leading to his alcoholism which they were completely unbothered about this whole time lately

- archie and betty drinking increasingly thru the season has been a kind of bg theme. maybe less so for betty, tho she was a round ahead of everyone else when last ep started and she had no qualms knocking back jughead’s whiskey in the bunker. but archie’s house has noticeably continued to be littered with more and more bottles even after jughead went dry. what does it all mean dot gif

- also lili is drinking from that beer bottle like it’s a prop and she’s never interacted with a prop in her life lol

- jackson really doesn’t get a send off? :( then again if he has the option, getting out of this town asap is smart

- the usefulness of grieving polly and wearing polly’s tragedy like a chic and insulating coat is over and done. today’s betty appears happy and unburdoned. is it bc of archie? bc she got her diploma in the mail? i’m trying to figure out this betty bc it feels like she’s pretending to be a different character. idk i’m still thinking. more on this later i guess

- jughead enjoying weatherbee come crawling back to him lmao. ‘what’s the buzz’ ‘the worm turns’ these two only conversing in bug idioms is exceptionally good

- oh no is killing chad going to have a consequence for veronica after all? how cruel, how unfair, how unrealistic

- i think she could have made black widow of wallstreet work tbh, but it would have meant revisiting her pre-series trauma of social ostracization for her family’s criminal reputation. instead i feel b&v au potential in this chili’s tonight, but it’s more of a distant interesting dream than anything related to these characters in canon

- oh no is cheryl taking advantage of her new ward for her own ego? i didn’t expect that at all

- she calls palladium the ‘fifth element missing from her ministry’ (to go along with fire air water earth) which is funny bc it’s not, it’s the 46th element and this also feels like a little nod to the movie where the fifth element is love which is also sadly missing from cheryl’s ministry and her life

- i do actually love the rapport between cheryl and britta tho

- addendum 3/21: ok so i’m watching the exorcist and the beginning is just similar enough to the beginning of the fifth element so now i’m like HM?

- not sure what’s happening in this scene bc i’m just [eye zoom]

- it’s Them

- congratulations agent betty cooper u do not belong in law enforcement girl!

- give me a good reason betty wants to be part of this organization she believes in so much that she didn’t trust them with finding her sister! the only one i know of is the one suspected from the start, that the badge enables her own lawless vigilantism to achieve her personal sense of justice.

- also it’s not clarified but we’re left to assume she was allowed to graduate bc of successfully apprehending the starkweathers,, , which betty did not directly do?? she designed the operation that the team went in with, but the only reason there was a team at all was bc tabitha insisted, and the only reason they knew where to go was bc of jughead’s investigation based on tabitha’s curiosity. so betty didn’t get to repeat her mo of going in alone. and thank god for that bc she panicked in a crucial moment and toni had to save her

- so like, where is toni’s badge?

- B & V finally talk after avoiding each other for seven years and one season???

- 🍋🍋 v’s not having a great day

- tabitha had a taste of one party with this group and she’s like, that’s more than enough

- literally what, What is more romantic than being with the person who wants to leave parties at the same time as u? party ditching has been jughead since s1 but tabitha keeps being the one who says ‘should we leave? is there maybe something else we could be doing together?’

- plus there is something Very satisfying about jughead, holding tabitha’s hand, happily exiting early from a celebration of betty’s advancing career after betty passed on celebrating any of the milestones of jughead’s career with him. nice of him to make an appearance but he really doesn’t owe it to her

- frank and alice awkwardly realize they’re the only people of their generation who aren’t kevin’s dad left and therefore each other’s singular social and/or romantic option. the cougar in alice is waking up after a long sleep. (wait i realize cougar is not the right word but,, considering she only ever goes after her daughter’s bf’s father figures i feel like there’s a logic here....)

- ghoulies back for something other than to avenge polly :/ i don’t love that. but is that my hot ghoulie from the beginning of the season? i can’t tell under the makeup lol

- the way jughead and tabitha are laughing about the garage smell sounds like an injoke from their last date 😏

- and the way jughead says ‘cohabitating~?’ with exactly the same intonation of intrigue and delight as when he first said ‘mothmen~?’ it was really day one for him tbh whether he knew it then or not

- i think it would be funny if there was a running joke now that they keep trying to have this italian food date and increasingly unlikely and disasterous things interrupt them. a sink hole. meteor. babysitter abducted by real aliens.

- Not Pop’s Tho :( :( :(

- rip to the half with less asbestos

- pop’s burning vaguely recalls a bronx tale. that film was a major parallel in hiram’s flashback ep, which in turn informs tabitha’s parent characters (via the shared restaurant preference and mob implications). unlike rd, the interracial relationship in the film is a figurative spark that ignites tensions in the characters’ lives. but,, a black neighborhood’s businesses are attacked by arson so a comparison feels worth thinking about here.

- oh yeah, this friendship is fine. never better

- ‘i don’t need confirmation’ not to defend hiram but archie and betty really adhering to a reassuring and reliable practice of law

- tabitha wilting in sadness here makes me realize how different she usually is, idk how to describe it tho. peppy but chill? i love a cool-head warm-heart character

- aw this intro to jughead’s journalism storyline

- wishing the best to the sacasa family <3 and safety and humanity to every journalist chasing truth in tyrannical places

- i love how full circle this is for jughead. way back in 5.04 he was asking his agent to help him get a writing position at the new yorker. school newspaper is not quite the same but,, at long last he has sole control over his ‘voice.’ even back in hs, betty as editor had final say on what he got to publish. i know weatherbee is still there, but i feel like they have an understanding now, u know?

- the sheriff being like ‘guys i don’t even know, this is not my bailiwick’ sure does explain some everything in this town

- toni is on the gladys spectrum of leadership but she’s protecting her ego instead of family hm. she and fangs are unexpectedly bloodthirsty, like pls calm down?? ‘serpent justice’ sounds as much like justice as whatever betty did all season. this is not it guys, come on.

-  but it’s interesting to me that betty and archie’s police investigation efforts are intercut with the serpents’ overtly violent methods. plus this tentative return to the 5.05 team-up between the police and the serpents to get something from the ghoulies. even on a paperwork level - started off looking at the layout plans of archie’s house in order to recover it, now they’re looking at maps of the whole town to save it from hiram and his ghoulie army.

- another thing to reflect back on, toni started this season doing her best as a social worker and speaking at the townhall to save the school, and she could have ended the season on a high note having saved britta from murderers and placed her in a relatively safe home! but that ghoulie poked her ego and now she wants to go out with a gang war :/ is she more like cheryl than i realized?

- on the other hand, veronica seriously contemplating killing her father, not for herself or her own ego but to save the town. i didn’t expect it to go that way, this is fun

- on the other other hand, planning a murder: always fucked up!

- i only saw little bits of 4.19 via gifs on here + i think i read the synopsis at some point, so i’m not 100% certain on this but, veronica and archie brainstorming how they could make hiram disappear has killing mr. honey vibes all over it. that’s also very fun

- the fact they’re doing this in fred’s old car tho, oof. i wonder what he would think of the state of things now. what would he be doing rn?

- reggie has gone on such a journey this season. from trusting hiram wholy to bringing about his downfall, love this for him

- his first interaction with veronica this season was in his car lot in the rain (this scene stuck in my head bc i thought it was so weird their umbrellas matched, like, oh no one of us has to change) and they talked about hiram

- so this ‘irrefutable proof’ scene feels so cool. almost all the same elements are present but it all became more intense and dramatic

- lmao is the cyan filter the new red filter? did i shake hands with the fucking monkeys paw

- this collaboration between veronica and archie despite their split + new(ish) love interest reggie contributing the clincher feels very narratively balanced with the betty and jughead + tabitha conclusion to the murder mystery arc.

- betty pulling a late night to review the documents they stole from hiram but also refreshing herself on whether or not unincorporated riverdale is part of the usa bc she’s been hazy on those details

- well well well if it isn’t the trauma she never dealt with, catching up at last with a final nod (they prayed lmao) to the ending of silence of the lambs. this is the real reason betty got to graduate: film ref pay off. in this scene, clarice receives a phone call from the recently-escaped hannibal while at her fbi graduation after-party.

- u know, now that i’m watching this again,

- that’s

- that can’t be...

- HM OK i have a theory about my boi tbk that’s too delicious to speak here, i have to treasure it and keep it safe in my heart. i’m trying to swear off guessing ahead but i’ve never wanted so bad to be right about a theory

- back to film refs for a moment, there’s a whole tangle of things here that’s so fun and convoluted i’m not sure how to take it apart from how it’s shaped in my head. join me on a betty detour:

- per betty’s nightmares, tbk was like buffalo bill. now he’s in the hannibal position opposite betty’s clarice. that’s interesting bc clarice is much less afraid of hannibal than she is of bill. in her tv spin off she has nightmares of being trapped in bill’s well after her traumatic encounter at the end of sotl. and in the 2001 film, hannibal haunts her in a much different and more complicated way. i hope think this film parallel evolving makes room for tbk to prompt betty to examine her darkness and what makes her tick and about fucking time

- speaking of darkness, the thing about betty as clarice - i don’t know if ‘opposite’ is the right word, but it’s a pretty twisted comparison

- clarice is clean. as fbi she’s above board, thorough and seeks justice by the book, not as personal revenge. in a way, clarice does want redemption like betty, but for a trauma on her childhood innocence, not bc of a mistake or choice she made. where betty has a void that makes her do things that she doesn’t (or doesn’t want to) understand, clarice has innocent lambs screaming for protection in her mind, driving her to make up for not being able to save them in the past

- sotl isn’t betty’s only clarice film ref this season. 5.04 introduces her and glen in a hannibal 2001 context. this film ref is fun bc it also ties into the dante’s purgatorio reference

- lector is hiding in florence, dante’s city, where he enjoys cultural pursuits like lecturing about ‘inferno’ and the pazzi conspiracy (a takeover attempt that resulted in banishment.... hiram?) and attending an opera of dante’s sonnets. and lector draws a parallel (literally, he sends her fan art) between what clarice is to him and what beatrice means to dante. he’s only met her a few times but she embodies his ideals and is like a muse to him.

- in the divine comedy, dante is motivated to progress thru his difficult journey of self reflection and refinement with the promise of meeting up with his dead beloved, beatrice, waiting in heaven to see him briefly before he returns to his life. after he gets all the way thru purgatory and the earthly garden, she guides him up thru the celestial spheres of paradiso (heaven). literally they go to space.

- so very early this season i thought rd might take the space alien thing in the direction of dante-jughead reuniting with beatrice-betty

- but i dismissed this thought almost immediately, for a lot of reasons but in this context the problem is,, beatrice is virtuous. plus she wants to see dante and cares about his progress, not for her own sake but bc she wants him to be free from sin and get right with god (i think that’s what the whole story is about? disclaimer i am not a dante scholar lmao). beatrice isn’t avoiding dante and she couldn’t be waiting in heaven if she had avoided confronting herself either.

- betty is not like beatrice. whatever betty represents to jughead is left in the past or possibly was never real. she resists examining her morals, and she isn’t virtuous by any stretch.

- back to betty and glen, remember this scene? what i didn’t fit in that gif set is that it reveals krendler’s resentful and patronizing attitude toward clarice is bc he once made a pass at her (despite his marriage and her disinterest) and ever since he’s taken her turning him down as an insult and one of several reasons to hate her. clarice navigates his harrassment and misogyny with her wits and without compromising herself.

- betty in contrast is having an illicit office affair with glendler sorry lol glen tho not, as we see from the rest of their interaction, bc she likes glen any more than clarice likes krendler. she and glen are both trying to get something from each other - field assignments and dissertation research respectively.

- another prominent film ref in this storyline is psycho

- there’s A Lot of betty psycho parallels throughout this season (and past seasons too). aside from the glaring - a body in the trunk of a car, plus many visual nods and shared themes like guilt and paranoia etc - there’s also a murderer, a mother, a missing/dead sister, and an investigating sister (alternately one respectable sister and one not, haha unless...?),,, all combining as doubles of each other in different ways. literally, the cooper family dynamic

- this video analysis of the film talks about this better than i can.

- no like seriously, it’s only about 10 minutes and i think it can make a big difference in interpreting betty, here in s5 but also like, always

- one psycho scene parallel is betty and glen dressing in the 5.10 hotel scene. glen appears to be down for ‘respectable’ but it’s a ploy. and betty doesn’t want him in her house anyway.

- psycho begins with a similar scene between marion and her secret lover, sam. it’s secret bc they’re not married (it’s the 60s) and he’s ashamed to marry her without the means to give her a comfortable life. but marion loves him and just wants a respectable life out in the open. she wants to move her relationship out of illicit hotel meetings and into the sphere of family dinners.

- this is not and has never been what betty wants. in her youth she perceived family dinners etc. as a false veneer hiding something rotten at home. in the musical last ep, she sees this continuing to represent a denial of an uncomfortable reality.

- betty feels (and resents) the pressure to be respectable or ‘perfect’ but her search for justice has always been more important to her anyway. like marion’s sister, lila, who doesn’t want to sit like a lady on the safe sidelines of the search for her sister. she enters the dangerous bates house to search for answers herself.

- another psycho scene parallel is the decisive shower scenes

- after a deep conversation with norman, marion remorsefully decides to go home to return what she stole and make amends ‘before it’s too late for her’ - in other words, try to be respectable for real, not with illegal short cuts. with a newly clean conscience, she takes an almost baptismal shower and is murdered

- compare: betty and archie decide to do ‘what they wanted to do since hs’ and consummate their affair, via shower sex, with no apparent remorse for the people this hurt in the past (including themselves). but they still keep it secret, not ‘respectable,’ and cut it off before developing emotional commitments.

- but betty changes her mind at the end of this ep and agrees to archie’s proposal to pursue a real relationship together, presumably out in the open. respectable.

- what changed for her? is this a ‘private trap’ that she now says she doesn’t mind even if it’s a lie? did she find the answers she wanted and now the hunt for justice is over and she can settle down? is it bc last ep she decided to stay with her mother in alice’s chosen life of suburban respectability? will betty now embrace that pretense? will she and alice find a compromise between authenticity and the shiny ‘perfect’ veneer? is that what she’ll bring to a relationship with archie’s own all american boy next door veneer?

- maybe, as per that video analysis, it comes down to authority? maybe one reason betty wants to be fbi, a position of authority and control, is so she won’t have to worry as much about anyone telling her what or what not to do, thus unburdoning the part of her identity that could never tolerate that??

- idk idk what do u think?

- also lol why can’t i figure out archie? should i be watching more manly movies? war movies? i’ll be honest i was surprised this season didn’t do a deer hunter ref with him and betty. there was a deniro film and a walken film, why not this one? it would have been too gay

- i’m physically dying this is so cute

- many things come to mind!! after the ‘date someone who leaves parties when u do’ thing, the other secret to a good relationship is to find someone whose appetite also increases during times of crisis. also that whole genre of tumblr posts on the theme of how ‘love is stored in the kitchen’

- i’m emotional about the visual echo of jughead carrying milkshakes to a table, a callback to the devotion he’s given his friends that they suck at reciprocating. now it’s just tabitha, who meets his caretaking with the revelation that she’s exactly as compassionate as he could hope for in a partner <3

- idk how to articulate this thought but. tabitha confesses she cut off her insurance to pay her employees. tabitha recently telling jughead she would pay him to take time off from the diner and look for her friend (also a former employee), which averted a transactional favor from unbalancing their relationship. and all that happened before we saw how self-critical and anxious she is of accidentally becoming like her parents. I’m Emotional

- also, hands down favorite part of the entire show episode is when jughead unhinges his jaw and sensuously shoves half a burger in as far as it will go for tabitha’s intrigued gaze

- it sure did occur to me that i possess blingee power. pls appreciate that i stopped myself from doing this to every image in this post, it took literally all of my self control

- these make me so happy tho

- first date, throwing darts. look at ‘em now i’m so proud <3 arson with the same whiskey bottle from pansky that jughead was drinking with betty <3

- actually i’m not sure about that bc the bar stocks the same bottles but in my heart it’s true

- it is objectively So funny that all this time veronica’s boutique was literally across the street from her dad’s newspaper office

- something very untouchable and stable-feeling about the centered unskewed framing of all their kisses up to now, like a fairytale structure to these shots. it feels classic and larger than life. but also less intimate - the viewer is outside of their moment. rd uses this framing for a lot of kiss scenes, pretty much all of jughead and tabitha’s so far, so it feels special that now in the season finale these two get to break their pattern and the camera is allowed closer in and at a more organic angle at last.

- the lyrics to the song playing here continue as ‘don’t u realize, unchained, we have nothing in the end but love’ and genius notes it’s a break up song. believe it or not jughead and tabitha don’t appear to be breaking up here so i’m gonna go ahead and consider it another nail in that coffin in the corner

- oh yeah and u know what’s wild? jughead and tabitha doing arson like this is possibly the coolest reference to purgatorio of the season

- ok so like, dante describes purgatory as a mountain of seven terraces (one per sin) that penitants must ascend to reach heaven. unlike in hell where sins are all bad, in purgatory sins are understood as misdirected love. loving the wrong thing (pride, envy, wrath), or loving the right thing too little (sloth) or too much (avarice, gluttony, lust). to correct a sin, a soul must temper their love thru an understanding of god and with the hard work of self reflection. as dante ascends the terraces he’s presented with virtuous exemplars to counter each of the sins. the examples are usually famous rl people, roman mythology, and biblical characters.

- the final top-most level of purgatory is the terrace of lust. one of the virtuous examples given of people to emulate is.... the roman goddess diana, a symbol of purity. the ‘chaste love’ of faithful couples is also noted as ideal.

- to move thru this last terrace, a soul must pass thru a frightening wall of purifying fire. dante is so scared by this he only gets thru with the encouraging reminder that he’ll see the woman he loves on the other side. after successfully crossing this fire (and therefore the 6 previous terraces too) a soul and all its desires will be considered correctly aligned with god and finally prepared for heaven.

- so like. jughead and tabitha are pure of heart and, in the context of this season’s overaching dante ref, their relationship is affirmed by heaven. that’s neat :)

- dante’s comedy has a theme of free will - the choice to be a good or bad person. this is what marks the punishments of hell and rewards of heaven as ‘just.’ if there was no choice, if people did bad things bc of their serial killer genes god decided they would, then it would be fucked up to punish them for it. and in purgatorio dante emphasizes that it’s never too late to choose to be better. he particularly implores people to follow a moral path regardless of what their government or society’s pressures say is acceptable

- idk i just think this is all fun and interesting. i wonder if dante will continue being an influence after this season?? the earthly garden, last stop in purgatorio before lift off into heaven, is where beatrice is waiting to greet dante along with some other very strange stuff. tho i don’t find a parallel between betty herself and beatrice, there is her ancestor character in the history bit who’s literally called beatrice. what does it mean

- also, if betty’s not beatrice, who or what might she be instead? i said i was gonna talk about the mothman,,,

- jughead’s mothman apparition is modeled after pumpkinhead. the maple buddy mothman also takes its appearance from the film. the eponymous monster is an unstoppable demon of vengeance, summoned in grief by an otherwise kind-hearted peaceful man (with help from a witch) whose young son is accidentally killed by a group of teens. the guy quickly regrets what he’s done bc pumpkinhead targets everyone involved unmercifully and indiscriminate of guilt or responsibility. and revenge can’t bring back his son anyway.

- this creature is perfectly chosen to tie together the monstrous starkweather killers, jughead’s manifesting feeling of abandonment, and betty’s personal vengeance quest. it’s those last two i’m most interested in

- i think the premise of betty’s season arc is essentially a rape/revenge narrative, whether for herself (substituting her tbk trauma in for rape) or on behalf of polly. rape/revenge is what it sounds like. i’m taking this from ch 3 ‘getting even’ of carol clover’s horror film theory book (which i really enjoyed, my copy is so highlighted it fluoresces thru the cover). a victim is attacked, then takes revenge on the attackers.

- however, betty doesn’t have much luck with this. it’s not until late in the season that she finally succeeds against her targets, when she’s forced to do things ‘right’ by going in with a team in daylight. and this success doesn’t take the form of the visceral violence-as-justice she kept attempting. neither does it follow the standard cathartic rape/revenge formula where we would have been cheering for her earned violence. she barely survives the junkyard encounter. or like earlier, when her admission that mr. chainsaw’s death made her feel better is presented as eerie and uneasy, not a triumph.

- and every time she came close to taking her vengeance - her readiness to shoot truckerboy69, to dismember mr. chainsaw - she was interrupted or stymied. almost as if the narrative itself was blocking her?

- meanwhile, the film refs in jughead’s part of the narrative establish him as betty’s victim.

- he and tabitha approach his mothman problem with a reference to the sci-fi film communion, wherein a writer, whitley, whose life is disrupted by repressed trauma of alien encounters is encouraged by his wife and his doctor to talk to a therapist specializing in rape trauma - rd’s answer to this is prof diana whitley. since jughead’s alien imagery turns out to represent his abandonment by betty, the parallel suggests what betty did to him was a trauma comparable to this kind of violation.

- during jughead’s mushroom hallucination the handcuffs, deep red lighting, and visitations from his past all combine to present a reference to the horror film based on stephen king’s gerald’s game, another story about repressed memories and coping with sexual violation. the mothman in that context appears more like the spector of death who turns out to be a physically present serial killer. betty takes on the sweet-talking role of protagonist jessie’s father who abused her then manipulated her into complete isolation to protect himself from the consequences.

- another film i believe is woven into the pastiche of jughead’s betty-trauma is drama/sci-fi mysterious skin which, again, deals with repressed memories, past sexual assault (in this case, experienced by children), and surviving a devastating feeling of abandonment.

- the horror genre’s narrative framework says jughead is the one entitled to pursue revenge on betty. but he doesn’t even seem angry with her. instead jughead follows a more sci-fi oriented journey of searching for understanding (of himself at least, if he can’t understand her).

- on the other hand, since jughead is the writer and the story is ultimately under his control (i think ! ) then it’s possible that he’s taking his revenge wherever the narrative stops betty from getting what she wants (or protects her from going too far?). like jughead’s phonecall unwittingly stopping her from killing an innocent man. i’m also still always thinking about the threat in his voicemail ‘everyone will see who u are’ and how it lines up with betty’s unsympathetic developments.

- fuck wait i forgot to fit his secret window ref in here too. pretend there’s a section in here about how i don’t believe for a second that jughead doesn’t hold some level of resentment, no matter how friendly he still is to archie and betty

- lol anyway

- toni fangs NO, do not decide ur child’s whole future for him, have we learned nothing??? Do Not Put Your Baby in a Gang????

- speaking of gangs, gang’s all here. even weatherbee. which to me just draws attention to how occasional-hiram-informant miss bell is absent lol. that’s too bad i would’ve loved to see what weapon she would bring

- in my mind i’m doing another [eye zoom] there they are 👀👀👀

-  i like to think that fred is present in the form of that truck. i’m missing luke a lot in this episode. his absence from group scenes feels stark

- love to see veronica pointing at hiram the same gun she bought to scare her stalker hiram-proxy husband, then later killed him with. most chekovian gun, very satisfying after every other gun in this series has sort of just gone away without consequence. i mean, i guess alice does still have grundy’s gun

- no offense to archie but they should have had him sit down out of frame for this imo

- spin off where hiram lives in the woods and has like a cooking show or something that he runs out of a cave. idk i’m just trying to imagine what kind of life he might pursue if revenge and money weren’t his whole personality

- the kellers are talking! interesting! kevin as a cop, that’s a no from me dawg! thank god it’s a no from him too. he’s gotta be antsy still from reading wickerman. also he’d have to start competing with betty again and i don’t think he loves that

- oh my god miner cheryl. can u imagine how different everything would be if cheryl had a day job and had to work to survive this whole time?

- Oh My God town history, i take back all my complaints. have i been complaining? i can’t even remember

- head empty, one thought:

- archibald’s sideburns are Something. but jedidiha’s stache-centerpart symmetry is Everything

- this is divine retribution on everyone who hated on the facial hair from before

- not that i’m not taking storytime with nana rose with a grain of salt. like 1890, hm? and when did palladium mining start in america again, nana? oh the 60s? the 1960s?

- then again, before i blocked half the fandom i remember seeing a fuss made over the accuracy of witchburning in that era which is very funny. like no one here drives a car made within the past 40 years and fandom never questions it but as soon as the town next to greendale on a fictional tv show does a little witchburning to justify a landgrab a few years after the rl sociopolitical fad is over, then we have to talk about realism being thrown off? i love u guys

- RETIRED AND THRIVING POP i’m ecstatic for him

- this scene was so soft and pretty

- erinn is so good and brings tabitha to life with so much clarity, even from her first appearances i never had doubt or confusion about who tabitha is or what she’s about or that she belongs. i’m so glad she’s here now and i feel kind of desolate knowing if (when, lol) i go back to rewatch past seasons she won’t be there, just a tabitha-shaped gap </3

- UNRETIRED adrenaline junky pop, omg yes he’s coming back

- anarchist jughead confirmed

- cheryl forming attachments to deceased family members Must be stopped but How

- also cheryl rewriting her own little history, gosh. guilt and repentance for the old original sin something about the colonizing blossom family committing genocide on the indigenous people here is Over. new original sin is the capitalism-driven murder of the woman nana rose just invented to catch cheryl’s fancy. i confess i’m entertained

- wtf tho

- if everyone at this meeting recommends someone for the council, then we can assume veronica chose toni. which retroactively makes sense after v and reggie propose the casino which i can see appealing to toni as potential employment for the serpents. but like. other than this convenience, i’m wondering what connection v and toni have? she appreciates fellow business women? she legitimately doesn’t know anyone else in town? we may never know

- jughead strolls into the next school newspaper session like ‘by a very unusual stroke of luck we are now suddenly the only paper in town. do not ask me or my gf for details at this time’

- taking the former blue & gold and renaming it the choice like,,, this could not be more opposite from betty ‘i don’t think i can stop’ cooper whose storylines are built out of excuses (killer genes, hypnosis, brainwashing, inescapable voids) against having choices. nice

- his little flock of impressionable young minds aw

- not to be extra candid once and once only, but there’s no one better suited to play jughead’s resilience and integrity. much respect, we’re lucky to have him here

- i’m Super sad at veronica saying to reggie ‘sure we could go be nameless faceless traders’ as if she’s not hiding out here from her new killer reputation that very much does come with a name. love them together and how they both make the best of things but there’s a bitter sweet flavor, alas

- cheryl cecedes and everyone is like, ok...? bye?

- that’s not great tho bc the whole point of reincorporation is to protect the land, including the mines on cheryl’s property, from hiram absorbing them into sodale. just bc he’s a wanted man now won’t stop his reach. did no one tell think to tell cheryl about that part??

- cheryl finishing reading that satanic curse outloud like, ‘oh....regret!’ girl if there was ever a time to read ahead before u open your mouth,,

- britta: hostage. but her life is a lot more interesting than it probably was before so, good for her

- archie is reopening andrews construction so he is now a carpenter as well as a fire fighter, community center manager, football coach, and soldier. did i forget anything? his village people solo album is closer to realization than ever

- speaking of music, jughead is entering his boogie woogie era with this very mondrian jacket that i covet

- got an anon asking me to clarify what i said in my last post + previously in my 5.08 thoughts:

- ty for asking, i wish i knew a good way to name and articulate this feeling! to preface: obv i can only ever speak for my own watch experience

- my confidence in both of these actors’ range and ability is safely limited to begin with, they both tend to be one note with kj on the under-acting end of the range and lili on the over-acting side. But that’s not necessarily bad especially on a campy show like this, and i’ve never found it to pull either of them out of what’s believable for their characters before.

- but now we have stuff like this?

- since we arrive at this scene mid conversation, i can’t gauge if her reaction is proportionate to whatever archie said or did, or if it’s as over-the-top desperately flirtatious as this appears to me

- this is a betty whose sister just died and who has gone thru unimagineable trauma in recent years, some of which she blames herself for and none of which she’s confronted. i don’t expect to see her return to a sincere level of happiness or balance at this point so naturally interactions like this seem forced to me.

- in their 5.08 ‘break off’ scene, it seemed like an adult melodramatic version of her adolescent melodramatic speeches to archie from the pilot and early s1. so maybe what i’m thinking of as untruthful is just a regression i didn’t expect?

- something else we’ve seen before is betty being exaggeratedly flirtatious (as she often is with archie) - whenever she’s trying to seduce or trick or manipulate men into giving her something. an apology, information, gang admittance, murder investigation leads, etc. but there isn’t something for her to get from archie. he’s the prize. it feels like the one she’s tricking might be herself. like ‘look, i have what i want, i’m so happy, believe me’

- and yet other thoughts nag???

- i could get if their stiff and awkward navigation of each other in scenes like in 5.15 (waiting in the diner for toni’s baby) were bc their decision to keep their hookup secret ended up being uncomfortable. but their intimate scenes together feel equally wooden so it’s possibly a catastrophic failure of chemistry on set. it’s hard to be objective about that kind of thing tho

- idk yet how i want to interpret it, either as intentional storytelling or as unreliable actors. i’m labeling it as ‘untruthful’ bc i think that will apply either way. something feels ‘not real’ between betty and archie. ‘not real’ as in like, i can see the actors acting and it breaks my immersion? or is it the characters acting deceptive? or am i way fucking off lmao i don’t know

- as i’ve also said tho, in a funny way i’m finding my uncertainty makes it more accessibly enjoyable to watch. the question feels like the point, meta and all

- oh yeah, the bomb lol

- if ur different from me and enjoy musicals, maybe you’ll like pondering if veronica’s earlier ‘tick tock’ and now hiram’s retaliatory ‘tick tick... boom’ carry any references, like for veronica and her dream career quandary

- anyway that’s so sad that betty and archie died i guess. nice send off for hiram tho

six episodes behind, who me? no, You’re watching the show too fast. slow down, take a break. chill out with me for the hour it takes to read this

- i hate the sounds and stylings of musical theater. and i have even more feelings about this particular musical but i’ll spare u the tmi of it all. i’m glad rd chose to leave out the bipolar part. here’s a critique i enjoyed.

- But i also thought this was the most fun musical ep yet bc i love insane alice, veronica finally wakes the fuck up, somebody shakes betty, and also jughead and tabitha. Jughead and Tabitha.

- Jughead and Tabitha 👀✨

- i promised orpheus redux but i’ll get to that detour in a minute. the truth is i’m avoiding jumping in to the opening scene of this bc it’s so cringey it physically hurts

- if i was supposed to take the tone of betty’s grief seriously they would not have introduced this musical like a psa skit. or an infomercial. ‘next to normal? hey what’s it about? tell me more. what number do i call to buy it?’ i’m throwing up pls

- but look, betty is finally getting what she’s wanted all season. undivided and blameless sympathetic attention without having to explain herself or her choices. she needs a caring ear after her tbk trauma but that comes with the risk of a response that sounds like ‘maybe u shouldn’t have done that’

- sympathy for polly’s death will do, except her mother is inconveniently distracted with her own grief

- also taking ur kids to see this show on mother’s day sounds like psychological torture. is this irony or is that just me

- CHARLES

- TYSON RITTER??? he’s just gonna be in every show i watch (i have only watched 2 shows)

- and none for former faux cooper child now-son-in-law chic

- wyatt nash is extremely fun and all this time we could have had this guy around but they put him in fucking jail

- but look, polly is Fine and Completely Alive :’) alice is ok actually. this pink hallucinatory betty with the hair bow and neck scarf is grotesque tho. maybe alice is not ok actually hm

- the way the warmth drains out this scene tho, this is the power of not having a red filter over everything all of the time and i am begging for it to continue

- this season but especially this episode really succeeded in making me sympathize with alice over betty, a feat

- ‘those seven years we lost’ veronica my love did u not break up with him for a reason...?

- archie ‘long term my house has more room to grow into’ he doesn’t mean for having kids, he’s talking about his man-adopting addiction. he needs room for his collection of men. he can’t believe veronica is ok with all of his men.

- the stark difference between weatherbee saying ‘sadly there’s a situation’ for britta and like, the expression of panic and expectant fear that s1 jughead had when weatherbee and keller came to get him for questioning for the car arson but he was definitely assuming they had discovered he was living in the school and were there to kick him out. we don’t know what their actual response would have been if they had found the truth but it probably wouldn’t have involved calling the guidance counselor first

- ALSO gay britta, who chooses both football and music, living in jughead’s old closet sure does sound like tempting meta fodder HUH Have U Thought Lately About How Jughead Is Bi?

- this season ras shoveled all my favorite dishes onto my plate so constantly that i literally could not physically keep up, have mercy

- something about betty saying find a way to move on,,,, , Gosh. tbf this is necessary lead up to the progress she (finally) makes by end of ep, but this display of her hypocritical insistence on controlling other people’s emotional processes without being accountable to her own is a lot.

- i’m kind of impressed by how fixed in place betty has remained this season. the only growth she’s had, i think, was coming closer to murder than ever and confirming for herself that she liked it.

- after betty yanked alice’s senses of hope and acceptance back and forth for months, dangled her in front of her captured interogatee then nearly made her an accomplice to his murder, it’s no wonder that alice’s grieving process is this detached from reality. realistically the most helpful thing would probably have been if betty just sat down and listened to alice reminisce with the photo albums for a while. if she had a physically present audience that cared, she might not be losing herself in fantasy

- not everyone wants to jog away from their past in order to cope with their choices, betty

- truly tbf it probably does really hurt to be the person who wants attention after being the person who wasn’t there for s e v e n years

- THE TRAIN

- there it is, right where it definitely always is in this totally normal not at all stolen from s1 shot of the diner’s parking lot !

- now why would rd choose a shot like that when they made the gas pumps and trucks addition such a big part of s5? probably the same reason they included that enigmatic part in hiram’s flashback ep where a passing train shakes cucina sacasa.

- both the diner and the restaurant are in the liminal zone directly next to the tracks that divide the town north and south, and the show wants us to remember it right now

- i thought So much about the train behind the diner this season mostly for wondering if it explains the building-shaking ‘alien/angel’ encounter that pop describes (and jughead’s too, tho that equally could’ve been the drink)

- her face <///3 her parents :( :(

- ‘cucina sacasa sounds.... perfect.’ alice and betty’s ‘perfect’ means not real. tabitha’s version of perfect means rolling with the situation and ready to stand her ground. i’m sad she’s clearly had practice managing her parents. but i love that she already has a plan to survive this, and the plan is: jughead

- this season is delivering Everything it promised, my trust issues are healing. their quick thinking team work, same page, i’m literally dying i love this. cole’s panicked eye acting, as delightful as his unhinged rabies eyes.

- pls look at these 2 shots i’m obsessed with for how they compliment each other:

- how do u show the camera what ur characters’ priorities are? like this. while confronting her parents she moves aside to reveal that jughead was there the whole time, and he steps up to join her against them no questions asked. and later, at jughead’s arrival she moves to join him, putting her parents behind her and out of the scene so their reaction to her and jughead leaving together doesn’t even matter.

- tabitha: dating u intrigues me but this is not a good time   jughead, eating garbage food off the table: yes it is   tabitha, nodding: yes it is

- i’m laughing but i also really appreciate that this episode does nothing to play up jughead as if he’s suddenly very put together and ‘perfect’ according to conventional standards. extremely the opposite. he spits, he’s snacking on other people’s leftovers, he shows up late with something like, crusted on his jacket. and he’s as genuine and snarky and caring as usual, and isn’t self conscious in the face of the tate’s judgement or tabitha’s anxiety

- jughead is gross and beloved by tabitha exactly as he is.

- jughead is also, at his best, very good at maintaining sight of what’s important and letting the rest roll off his back. an ideal answer to tabitha’s present stress

- tabitha is so cool and put together,, almost all the time. gun point robberies, ominous debt collectors, shitty parents, unexpected challenges, she usually has it under control. But. jughead flusters her. the possibility of romance with jughead flusters her. like after their first kiss, or the time before the key party where she was like um uh we could see a movie! or hang out :( crush so visible from outer space, aliens were jealous

- and now with the nearby pressure of her parents, she’s flustered in this frenetic pacing clean-everything way. it telegraphs that her parents make her feel less than good enough. even without knowing the details of her past, this balances her against jughead’s known (more subdued) self-esteem issues so that ‘perfect for u’ hits harder all around.

- what i hear jughead saying here is, of course i’ll be ur partner in deceptions but can we not have deception between us. like, consider: fake-dating trauma leftover from when he trusted his hs gf to do that and she used it to cheat on him. bad vibes

- i like how the lyrics of this song adapt to rd. jughead smokes weed confirmed

- ‘square the corners and straighten the curves’ this feels almost too obvious to point out but have u ever noticed circles are a bad shape in riverdale? the round entrance to the bunker of misery, bloody handcuffs, archie’s old red circle thing, the generational trauma cycle. circles = bad so, what if we just,, make them into squares <3

- the cutaway to the jukebox when jughead sings ‘i’m trying to tell u i like u’ is the smoothest spot in the scene to elide the unused lines from their full recording. but it also makes me wonder if they retained the option of him singing ‘i love u’ like the original version. the musical’s version of this song and the relationship of the kids singing it seems immature to me, ironically in a forever by judy blume kind of way - kids rushing in and defining their actions as commitment or love without having a full understanding of what that experience is.

- but after literally an entire season of jughead and tabitha developing that, specifically, between them, this song feels satisfyingly earned and appropriately placed. jughead saying ‘like’ is a contrast from how as kids he and betty said ‘love’ super early in their teen relationship - a love that in restrospect he’s beginning to understand more as a blinkered one-sided devotion. he’s mature enough now to understand the difference between mutual commitment and imbalanced obsession. and he’s experienced enough to have a careful approach to this new relationship that he really wants to work out.

- and tabitha’s hesitance to risk the best friend she’s depending on rn after recently taking the huge risk of abandoning chicago and the life her parents expect for her? not a surprise. she already almost lost jughead once - literally misplaced, but also figuratively fumbled it and could’ve scared him off. what she doesn’t know yet is jughead imprints 4 lyfe

- ‘we’ll be the one thing in this town that won’t hurt’ sorry to literally everyone else living in this town but hell yeah hell yeah

- the words to the song playing in the diner for real when they stop singing and start kissing?? ‘i’m gonna hold you tonight’

- betty creeping into the bg of alice’s hallucination is cool

- i’m very interested in how her sitcom-esque entrance from the stairs, which has repeated over and over this season with a laugh track in my brain every time, is now viewed from a new angle that foregrounds alice and puts (the real) betty far away. to me the effect supports the narrative’s sympathy with alice

- after that first very infantilized betty hallucination, now betty’s and polly’s pinks are swapped (innocent and sweet light pink vs rebellious dark pink) and after this i think betty disappears from the fantasies altogether.

- veronica’s awkward cooking joke 😔 there is nothing veronica cannot do and that includes cooking a nice dinner if she wants to show off, but how does she not know archie is the better cook and spends all the time that he’s not out jogging in the kitchen? her flashy attempt to find a role in this home isn’t matching up to this particular household, where archie grew up with fred’s cooking and mary’s takeout

- jackson would have laughed at her joke tho rip 😔😔😔

- getting less sure jackson wasn’t also archie’s hallucination

- empty chair next to archie but that's where jackson’s ghost is sitting rip not only must veronica reign at the head of the table, she would Never seat herself across from jughead if she can help it

- lmao at the depth of their friendship and appreciation for each other. ankle deep at most. their mutual tolerance is a testament to their affection for archie. i love pondering which side is generating all this hostility tho bc i’m pretty sure it’s mostly jughead but he’s otherwise so unparticipatory in social drama. is it the gentrification of it all or the boyfriend hogging?

- but i’m not lmao at veronica realizing that thing i’m sad it took her so long to see: she’s not archie’s priority and he doesn’t consider her a life partner so much as his favorite person with which to fill the relationship slot in his brittle system

- veronica looking both Through a window and At her faded reflection, love that but also i’m so sad. this house is cursed to only be a home to men! get tf out of there !

- and this shot crawling down yet another ill-fitting table, her motif 🍽️, cut to alice insane alone in her kitchen

- gosh it’s almost like the show is suggesting that traditional suburban family units with wife’s dinner on the table and a white picket fence actually suck and it’s really the people being there for each other that matters

- but like, alice’s world is great and so much fun, i can see why she wants to be there. i think more people should be there tbh. i kind of want to be there, if only for the spectacle

- keep this polly and charles pls they’re so funny

- No One had more fun shooting this than wyatt. let him out of jail for good behavior i’m begging

- alice being like, ‘look all of my children are here, even the one that’s not dead.... betty charles.’

- that belt the glove the Earrings, style icon, i love her more every time she appears. cheryl has to banish her bc every time she appeared her earrings were bigger and more powerful

- i guess they have a lot of experience by now, 5 seasons in, but how tf does the costume department match all this red

- at this point i don’t even remember what cheryl’s conflict with her mother even is. like, just move out??

- rd’s rewrite for the movie song, chef’s kiss. it’s the female sexualilty and queer themes, beloved. or maybe it’s how the exorcist’s story of a fractured family unit and demonic possession is fascinating to pair with the gothically horrifying modern psychiatric treatments and ‘normal’ family of the musical. i’ve never actually watched the exorcist, maybe i should finally get to it before i start s6

- fursona church. rd doesn’t want us to ever forget that cheryl is a furry. fursuit when? i’m stopping myself from musing about which characters would be dumb enough to do nfts bc i love all of them too much to insult them like that

- the polly and charles parts of this are So fun and the betty parts are So grim and too-late sounding. this is art, perfectly assembled

- ‘i am the one who stayed’ lies betty who stayed away for 7 years. alice’s fantasies are here to trick the eye away from betty’s fantasy that alice’s distrust in her is unfair or that her blame is unjust. 7 years and a whole season of betty running from consequences, deflecting her mistakes onto others and rigidly refusing to confront herself to make progress on her trauma - did she think no one would notice? alice just made progress tho - she’s now able to admit polly is dead. sometimes embracing anger is good medicine

- jughead has an encounter in pop’s parking lot, this feels weirdly familiar. it’s a dad instead of an alien tho. and the dad is a mobster

- this aesthetic tho ❤️‍🔥

- they made mr. tate feel more formidable than hiram ever was with just one throwaway joke line

- luckily standing up to parents is one of jughead’s best and most practiced skills. name a parent jughead hasn’t battled, u can’t. it’s not only a skill, it’s a sport. a cherished pastime for him. ‘do us all a favor and don’t show up’ is jughead’s favorite personal challenge

- i love this interesting twisty thing happening in this ep where jughead has a momentous super-rare Two whole interactions (one of which is a dinner he bails) with veronica, rich girl with a shitty intimidating dad, and at the same time is encountering tabitha’s intimidating dad and brushing up against the reality of the life she said no to. like the narrative is borrowing from established dynamics but also making it clear that jughead hasn’t suddenly changed values - tabitha shares his values and that’s what sets her apart and makes the difference.

- tabitha’s relationship with her parents also appears to be borrowing from other families with impossible standards and stifling expectations like the coopers and mccoys, and the blossoms who expected their progeny to join the family business. with just a few brush strokes, tabitha is placed right in the middle of the canvas of rd’s shitty families

- also, moving hiram out of the story and having mr. tate take on the mantle of shadowy threatening rich man provides an opportunity to consolidate the separate threads of ‘jughead fights to defend the institutions of the town from the big bad’ and ‘veronica is conflicted about her evil dad’ into one story and one relationship, thru tabitha. revolving that around the diner would be a dramatic way to end the series.

- how long did veronica last at archie’s house? was that three days?

- she’s so used to sacrificing herself to make a relationship work :( and the flipside of archie’s reliablity is he’s rigid in his ways. unchanging. predictable, even

- nope that kiss didn’t work

- quick, try the shirt

- tragically, no effect. gee u must have really fucked up buddy

- that’s not totally fair of me - it’s on veronica too for not being honest with herself sooner. i guess it’s sweet that they wanted to try?? why am i trying to be nice about this? she just seems so sad

- fangs scored points with me for ‘take a break for some lasagna’ bc i love domesticity, but he lost them twofold when he said cheryl has really changed

- ‘cheryl has changed’ and ‘cheryl is ready to be responsible for another human being’ are spine chillingly distant concepts. rip britta

- kevin’s storyline is once again actually the most tragic. nowhere better to be than to sit alone in the school after hours, looking at? sheet music?? he sings like one song in this production and he’s supposed to be the musical guy. he’s loveless and unlike the other characters in that position he grew self awareness and has been looking at his mistakes, which is growth but also painful bc he has zero real romantic prospects in this town. betty shows up and he’s like oh cool are we hanging but she actually just needs life crisis advice. later he thinks he’s gonna finally hang with friends at the diner but realizes too late that’s he thirdwheeling hard and slinks off to sit alone in a booth. whose heart would not break for this sad sad man lol

- betty on the other hand u might notice i really ran out of sympathy for. the good news is kevin is literally shaking her and saying stop feeling so fucking sorry for urself and try changing ur problematic behavior. the bad news is the performance energy in this scene completely does not match the energy of the singing and it looks bizarre

- can’t believe i agree with kevin’s advice for once. voice of wisdom kevin is unexpected but i guess that’s what happens when u finally break free from multiple cult mentalities and do some soul searching. thanks penelope. oh my god wait he’s passing penelope’s scripture of willpower on, is her church actually saving people? we need to unbanish her asap

- but betty saying ‘home is bad and getting worse’.... alice was finally reconnecting with reality, it’s just that she blamed betty in the process. ‘home’ isn’t getting worse, but it is finally challenging betty’s control. she sings ‘never had to face the world without her at my side’ like,, betty was used to being alice’s favorite and lately she has not been

- tabitha’s dad’s owl pin. idk i just like it. let’s do a twin peaks season next

- i’m so fucking happy for jughead and tabitha. and also for pop, that his family is growing with people who love him. this tate family backstory makes sense for tabitha but it also tragically makes sense for pop.

- he’s mentioned his wife and mother a few times, they’re his important figures - and the diner is special to them too. but no other family ever showed up for him before and there have always been weird things like him working in the diner on holidays traditionally spent with family. i think those have probably been oversights in the writing, but now it’s been woven in to make sense :’(

- i enjoy how tabitha and jughead can both be so direct in communicating. jughead said ‘u can just ask me’ before. tabitha says now to her dad ‘if ur upset just say so.’ and she calls her parents out for misdirecting their displeasure with her onto jughead. despite her wish for a buffer she doesn’t actually use jughead as one or let him be attacked when there’s something she can do about it. they’re both showing up for each other in this dinner scene - he’s willing to weather her intense parents with her and she’s willing to ditch them and value him as more important than they are

- the flower yoink, the fresh plaid, my heart

- hey remember that part up there that u probably skipped past where i pointed out the diner and the restaurant are right up against the train tracks? ok what if within rd’s mythology the north-south divide is the line between life and the underworld?

-  the restaurant is established as a dark place by vito’s mob presence there (speaking of which uhh, did mr. tate and vito ever meet?)

- so then what’s going on in this scene?

- that’s right, it’s time for the orpheus redux photo essay detour <3

- i already did a ted talk on this, ty in advance for tolerating a repeat of those points here. this is one of my favorite parts of this season, how could i not elaborate

- ok so

- jughead formally introduces the myth of orpheus and eurydice into the story mix in 5.14 when he’s talking to his addiction group, but the seeds of the motif were first planted in 5.03 right before the time jump

- actually i would argue that this particular orpheus-turning story as a metaphor for trust vs doubt in jughead’s relationships is something that originated in s4′s suspense arc - struck from behind (with suspicion on betty), jughead is cast into an underworld of pretend-death in order to rescue betty’s reputation. but even after she’s cleared of murder, betty’s reputation and intentions are still under question for the cheating and she never comes back from that.

- but, if u prefer, the motif is standalone in s5. the important elements are: turning to look for someone behind, and leading/following out of ‘the underworld’ whether a figurative place of depression or from a literal physical place. jughead’s version mixes the roles around - for the most part the one turning to look needs a rescue and the one behind is leading

- in 5.03 jughead turns to look and betty is not there.

- or should i say, not-betty is there. much easier to show an absence with a presence. to establish how damaged jughead’s trust is by his friends’ betrayal, we’re shown a not-betty not-archie couple. his thoughts are implicit: it’s bad enough that betty cheated, but what if she and archie didn’t show bc they’re off together and have discarded him as a friend? he leaves the diner alone.

- with no one on his side, things have been sneaking up behind him in lonely moments like this for a while

- i think the unifying theme of all 4 of these encounters, other than each being illusory or deceptions or hallucinations, is that they all are or represent figures he feels used by. if the people he trusted most could hurt him then why not everyone else too?

- what about the mothman tho? that’s not someone he knows, is it? the bathroom scene is reminiscent of that s1 scene with archie....

- ....but this association created between the mothman and the blue-lit bunker exit connects back to only one person,

- the light and the exit point are a visual phrase for the sewer escape and his delusion of betty showing up to help him (this is more obvious if u read what he wrote). the phrase reappears in the bunker convo where we see maybe his delusion persists - idk what he expected but it wasn’t for the real betty to disappear too

- popping the biggest bughead bottles

- Most Subtle Show award, last place 🏆

- am i suggesting jughead’s mothman monster has represented none other than betty? the person he has reason to feel most used by? hold onto that thought for 5.19

- i’ve pointed out how the scenes cut here bc i love playful juxtapositions, but also it helps to articulate what’s going on within this episode (5.16) and the contrasts between the characters

- jughead invites betty for a drink and a talk while trying to salvage his writing career after betty sank it, vs veronica providing drinks for chad’s business launch party as a distraction while her sabotage takes effect

- and here, chad looks back after veronica just wrecked his career and won the war that their hollow marriage became. cut to a totally flipped around version of a similar shot where jughead is unvindictively still concerned about his ex who just wrecked his career, bc she’s alone and in danger and he knows intimately how terrible that is.

- but the jughead and tabitha shot is flipped the way it is specifically to show us that he’s no longer alone. unlike eurydice and betty, tabitha wants him to look and she doesn’t vanish when he turns.

- during the sewer escape we don’t actually see jughead turn around or the betty hallucination vanish. but we do have him ‘looking back’ twice in that episode in connection to the event

- once is when he looks back at the escape by returning to the location in the present. by facing the reality of the situation, his delusion of betty’s presence vanishes and he’s able to understand that he deluded himself bc of how abandoned by her he felt.

- the other occasion is, before he falls into the rat chasm underworld, he ‘turns’ in attitude to ‘look’ at betty in reality, and he describes to her via voicemail what he sees: ‘i see you. i see what i should have seen seven years ago.’ bereft and angry, he no longer sees the idealized version of her that he has kept.

- if jughead continues to ‘look back’ at the past, at the betty he thought he knew, who cared about him, will that person vanish? did she exist?

- in the bunker convo, she vanishes when he’s Not looking. her choice is to avoid being seen by him and, since he’s ‘not her problem anymore,’ to avoid leading or following him out of the dark where she’s still searching for something to fill her void.

- that’s the thing - looking isn’t the only part of the myth. they have to move, to try to escape together: ‘can we leave this behind?’

- jughead arrives just in time to spare tabitha from her parents trying to pressure her out of the life she wants and chose for herself and into her father’s business, implied to be nefarious

- he would have stayed and endured if she wanted - an invite to family dinner followed by dancing is, after all, something that is so personal to him - but she wants to leave with him instead

- is he leading her out from behind? is she saving him? when jughead introduced the myth he switched the positions of who’s helping and who needs help so it’s hard to say

- also hard to say, do they successfully escape?? i’m not sure they do!

- they finish their date in the garage, one of the town’s og liminal spaces (after the drive-in, rip) somewhere between safety and homelessness. at least this space is above ground, unlike the bunker

- what’s important is they’re traveling together, and that started a while ago:

- i think what he’s really asking here is ‘do u trust me? can i trust u?’ of course she says yes, and she doesn’t stop following after him,,

- until She Catches Up,

- now if either of them turns around, they’ll turn together

- u know what happens when two people are leading and following and turning with each other?? yeah Exactly

- 💃🕺

- this orpheus leading/turning motif has been so embedded in their relationship development that it’s literally tabitha’s season trailer introduction shot

- ✨her✨

- this scene is very nearly a perfect rewind - jughead seated at the same booth as in 5.03 when no one showed up for him, looks up, sees tabitha, and follows her foward until she turns to see him

- then: he asks her to give him a chance

- and now: after they’ve grown to know and care about each other, he’s asking her ‘give Us a chance’ in a scene choreographed as an echo of how they met

- myth so rewritten by now, he wants her to turn around

- in conclusion: jughead said eurydice who? there is only tabitha

- their s5 arc was exquisitely crafted, everything revolved around it, they revolved around each other, them coming together is the backbone of this episode and this season, i’m never getting over it <3

- anyway

- and Then they finish their dance

- it’s also extremely fitting that this garage, where jughead once fought with betty about the strain of her brand of perfection on their relationship, is where they properly redefine ‘perfect’ as ‘crazy and messed up’, and embrace each other as they are

- this garage is also a display of jughead’s reality. his lifelong willingness (or need) to rough it to live on his own terms within his circumstances, without selling out himself or anyone else to get ahead. the exact values that tabitha shares and that brought her to riverdale in the first place

- i think, like jughead, tabitha is someone who strives for balance between people and between extremes. maybe liminal spaces are home for them after all?

- curiosity piqued tho, what would it take for tabitha to start making threats to her friends??

- yet another juxtaposing cut that i love - this time bc it revisits something from several eps ago so that when i look at this tea cup, the wilhelm scream plays in my brain

- same phonograph in the bg even

- i love how this reverses things

- in 5.10 jughead, tripping and feeling abandoned, begins to flash back to his 🐀lowest point🐀, the betty-orpheus episode. cut to cheryl at her highest point this season, dancing with minerva right before the blossom fam scares her off with the threat of a, um, ritual sacrifice. and now in 5.18, jughead and tabitha have escaped together like ‘orpheus + eurydice but with a happy ending’ and finally get to finish their dance. cut to cheryl and toni tea time where toni, tho moved on in a new relationship, hasn’t been scared off from trusting cheryl enough to ask an important favor. nature is healing

- this also continues what i think is some kind of parallel connection this season between writer jughead and painter cheryl and their romantic journeys.

- first, when jughead brings up the orpheus myth in 5.14, cheryl follows it with her image of herself and minerva as cupid and psyche - another myth that hinges on ‘a look’ between lovers that is a breaking of trust. psyche ‘looks’ at cupid and loses him (he flees). but neither psyche nor her lover is dead, she’s able to overcome the separation her look causes by completing quests (even going into the underworld) and they get a happy ending.

- second, i think it’s impossible in the present to think of orpheus and eurydice without the movie ‘portrait of a lady on fire’ coming to mind. a lesbian love story with one party a painter like cheryl. fire is an important motif to cheryl (and to jughead) and also relevant to her relationship with minerva when the burning groves trigger minerva’s departure (....and later to jughead and tabitha)

- jughead’s switching around of the myth’s roles (rescuer and rescuee, following and leading) recalls this film also, where the two women switch between the roles (’we’re in exactly the same place’ says heloise, the object of the ‘look’ looks back) not to mention that his switch puts himself in the feminine ‘eurydice’ postion of being rescued, lesbian jughead prevails

- also a fun fact, like any myth the orpheus and eurydice story has been retold in different forms by different people. in the lady on fire film, the characters read it from ovid’s metamorphoses. there’s also an earlier version told by the poet virgil. in dante’s comedy (where the 5.04 purgatorio ep title comes from) dante imagines virgil as his insert character’s guide thru the afterlife. here’s the fun fact part: ‘book four,’ the section of virgil’s book ‘georgics’ that includes the orpheus myth (maybe like jughead’s ‘episode four’ manuscript title?) discusses bees and beekeeping at length

- opposite of red filter??? u Know shit’s serious. also where is this camera sitting?

- alice dressed to match polly’s urn. this is not quite the new pineapple jacket but same spectrum for sure

- betty for The First time this season admits to someone’s face - alice - that she knows she hurt them

- that’s not totally fair of me to say. she did apologize to polly for some of her past treatment. but then she immediately went against that apology and attacked polly. but then she did also send an apology voicemail for that. but it was also too late and it’s not likely polly ever heard it. so, like,, u know

- this contrast between jughead and tabitha accepting themselves and being able to redefine the word perfect to mean 'crazy and messed up’ to suit their reality, while betty and alice aren’t able to redefine it, or even the word ‘normal,’ they can only 'get by’ and settle with normal-adjacent

- conservative values suburbia just does that to u

- there’s also the contrast between cheryl umm exorcising her mother who decries her sexuality and relationships + tabitha being like ‘actually fuck mother’s day, my life and my boyfriend are more important than pleasing the parents’ vs betty promising to exchange her life for her mother’s mental health.... which puts betty in proximity to the boy next door for the foreseeable future. it’s difficult to trust whether that’s part of betty’s reasoning or not given her past lies + uncertainty of herself, even if as of rn she must believe veronica and archie are happily ‘shacked up’

- cut to the diner scene with jughead and tabitha and third-wheeling betty-proxy kevin, and the bg music is a song with the words 'i’m a woman in love with a man in love with a woman who’s nothing like me.’ this episode is brutal

- anyway, jughead flirts with shakespeare lines: confirmed. archie sweet prince u don’t know what u missed. ‘mortality’s strong hand’ is from king john, which idk anything about so king john just makes me think of this, speaking of musicals

- tabitha sharing her thoughts on polly’s memorial makes me desperate to know what her opinions would’ve been on the other funerals we’ve witnessed. what i’m really after is where would she rank the viking funeral for jason’s rat infested corpse

- and now they have a hand touching motif?? help. they’re very good at playing sweet as sincere without being saccharine

- speaking of which, i did not expect to vibe with romantic fangs and toni but! vanessa and drew’s performance and this (extremely close up whew) intimate moment were really nice?? the domestic build-up to it primed me for it. that’s my weakness

- also bi’s in a relationship and friends-to-lovers, this season spoiled me

- tho at the same time, something about the hetero-passing nuclear family unit being the last relationship standing when the dust of the polycule-implosion cleared.... in the episode with the musical about a family trying to pass as the ‘normal’ status quo. that baby gets one mom and one dad after all. kind of smacks of correct christian family values. my brain wants to pick at it especially considering the direction they go in the next ep

- betty wandering around turning on the infinite number of lamps in the cooper house, a comedy. 

- and a very hitchcock rear window shot that perhaps reinforces how betty is compromising her life to stay ‘married’ to alice, mother-child codependence being another v hitchcockian theme

- rear window is interesting to consider along the lines of how ‘the look’ relates to jughead’s orpheus (seeking reciprocation) vs ‘the look’ in this film (avoidant, one-sided) as in this passage from an article that considers the interrelation of ‘the murder story and love story thru the theme of voyeurism.’ (betty being jeff here):

- not that she’s trying to see jughead anymore or, especially, be seen by him after he threatened to share what he sees. but i wonder if this theme from rear window could be useful for understanding the ‘window of light in the dark’ aspect of betty’s attraction to archie?? she’s so haunted by shame, maybe the relative privacy of the two windows - limited, controlled - has appeal? idk i found lili’s performance in that 5.08 scene so far out of character for betty that i’m still trying to figure out what to make of that bit

- i have other thoughts on betty (and polly) and hitchcock this season but i’ll save it for my 19 thoughts or another post so we’re not here all night. not trying to keep it secret tho - it’s psycho

- i was so excited for a minute that we weren’t being made to watch another weird funeral bc so many people die on this show. i like that they messed with the order tho. put events in the order that makes the story work best. rules are fake

- veronica singing in front of the lost ship painting?? hello???

- that’s the second time this painting has been in back of a moment of disconnect between veronica and archie. the first was i think in 5.11 when she came back from the city and archie blows her off while she’s upset

- archie might be dismayed that veronica is leaving him but not that dismayed bc, as the pair of paintings suggests, he has a back burner lit

- not to digress from v’s moment, but she and archie both inherited these paintings from jughead and tabitha. jug stopped needing the lost ship at this moment in 5.08 when tabitha brought him to dry land and he finally got a little peace before they moved on together to other metaphors

- look how nice they match the frames and the upright trees and horizontal clouds

- to prove he’s done with the ship painting, in the next ep he appears beside the boat safely off the water and indoors, and with paintings of shore lines. istg i’m not making this up, it’s consistent. veronica inherits the stormy ship, it Sinks, and reggie shows up with a life boat. treat him right this time v !

- is cheryl and britta’s chess game a queen’s gambit thing? i haven’t watched it but idk any other chess-prominent media. other than, like, the seventh seal. uh oh. maybe it’s just the blossom house still doesn’t have a tv or more contemporary board games. wait no there’s a max von sydow link via the exorcist lol idk this show makes my head spin

- jughead is the only one at this event being respectful to polly by not singing

- memorial had to be organized like seating feuding family members on opposite sides of the aisle lmao. penelope kept kevin

- sorry for laughing but they really got polly a bright pink tomb stone. also notice those train tracks above the cemetery

- did polly not have friends of her own? were they too ghoulish to invite? someone out there knew polly and it wasn’t a single one of these people

- i’m still not convinced she’s actually dead bc that was so many red herrings but i’m also still mad that she is

bestie i lied to you it’s not short

as of writing this i’ve finished watching s5 but not started s6 and i just completely stopped looking at my dash here to avoid spoilers sorry guys miss u

ok

- betty is mad that tabitha isn’t letting her solve her problems her usual way, by making herself as vulnerable to murder as possible. tabitha says too bad

- betty explaining the killer’s building desire to hunt and kill with which she is intimately familiar:

- this ep is funny bc by the end betty’s serial killer instincts are completely validated, the killers were in fact a family exactly as she predicted. and at the same time the show points to the methods she’s been keeping to and rips them up one by one, starting in this opening scene

- trying to do it alone, snapping at a valid lead bc it came from jughead it was a little weird, isolating herself and disregarding her emotional needs so that she’s been operating at her absolute worst, searching for violence to cope with her frustration with herself. none of this got her very far. a dead suspect, she and alice are completely traumatized, she didn’t find polly on her own, and now she won’t adjust her tactics to spare herself and tabitha from mortal risk. it takes tabitha’s intervention saying ‘enough is enough, work in a team’ in order for this thing to finally be resolved

- also, i don’t have super clear memories of that s2 (i think?) exchange between betty and kevin about his ‘socially wrong’ cruising vs her ‘socially acceptable’ camming and bdsm interests, or however that went. but that sure would be interesting to reflect on now as kevin was bashed this season while betty is once again exploring a shallow version of fringe sexual practices without consequences.

- meanwhile curdle jr doesn’t feel the same consequence-immunity as betty and he doesn’t get payed enough for this shit. And to make matters worse it looks like he’s developed an expensive latte habit to cope. needs that corpse $$. or maybe it’s that whole new extra lab he has to pay for? convenient for all the dna testing he’s about to do that’s definitely above the paygrade of a small town mortician

- curdle moving up in the world, s6 main pls i love him

- cheryl out here mistaking her personal journey for an everyone journey. glad to see that getting in touch with her spirituality has swayed cheryl back from the dangerous precipice of realizing other people exist separately from her. whew that was close. compensating others for labor?? what a drag. the town and the people in it still have physical needs like infrastructure not being on fire?? there’s probably a spiritual solution to that but whatever,,

- would love to see the group huddle that resulted in the miners picking archie as their spokesperson to cheryl

- that kandinsky tho. chad has fictional knock-offs, v has real things. or at least things that look real

- WAIT this return to the across-the-table motif from their very first scene together, with the candles framed between them and everything but it’s lawyers instead of dinner omg. that’s a gorgeous shot too. table could be longer wider tho

- ‘fine u worm’ says veronica to chad in his little worm colored blazer. i take back every fashion related insult i threw at him bc i love that. where did he even find it

- wonder if wearing pink is his un-selfaware response to the pink flight attendant get up she wore while destroying him last ep. he’s forever a step behind her

- i’m in mourning for veronica. everything has become a territorial dispute to her, including her heart. she flings her insistance that all she needs is archie at chad as an attack to diminish him. but even that is giving him more power over her - doing what hurts chad the most isn’t a formula for her best life

- wait this whole opening segment just comes down to money?? curdle needs it, betty has enough to not worry about eschewing a job for vigilantism and handing out bribes. the women who the killers keep targeting need it and seem to have no option but the dangerous highway. archie needs it but for the town, not himself. cheryl has it, hates to part with it and uses other people to get more. veronica has it and will throw it away to move people in and out of her life bc she knows given time she can always get herself more.

- lesbian dominatrix penelope saying ‘my will is a steel rod, how’s urs?’ to gay disaster kevin. god what a show

- no but the confusion of film homage here, I Love It

- penelope says wicker man to kevin and per usual kevin misinterprets and picks up the novelization of the wrong movie.

- there are two wicker man films: the 70s original and a more recent remake with nicolas cage, in all the glory that can be relied on to entail. we know which she meant bc bees are central to the cage film and ‘completely absent from the original’

- an aside, reason number one million why this is my favorite show: it sent me looking for film analysis to find an exquisite article that happens to be hosted on the website bee culture dot com which is,, , exactly what it sounds like. whoever’s niche that is, i love u call me

- anyway, cheryl and minerva’s subplot with the cursed now-barren maple grove and the human sacrifice thing was leading straight to this too. nana rose takes the part of lady summersisle. penelope is also in the manipulating role of the cult but hang onto that for a second.

- which version kevin is looking at doesn’t make a huge difference except that kevin failed to appreciate penelope watched a nicolas cage film and it made her think of him it’s interesting which of the sacrificed protagonists kevin has identified himself with

- both versions are too intent on being the hero and saving the little girl so they miss the red flags that they’re being led straight to their own doom

- but instead of cage’s damaged cop character, who’s a little odd but selfless  and is being pulled by his heartstrings, kevin identifies with the stiff straightlaced virginal cop who is so devoutly christian that he’s driven on his rescue mission out of horror and disgust for the devious sexually-open pagan society he’s confronted with

- much to discuss,,,,,

- the way that this plot is kevin and cheryl, two queer characters, wrestling with spirituality, shame and, imo, ultimately trying to deal with how they nuked their most significant relationships.

- these films hit close to something i think i mentioned earlier in the season as being so weird and glaring on the show. in both wicker man movie cults, coupling is just for the purpose of reproduction. on rd, idk, it’s like there’s this sensitivity in the writing to the distorted traditional idea that babies legitimize a relationship

- also, gay kevin is afraid of religion becoming another cult that will change him or kill him. lesbian cheryl is full of answers but accidentally slips over a line into satanism and a vendetta against the entire town (oops that’s skipping ahead). the gay catholic dissertation i definitely don’t have room for in this post

- and above all kevin doesn’t notice that by taking penelope’s film ref warning at face value he plays right into her hand - exactly as the film protags do via the cults’ manipulations - altho fortunately not to his death. this is some tidy homage

- anyway my very favorite part of all of this is its potential as an illustration of rd’s show-audience dynamic. penelope making an absurd but meaningful reference is to the show as kevin missing the fucking point is to this general fandom.

- i am Three minutes into the episode girl help

- the toni and student britta scene is really sweet but i feel a little blindsided by this show deciding to model positive behavior for young people without a twist...?? that’s new

- i guess the twist could be like, if despite all best efforts, coming out to ur parents sucks and goes badly, definitely run away along the nearest infamous murder highway.

- altho now that i’m thinking about it like that, tabitha’s approach toward jughead’s drinking and trauma has been an actual excellent example of how to be supportive toward loved ones in that position. a very pleasant relief to me after i was braced for a mess. perhaps this season’s effort to get it right in certain important ways suggests that the places where things are glaringly wrong are intentional storytelling hmmmmm 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

- sorry i just think the implosion that a chunk of this fandom is going thru rn is really funny.

- actually tbh i have to laugh bc the lack of clarity, humanity, and what i consider to be basic observation skills from noisy voices in the fandom is pretty disturbing otherwise. and that’s not even getting started on the malicious and racist distortion of the show

- idk what there is to do except continue enjoying in my own peace. i hope the same for anyone else struggling with the shit flooding our space

- anyway,

- idk, i want to talk about this veronica plot but everything involving hiram is literally just him repeating himself and it’s really boring. he’s evil and sexist and uses pawns instead of ever doing anything unless it can get him very close to shirtless archie and he regards the men in veronica’s life as so much more significant than her that he thinks removing one or two will clear her schedule to automatically make room for him. she just wants to get away from him and chad. this is exhausting.

- i do think it’s funny that chad thought if i shoot the other guy she’ll definitely love me then. exactly buddy, it’s gonna work for sure.

- see i enjoyed chad being here to mix things up a little. could’ve been interesting if this was more like hiram helping v by giving her shitty ex the rope to hang himself. but he and chad come across to me as pretty equally deranged so even tho that’s the effect, i don’t feel like it was the intent. no one in this equation actually cares about veronica.

- literally, Literally, my insane esoteric grandma did that maple syrup cleanse. a real thing that real people do. we had to talk her down before she fucked her whole pre-diabetic self up. we have to talk her down from a lot of things. cheryl reminds me of her more and more. love u grandma

- lol at tabitha springing her plan to get this season’s mystery solved on both jughead and betty at the same time so they’re surprised into agreeing to work together. she just spent Ten Days listening to betty complain about not being allowed to work alone and she already knows all about the shit betty pulled on jughead that would make him unamendable to this. but she needs this job done with haste and she’s smart

- this diner conversation kept pinging my memory. it closely parallels 1.07, the first public display of a budding relationship. jughead’s love interest is stressed about a missing person and asks for help searching. jughead offers support and wishes they were alone

- POV they are having a moment and u are intruding on the moment

- not to put too fine a point on it but this moment is so exclusively jughead-tabitha, he barely looks away from her the whole scene. when he has to look at betty it’s either a glance cut between her and the table or it’s a flat direct look that doesn’t return her smile - which is the only positive indication she’s given to him since one (1) other, the time he offered to help her with polly, and is kind of a departure from her uhhh departure last ep. i feel like her response here has more to do with tabitha complimenting their past detective work than anything to do with her consideration toward jughead as a person.

- as for how jughead feels, his dialogue gives a hint. he addresses only tabitha and offers ‘anything I can do’ and that ‘i’ll start’ by reading the case files. he agrees to tabitha’s request to work with betty but there’s no ‘we’ or ‘us’ with her anymore. earlier in the season he was willing to do more with and for betty and she threw it and all his other olive branches back in his face. now after everything he’s beginning to heal and has arrived at a much colder more guarded relation to her. his focus and concern is tabitha and the missing women.

- interstitial where chad attempts murder and archie shrugs it off like huh that was weird

- was that it, chad???

- i love when things get wrapped up in a neat little bow. the time jump starts with betty buried in old case files and trying to get away from them and back into the field. and now jughead is diving into a pile of old case files to help resolve this mystery that betty has been unable to crack alone in the field. also another example of this ep validating betty’s instincts but shredding her methods

- appreciate jughead using gender neutral language for the dead tongue guy lmao 👑

- also u know me, i love the show’s name games. lerman, whose name played on actor logan lerman’s name (as a nod to a film where a writer disappears), now has an updated full name: lerman marshall logan

- coincidence OR it's a very funny addition to the running joke about ships that’s been going strong. logan marshall was the pen name of a guy who wrote about the most famous sunk ship when it happened.

- this is a comedy

- cut to the morgue :/

- jughead is done offering betty even a minimum of emotional energy. when curdle ominously says the body could be polly, the camera cuts to jughead eyeing betty and backing away with arms crossed. compared to later when they learn that it’s squeaky and he’s already reaching for tabitha when she turns to him <3

- i love this episode’s tonal confusion. this morgue scene has all these sad heavy notes of polly and squeaky and brutally murdered women and betty’s implied trauma and jughead’s changed outlook on her. but then there’s the absolutely irreverent comedic smash cut from curdle’s swab approaching betty’s face to chad’s broken nose

- and Then, it switches between chad getting literally nothing in the divorce he was previously winning, sitting in hiram’s stark office of no-family and no-palladium wealth, to the blossom fam + kevin sitting amidst excess, feasting on a pile of breakfast that cheryl is intentionally denying herself.

- i am Ten minutes into the ep what the Fuck

- did hiram ever make the connection that veronica only stole the palladium to make up the money for chad’s failed scheme? awkward

- he tells chad ‘u lost my daughter forever’ but it’s hiram who really lost her by making the wrong play on the game board and finally losing the game, his last hold on her.

- the lyrics to the song playing during veronica and archie banging were so distractingly strange i had to pause it and look them up. so the mood is like, something about not understanding ur partner and also comparing sex with them to using exercise equipment. that’s super romantic and probably not meaningful at all

- speaking of interesting music choices, the delicate emotional piano that plays while betty stares blankly at her traumatized mother - who literally Just said she’s trying to distract herself from polly - and blurts out ‘the body is uh dismembered’ like,,, ,  betty that’s fucked Up. she swung from outright lying to alice about the blood match to whatever this is

- cheryl and kevin, oh boy

- also penelope,,

- here beside her we’ve got two paintings, not by cheryl

- the rape of tamar is a biblical story with pseudo-incest, sexual assault, family and social dynamics of how sexual relationships reflect on individuals especially re: gender, and how rape and biblical marital laws interact

- this vibes so interestingly with penelope’s backstory of nana rose adopting her to groom into a sister-bride to one(?) of her twin sons

- the second painting is the death of socrates, that greek shit!! he chose execution by poison instead of fleeing to exile so as not to compromise his belief in the law and undermine his philosophical teachings. please excuse this sparknotes version lol

- kevin on the other hand is like, exile PLS. he’s the last character in this town that would sacrifice himself for a principle. so if socrates represents anyone at this party, it’s not kevin. then who?

- in a socratic kinda way penelope is encouraging him to question things and think for himself. so could it be her? is she encouraging kevin to grow some integrity and wisdom?

- i mean lol, no. penelope successfully manipulated kevin’s sense of self preservation to fulfil what she wants which i guess is to put him on a bus back to betty bc thornhill needs clearing out for the next plotline to remove cheryl’s allies

- socrates was charged with corrupting youth and worshipping false gods. penelope would point to her daughter and she’d be right. cheryl’s gaia is from the traditional greek pantheon (or like a grandma to it) but is that who she’s really praying to?

- so cheryl is socrates in this scenario???

- lmao

- jughead at the table with betty but he’s not drinking coffee with betty. his cup is upside down. they’re regressing even further from that meal earlier lol. then again at least he’s looking at her now

- in case ur wondering what kind of thoughts haven’t made the cut in some of my earlier posts, i have been wondering all season: does anyone actually order the blueberry milkshakes?

- blueberries worst fruit imo, stick in ur teeth, unforgiveable. i like this shot tho

- alice pleads with the killers on tv* and betty comes dangerously close to expressing an emotion in public. is she having a realization about alice’s emotional state and how negligent betty has been toward her while avoiding her own problems? does it have to do with jughead, who she looks at when alice says ‘closure’ which betty has denied to him for 7 years? who knows

- alice doesn’t know who she’s appealing to yet but *do the mothmen have a tv? their house doesn’t even have a phone. the trucks do have radios tho. i’m thinking too much

- why did curdle think to test the trucker against betty? idk how dna works. is he making his own database of local criminals? curdle jr crime spin off pls. jk. i’m lying it’s not jk i do want that i’m still thinking too much

- i’m sad about squeaky :( her brief intro pretty much established that she would die but i still was rooting for a twist where she comes back as a cool villain who turns evil on the town simply bc she just kind of didn’t vibe with it. idk why i thought that would make sense but i was ready to be surprised i guess

- tabitha is also very sad. betty appears to be mildly annoyed

- no like, listen. in concept, i find something charming about the grim hard boiled miserable isolated noir detective cliche layered with a fresh and ambitious young woman. especially when, as far as i’m aware, that’s a big contrast to the majority of betty’s comics origins (the hunger is the only exception i know of)

- on screen tho, this season has been a lot of go betty give us nothing and i don’t think it’s an issue with the writing. the story explains this character is hardened to violence thru constant exposure and she’s exhausted by her own traumas and is for whatever reason unable to manage herself. on paper all good. but the performance is kind of a flatline

- hiram has zero security on his office huh. how many people this season have walked right in? i think he’s doing it on purpose bc he’s lonely. go on a singles cruise or something hiram, u literally don’t have to be here

- man to his estranged daughter for whom he just blew up a mine: stop being so dramatic

- but guys the emotional truth of tying ur dad to a chair to force him to listen to the damage he inflicted on u in ur childhood. why would anyone need other shows when this one’s right here

- also the truth in high school guidance counselors giving absolutely fucked up inappropriate advice right as ur making important choices about the rest of ur life and are about to leave the realm of their responsibility. watch out kids

- and finally, the tragedy of jaime the kid feeling like he has so much to prove to the world, growing up to raise veronica to feel like she has everything to prove to him :(

- on one hand i don’t love important character motivation being dropped in so late and in such a disconnected way, especially for veronica who has received substantially less time and focus for her emotional journey than All the other mains.

- but on the other hand, i do like how this fits her. this show often leaves blanks to be filled in by assumption but veronica gets to say outloud, essentially ‘u wanted a son and i wanted approval so i did the math at the expense of my own needs.’ i think it’s pretty clear that her marriage to hiram-lite™️ chad was her attempt to force this motivation to line up with her identity, but now it’s easier to read her relationship with archie (in each of its forms) as also being about making these pieces fit for her. archie is the ‘son’ that hiram responds to without fail, back in hs and even still.

- to that point, there’s a whole extra archie-and-hiram layer of how archie has been the privileged white ‘all-american’ kid that jaime luna didn’t get to be or feel like. and now he’s digging up the palladium that hiram’s dad dreamed of finding + he’s undoing hiram’s work to destroy things. but friends, i care about hiram not at all and about archie considerably less than veronica so it’s whatever to me

- and for all that i think this fits veronica and her overall storyline well, i hate where it’s taking her. but... maybe she needs to go all the way before she gets anywhere else? i’m here for the journey i guess

- this episode writer’s vendetta against people named tim. punched by britta and a maple corpse

- grandpa blossom sounds uhhh interesting. he was the son of the guy who killed his own brother and caused the cooper split, right? or is he the guy? everytime i try to figure out the blossom family tree it blows a fuse in my brain

- also i’m suffering deeply bc:

- i was of course referring to rd’s very own reclusive inbred family, the blossoms. and then :) that’s exactly what it was :)

- dismissing this type of answer as too obvious is always a mistake on this show and i always do it :)

- plot twist, dreyfuss was his first name. starkweather is a whole thing if ur into true crime but if ur into true crime u probably already know bc that’s basically example number one. i like this actor, i think he hit the mark perfectly on both angles of this role. this also makes it feel right to me that he was so chill about chatting to fbi, like it was a game, when most actual conspiracist reclusives probably would not love that.

- betty’s ‘u and i have both been there’ is such a fun spin on ‘u brought me there to investigate and i said this is a waste of time and left to take my rage out on truckers.’ like betty sweetheart no

- unanswered tho: what did pop tate see at the diner way back? i guess the obvious answer is nana rose drugged everyone? i like it as a door left open tho

- the mine explosion, gotta be honest, this event is the opposite of gripping. hiram did it, there’s no mystery. archie won’t die here and his concern focuses the scene on eric, who could die and i would be sad about it - but eric is pretty neglected by the plot, barely involved with anyone other than archie, and his character development wrapped up last ep so like.... low stakes. veronica, cheryl, kevin and frank care about the situation but i mean. i’m not invested in any of their relationships to archie or even to each other so there’s nothing grabbing me here

- would i have felt differently if reggie was there tho???

- consider: the tension between him and archie regarding reggie working for hiram is still so unexplored. the two of them digging on opposite sides of hiram’s latest death trap could’ve been neat. plus the missed opportunity for reggie’s response to seeing veronica’s panicked reaction to archie in peril. if anyone was going to be an emotional key into these scenes for me i think it would’ve been him

- lmao why am i perpetuating the problem i have with the show in my own head tho?? this is the thing i want less of in the narrative - making it about the guys instead of her. i’m frustrated by how unevenly this season brought out reggie but i’m also frustrated by veronica’s everything

- like, i don’t love the execution around this mine shit, but at least there is an emotional crux fixed on veronica. plus you know, whatever is... going on with archie. u ok dude?

- being mentally ill is good actually bc a pack of ghost boyfriends is a great substitute for essential things like self esteem and not being trapped in a mine

- fangs and toni declaring they’ll watch each other’s backs and be there for each other no matter what. cut to betty and jughead looking on with the shared knowledge that Somebody blew it.

- almost as awkward as the ‘hey’ thing

- am i laying it on too thick? idk it feels fair lol

- i thought that toni and fangs exchange was kinda sweet and, spoilers, i was surprised how much i liked them in the following ep. but upon first viewing this i was def still seeing sibling vibes not that that ever stops ras

- bye chad, u sucked but i enjoyed ur antics

- i think veronica has earned her violence against these people who pose as loving family members but are really just sociopathically obsessed with controlling her. that ride of the valkyries moment, glorious, coming into some kind of power

- except it still feels like she’s turning into hiram. archie, ‘all she needs’ and ‘alive, above ground, waiting’ for her, is as much a pawn to her now as he was to hiram and chad.

- later it skips to her relaxing in the bath with archie, no emotional check in, no moment where she and archie compare notes on the major events they each just went thru. as far as we're shown, they both allow this relationship to go unmaintained. there’s the physical delights of sex and each others bodies, but no conversation about each others internal worlds

- i’m frustrated watching this bc her connection to archie feels immature at this point. i think her arc has been continuing on a journey toward knowing her own mind, recognizing the difference between what she does for others and what she does for herself. archie’s even on a similar course, but where he fixates on other people’s tangible problems to consciously avoid his own, veronica convinces herself her own needs don’t exist. bad combo.

- ‘it’s a little cold’ says jughead when he confronts dreyfuss. hey which of the five possible seasons is it rn?

- wait speaking of weather seasons, i have meta i never posted anywhere and now chad is dead and hurricane season just ended so there will never be a moment for it after this. r u ready for a complete detour:

- look i had a gif for it and everything

- i only paused this scene to laugh at chad for doing the classic ‘ur book is upside down’ thing, but then it sent me down a rabbit hole. that paper reads ‘hurricane tyson looks to make landfall’

- first, a hurricane bg detail in the veronica-chad-hiram story could be a twisted nod to the tempest, that would be so fun to pick at

- but for the moment i’m more interested in the storm name they chose for this newspaper, assuming it’s not a sports joke

- disclaimer, i am your friend not ur meteorologist

- storms of a certain size are named using a premade series of lists that rotate on a six yr cycle. the lists don’t change so the names repeat. names are only retired from a list when a storm is so destructive that it would be insensitive and confusing to keep using it for new storms, in which case it gets replaced with a new name starting with the same letter.

- actually i think they did recently adjust the lists to keep up with climate change’s increasing number of storms But the point is,

- ‘tyson’ has never been on any of the official lists, current or past

- that’s cool, film and tv have to step carefully around the storm name topic. i wasn’t expecting rd to use something real but bc of the fucked timeline i was curious if it could indicate a future year, or be a nod to other media. as far as i could find, tyson hasn’t been used there either.

- and yet, hurricane tyson has a hit on google??

- 'hurricane tyson was one of the worst storms to hit haiti since hurricane matthew in 2016.’ why don’t i remember this? category 4, 5312 fatalities, damages totaling $9 billion in 2043 usd. this is horrible?? formed october 2, 2043, hm

- i lied it wasn’t a rabbit hole, it was a wormhole to the future

- jk it’s just that there’s an entire wiki for fake ‘hypothetical’ hurricanes that people make up and post complex encyclopedic entries about. u know, as people do. if ur confused or upset by this apparently irreverent attitude to the tragedy of storm damage, ur not alone. but maybe u already read all about it from slate in this article that went up during the s5 development period, which i found while frantically googling why this wiki exists bc i felt like i was hallucinating

- the whole article is fascinating but i found one passage in particular vibes very well with my  watching experience of this show and being in this fandom:

'i wondered whether hurricane writing could be a cathartic or educational exercise, or if the mere choice to conjure up such deadly events was inherently tone-deaf and insensitive. so i reached out to ashlie brown, a trauma therapist based in houston, to see what she thought of hurricane fiction. “as a trauma therapist working in this community, my first inclination is that’s something really fucking insensitive,” brown said on a phone call with me. then she took a moment to step into a writer’s shoes and rationalized the appeal. “i think there’s a lot of sensationalism or fascination with, a) things we don’t know a lot about and b) things that are scary, twisted, dark. i could see how that might be entertaining to people who haven’t experienced it,” brown said. i pointed out that the writers were young and that a few of the teenagers had even lived through hurricanes. this didn’t change brown’s opinion. “i think the healthy way [to deal] with something traumatic is to be able to talk about it and be real about the fear and the helplessness and the powerlessness felt when someone experiences something life-threatening,” she said. “maybe writing a fictional story about something like that would give them an outlet to express something they were feeling, but didn’t get to express in therapy.”’

- this whole hurricane meta has been sitting in my drafts since chad’s paper appeared, in 5.06 or 5.07 i forget, at which point it seemed significant enough to the season’s plot to be worth hanging on to. and now that the season is complete i feel it’s even more relevant - to traumatized writer jughead but also just to the overall tone of the show.

- did whatever aspect of riverdale production include a storm name used on this wiki knowing it could lead a curious viewer here? i mean, my guess is yeah probably. their newspapers are always intentionally designed and pretty canon-relevant - past examples have indicated the town’s economic decline, refs to sabrina, nods to concurrent or past plotlines, and sometimes nods to relevant real journalism. this hurricane thing was almost invisible and extremely indirect, but that’s also standard for a lot of the show’s details. there’s very little onscreen that doesn’t have a specific reason to be there, so i don’t feel like it’s a reach

- anyway um thanks chad, rip

- this is definitely what u were hoping to read when u clicked on this post right

- also i hope u and ur family are able to be safe from tornado season if you’re in affected states

- ↪️ back to This episode,

- betty, u don’t have ‘colleagues at the fbi.’ u quit and then glen had to take the badge u were using to impersonate an agent

- polly :(

- first of all, polly is not dead. citations: fig. a) we never saw a body, and fig. b) i do not want her to be dead

- fig. c) the manson thing???

- lmao OK FINE so this lonely highway plot had some red herrings

- if polly really is dead that sucks. and i don’t say that bc it means i guessed wrong about her, that’s just kind of funny. or bc of what this means to betty and alice altho that is tragic. but bc it’s a really depressing conclusion to a character who was only ever given narrative space as a kind of foil to betty, enduring horrors that act as warnings, and whose voice only broke thru to fight for herself on rare occassions. in the whole story-scape of rd, it absolutely makes sense that she would be fridged for betty, but that doesn’t make me less mad at it.

- the cooper sister relationship has always been less about their interaction and who polly is, and more about what polly represents and how betty compares to her

- :(

- ok wait, i am overwhelmed with the rest of my thoughts idk how to organize

- ok

- to start with, i think it’s interesting how the show has used some indicators in this mystery plot as a way to suggest context without crystallizing certain things into the show. so the complete picture is visible and it’s pretty dark, but the genre elements blend in and the ratings remain soft.

- an example of something brought to attention but not explicitly stated is missing white woman syndrome, a term u may have heard in the news lately, especially around when this episode aired which was only days after gabby petito’s remains were found. addendum: it was remiss of me to not mention the highway of tears and the disproportionate crisis of missing native women.

- i find this topic really distressing and words feel insufficient. please bear with me. missing white women syndrome involves two things: 1) for a number of reasons, news media is biased against reporting on missing people who do not fit a very narrow category of young conventionally attractive thin non-disabled cis straight white women of middleclass bgs and ‘good’ social and financial standing. and 2) reporting on the missing people that meet this criteria tends to be obsessive and sensationalized.

- this bias is concerning bc it shapes society’s sympathy and awareness, dehumanizes people whose cases go unacknowledged, sometimes dehumanizes the people who are reported on, and it limits the possibility of witnesses contributing info to help recover those who are ignored.

- when confronted by jughead, dreyfuss says they picked their victims bc no one cared about ‘those girls’ ie the girls who were on the highway for whatever reason, whether to work or to flee unstable situations. the ‘no one caring’ exists in the context of this rl bias.

- even tho all the show’s highway victims with names and ‘faces’ that we’ve seen have been young conventionally attractive white women - polly, squeaky, britta, and several bodies similar to polly - none of them matched the profile favored by media reporting

- also the most noticeable outlier was logan, a black boy with a record of unusual behavior. altho he was lucky to have family and school faculty concerned about him, his disappearance wasn’t likely to gain a lot of attention bc of being outside the missing white woman demographic, so his release by that one mothman wasn’t really about avoiding this. instead it furthers another unspoken suggestion: that the mothmen were sexual predators who were targeting young women with this intent.

- a piece of context here, brought in by the texas chainsaw massacre homage in betty’s confrontation with chainsaw buddy, is that slasher horror tends to step around the topic of rape and sexual assault while still creating associations thru phallic weapons and penetrating wounds.

- the next thing on my mind is the question prompted by ‘those girls’

- polly is one of ‘those girls.’ her s5 circumstances as a financially-struggling single mother sex worker who might be involved in drugs is enough. but literally any one thing she endured in previous seasons would also count against her. despite her girl-next-door middleclass background of nice safe conservative values, she’s been closely involved in murder investigations, gangs, drugs, a cult, and sex work, etc. this circles back to polly existing only to measure betty against, bc some of what applies to polly also applies to her sister.

- is betty also one of ‘those girls’?

- or to word it differently, does betty believe anyone would care if she went missing?

- i’m thinking about this bc it’s still unexplained why she hasn’t told her family or friends about her tbk capture.

- she’s a character who’s sensitive to which labels are applied to her, which boxes she’s pressured to fit in, how she interacts with expectations set for her - by others and by herself. is she withholding this experience bc she believes she’ll be judged or blamed for what happened? (the term ‘victim blaming’ comes to mind but i don’t think that’s appropriate for a professional’s bad call, which is what we know for now.) i want insight.

- the other thing that struck me about this was the display of character motivations and values

- the three people who propelled this search from the start are toni, tabitha and betty. two community-oriented black women who take notice of the disadvantaged, and a disillusioned white not-fbi agent searching for a family member and personal redemption.

- toni started betty off with the leads she’d already collected, and shared the connections she’d made with vulnerable women and their families who she had been trying to help despite her limited resources and other responsibilities. this is major bc betty’s investigation abilities suck otherwise

- tabitha noticed dreyfuss as an interesting subject and sent jughead to him (who in turn tried to show betty). if left to it betty would have worked on the highway until she came to the same fate as the missing women, a repeat of her tbk mistake - but tabitha disallows her from taking this unneccessary risk. she’s the one who reorients the case as a group effort, encouraging betty to finally work with jughead just in time to join with toni in finding britta.

- tabitha and toni are also both business owners in an economically troubled town who have practical sense and value their employees. toni runs her bar and truck business to support her serpents. skipping ahead a second, we know tabitha put her waitresses above the diner’s insurance. when the option many in this area are stuck with is dangerous sex work or a dangerous escape, tabitha and toni’s contributions are a big deal even, maybe especially, the ones that exist outside the spotlight of the investigation.

- and this all complements the contrast between the two of them and betty that’s established right from the time jump intro, where betty is ruminating over her tbk experience and her mistake which has allowed him to continue his spree.

- whatever betty’s intentions were when she chose this career (i recall it as her desire to atone for the black hood and maybe also channel her nature into something good??) where she’s at now is not to help others but to help herself, whether thru redemption so she doesn’t feel like a bad person, or thru escape from the painful consequences of her choices

- there’s like a katamari of consequences she’s running herself ragged to stay ahead of instead of confronting and it’s full of all kinds of shit. betraying and avoiding jughead, messing up on the task force, getting grounded at work for refusing to learn from her mistake, fighting with polly, neglecting her mother, taking her rage out on that trucker guy so he warned everyone on the road and mr. chainsaw was tipped off and came to try and stop her. so much stuff and each thing connects like dominoes falling.

- the nature vs nuture question is getting harder with her too. is mismanagement of trauma and personal problems compromising her decision apparatus, or is her apparatus flawed to begin with? what if violent impulsivity really is her living her best life?

- idk maybe just betty grow up and develop accountability challenge

- anyway

- there’s a full circle big picture coming into view. the very first narration of the time jump era was jughead-the-storyteller beginning to tell about squeaky. and now, at this point when his healing is underway and the betty chapter of his life is at long last beginning to resolve, jughead-the-character is ready to start writing again for real and tabitha is asking him for help solving squeaky’s case. it’s so cool how unless u were in total denial u could read this as the writers neatly planned out season arc

- sorry but this is So funny

- worst breakfast cereal commercial ever

- do i vaguely remember archie hallucinating men he felt responsible for killing back in s3? unfortunate that therapy didn’t work out for him and he retreated back to clinging on to the structure and ideals of the army for dear life bc there’s a precedent for this to be not simply a story device but an indication that something is seriously wrong with him

- penelope’s church of jason the silent savior. ty penelope, ty jason, feel free to jump in sooner next time

- love these attendees. person in the back checking out penelope’s ass in this tragic clown dress. person in the back genuinely so dismayed there’s no singing. everyone here is insane <3

- penelope back in white and citing jason is like, is this a feud for power over the congregation? or is it a battle over the holy favor of jason? i feel like no matter how many times cheryl and penelope resolve their differences or defeat each other, they’re still never going to exist in relation to each other outside of that scene at jason’s memorial where cheryl bucks the dress code and her mother’s control. why do some families always want an audience

- jughead is wrestling himself to get back on track and has begun wearing a jacket in the color ‘plaid gasps back to life.’ ‘plaid revenant.’ or possibly ‘it’s only plaid if ur not colorblind’

- meanwhile betty is dressing and looking and acting more like polly, literally wearing polly’s bra in that same color of pink alice used to warn her away from

- i do not care about this general guy plot but the newspaper is interesting. there’s a more or less real article in there about the army’s recent grooming policy for women relaxing a little. this is great and important progress for the health of people serving, but it’s also like, diversity win! brainwashing military organization now more accessible for those considering joining than ever before! maybe now more girl characters from this show can sign up

- jughead was grumpy about it but i think he actually really liked being a teacher. also he’s been gone weeks?? or he came back but never contacted the school lol did betty and veronica arrange subs or are they on administrative leave too

- veronica i am begging u to step back and get perspective on ur life. like, not to judge or anything, but,, robbing hiram to settle chad’s robbery... poetic but corrupt

- reggie and hermosa is very funny and a very weird kind of tension. reggie’s sleeze and v’s disgust when she’s usually so unphased by everything

- speaking of disgust, the echo chamber of kevin and cheryl giving each other advice is. hhh. every time i try to form thoughts about this my brain does this self-protective automatic shut off. system error. back away and wait from a safe distance for the nuclear event to subside

- no u know what their dialogue reminds me of? drunk writing comedy skits. there’s logic here that i am not on the right plane of existence to get

- ‘which is why-’ kevin let me stop u there. ur advice tho well intentioned literally never goes well

- archie says ‘i thought i was protecting [my men] bc i was taking the risk.’ which is what he’s continued to do, running into danger by himself to save people. somehow even tho he’s describing a realization here, i have a doubt that he will learn and change??

- i feel like archie’s choices are categorically similar to betty’s. alignment to a violent institution that justifies and channels their violent impulses so they’ve both avoided learning to manage them by themselves. sublimating their self-destructiveness into ‘saving’ other people - only for archie it tends to have positive results. for betty it does not.

- i do not suggest this means they belong together so they can complete each other and finally be effective and whole people. i think that's a super unappealing concept for a romance. but i do think this story has been leading to something between them - not in a way where they’re building a foundation between them like other pairings have this season, but in a way that their paths are parallel and feel on track to either converge or collide in a way that could finally allow some kind of self-understanding that they both lack

- i love that veronica and reggie got dressed up in these sneaky neo-noir matrix cat burglar outfits with leather and accessories. finally v has a partner in crime who understands a singular fashion opportunity when it visits

- this is exactly what i wanted! be shady together and look hot while doing it, ty

- i complained along the way but now i’m really enjoying how the film references in veronica’s storyline have been paced out and revisited in little bits. it’s ending up more like a subtle world building effect than a big impact thematic payoff and i’m beginning to appreciate.

- veronica’s expression in response to cheryl dipping to perform a miracle, same girl

- josie is so powerful she removed everyone from the normal flow of time while she was here. jughead attended the pussycat’s performance in spirit but not in the flesh. like sending a video acceptance speech when ur getting an award but can’t attend

- jughead and tabitha....! my heart is shouting

- this scene is So !

- both so soothing and so stressful. tabitha understands his abandonment issue, jughead understands his own responsibility for the situation. their regard for each other and their willingness to be open and direct has led them naturally to the same clean page. plus it’s now out in the open that the unknown factor, betty, has transgressed in a way that requires confrontation, but there’s no conversation that can repair what her continuous disrespect for jughead has caused.

- this is also a higher stakes parallel to their conversation from 5.10: where she apologizes for making an inappropriate move and he reassures her it was mutual, then he asks for a favor to which she responds in the negative. Now, she jumps in to apologize for letting him down regarding that favor, and he reassures her that the apology is his to make. it hits all the same beats but they’re more in-tune and closer to being ready to move forward than before. but when he asks about the manuscript, she again has to respond in the negative. what she says is even similar to last time - i don’t think u should be getting high. i don’t think u should do something triggering. ur sobriety is important.

- and there’s also a parallel to his conversation with betty later, or rather a scintilating contrast: jughead apologizes to tabitha for making her worry about him disappearing, she immediately and easily says ‘i forgive u’ vs jughead apologizing to betty for unleashing his valid emotions on her in reaction to her abandoning him repeatedly, after which he disappeared and could have died and she wouldn’t have missed him, and betty immediately says... ‘why now’

- lmao anyway

- look at him. i want to put him in my pocket

- i love these shots bc first hiram is disheveled, off kilter and tiny in the frame, then he swims thru a room of much taller people to stand below an imperious veronica. and in the bg reggie slides into view and literally takes hiram’s seat

- shouldn’t holy wounds mimicking jason’s appear on cheryl’s forehead...?

- ‘snakes are unmistakeably biblical’ ‘bees are not in my repertoir’ i want to see the bible that cheryl and kevin are annotating together in their sainthood thinktank, i think it’s probably terrifying

- i don’t have anything to say about this cheryl wriggles her way up to godhood plot except it reminds me of real church. behind the scenes ego-based power feud and everyone showing up would like to turn off their brain and have someone be in control and tell them everything’s fine if u just sing. why yes i’m on great terms with my catholic family members why do u ask

- speaking of talking to family, what does keller think of his son- i was going to finish that thought with what kevin’s been up to but like. actually just, does keller remember his son? does kevin remember him?

- this question was already answered once ever this season, idk why i can’t be satisfied and let it go

- this thing where archie visits the weirdly formal and lifeless families of his dead unit members is so uncomfortable. like, first it’s yet another occasion where archie needs a committee to make a choice, but it’s dressed up in respecting the dead, but then it turns out to be eric’s attempt to throw attention off his own bad call, so when he joins the cause later it’s extra seriously about honor and standing up for truth.

- and secondly, what does this actually mean for archie? what does he believe in?

- bc when he tells the general ‘ur dishonoring the military by pretending to be some kind of hero’ it sounds like he believes the men who died and the ideals he was told they were defending are all synonymous with the military and it’s on behalf of the military that he needs to get justice. and it sounds like he believes this is an isolated instance of corruption in an otherwise decent institution and he can bring that justice by challenging this one bad actor to be accountable for what he did.

- is rd treating this as an intensely oversimplified example of archie finding a healthy way to resolve his guilt? or. are they calling archie out for really being this stupid misled? gullible? stupid

- like, archie is so close to using that one brain cell. it’s all warmed up and ready to go

- anyway

- this feels like the episode where everyone is putting it all on the table and admitting to their truths except cheryl

- unless she is in fact a saint, i guess

- also a painting

- i can’t make out all the details, the white shape on the left might be a lighthouse or a ship? a bird? the red thing is a life boat. addendum: future ep confirms the white thing is a sinking ship lmao this show is nonstop jokes

- very proud of reggie btw, ready to tackle his dreams

- veronica perfectly captures the energy of a well-timed hiram interruption. she is finally fully empowered but i don’t feel like i should be happy for her. instead of breaking free from hiram she’s becoming him.

- i do love this vibe tho for deceiving chad and murdering hi...s career

- betty looking at herself in the mirror and not having any excuses left to run from jughead   betty looking at herself in the mirror and wiping off lipstick which recalls alice doing the same to her in s1 while talking about whether or not she is polly and making polly’s (alice’s) mistakes   betty looking at herself in the mirror and wiping tears off her face while talking to alice about losing jughead to the southside in the town’s civil war

- idk i’m just thinking about it all

- bret weston wallis who jughead did not sleep with is dead but in this universe cora carter who jughead slept with is writing bret easton ellis’s books. ok ras! i hear u!

- they picked a v sexy breakup song to set this talk up lol

- also i like that jughead got new jewelry and there were all these shots where we get to admire it

- wait oh my god is that the whiskey that pansky gifted him years ago? how bitter fucking sweet to toast with betty to the ‘ancient history’ of the night she chose not to celebrate his book with him, with the alcohol gifted by the agent he’s about to lose bc of a situation betty put him in. neato

- i think this conversation between them, with betty opening up about herself even minimally for the first time this season, would not have been possible if jughead had not descended again into the bunker and to drinking. betty wasn’t going to be honest with anyone who she thinks is not down at her level.

- this is like a mirror reverse of the 1.10 diner scene. that was intimate, this is commiseration. that started bc fp told jughead ‘don’t run, she needs u.’ now they need different things and this ends with betty ghosting

- in 1.10 they talk where it’s bright, busy, they sit close side by side with milkshakes. jughead shares his fear of being rejected for being himself. betty seems to reciprocate by telling the truth after lying to him about some of her recent actions. and she tells him about her overwhelming and inexplicable feeling that something is wrong with her and shows him her hands. this re-lays a foundation of intimacy and trust between them that makes the entire rest of their relationship possible, until she later breaks that trust harder than she knows how to fix

- this time they’re alone underground in the dark, so far apart they’re not in the room together, and they’ve traded milkshakes for whiskey that they toast offscreen instead of touching. jughead gives her apologies debasing himself and his natural response to being hurt and acceptance of the past and the truth of his addiction, pushes for some kind of reciprocation or reaction, anything. she doesn’t accept his apology for the vm, doesn’t offer concern or even interest in the state he’s putting himself in. she does not go thru the door he opened for her to come clean about the manuscript. she turns the conversation onto her own compulsions and admits a truth but her truth is that she’d rather be alone and think about murder

- ‘i’m trying to fill a void’ she says while tracing around her cup in a way that reinforces her implication that his addiction and hers are the same, that they both have something in them they are trying to fill or numb with a vice, maybe that it’s something they both inherited from their fathers. something she feels cannot be fixed or stopped (i disagree with all of the above)

- but they have this fundamental difference - jughead wants to recover, doesn’t want to be isolated. betty is uncomfortable around ‘normal’ people and does not see changing herself as an option.

- it’s very hard to tell if betty cares at all about jughead at this point or if she’s too dissociated and too buried in her own various shames to even see him. if she does, then what i’m reminded of is how she was afraid of corrupting archie with her darkness, a very distorted way of thinking. but i think she’s taking jughead and his drinking as proof positive of this, of her own toxicity. that’s super sad bc it dehumanizes both herself and him as individuals who make choices about their own lives.

- and in that case, it’s also interesting that jughead has stumbled but is still aware of them both having this power of choice. he’s able to choose the right thing and come clean to samm even tho it might end his career. he’s already damaged it, but he can stop himself here before it gets worse. betty knows what she’s doing is ineffectual and avoidant and so self-destructive it could end in her death, but she still doesn’t want to stop. and she’d rather run away than give him a chance to ask twice or suggest any other things she could take responsibility for

- and none of this has caused jughead to stop admiring her or caring about her. these two are family and he doesn’t give up on family, there’s a lot of room in that dynamic for complicated types of love.

- he believes the best of his people but paradoxical to his idealization, i think he also sees thru bullshit easily. betty thinks of herself as a lost cause but jughead champions lost causes and to him she’s an incredibly capable person who has lost perspective and needs a break. addendum: tbc tho, it was being Done with her that enabled him to stop waiting for her and finally just ask for this talk.

- anyway i’m v relieved that this season’s journey with jughead and betty has been focused on communication, especially failed communication and the question of whether they can ever repair it. this, as opposed to one option the writing could have gone with which was hanging the whole story on betty’s sexual agency.

- instead it’s never questioned. there’s no spectacle or outrage upon discovering she has sex with men who aren’t her ex that she’s not talking to. when jughead finds out she’s posing as a sexworker ‘hitchhiker’ on the highway he questions her safety but doesn’t challenge her choice. and whereas chad was an obstacle between veronica and archie connecting, archie was not an object between betty and jughead. their obstacle was just a break down in communication. i mean, aside from her cheating

- i mean, i think some of that breakdown was generated by betty’s shame involving cheating and jughead’s anger in reaction to how she handled that, but i also think it started way before that. anyway this could have gone really differently, i was kind of stressed about it. this outcome is sad in terms of their friendship and betty needing help but pushing everyone away. but i like sad stories just fine

- feeling less good about veronica becoming hiram, even if camila does it so well

- i do love how this sequence looks tho. it has all these parts that echo earlier, when hiram was the shortest most rumpled person at the auction was moving thru the bg + when chad confronted veronica with hiram’s portrait right behind him. it all culminates with v turning it around, facing chad with a cool rack focus that catches hiram watching her move in for the kill, and the portrait behind him. the real line of succession.

- also love the sodale model as a nod back to the town model in s1

- tabitha and jughead are about to share an entire pie and i love that for them

- their scene is actually what first brought that 1.10 jughead and betty scene to my mind. bc jughead asking ‘why are u so nice to me?’ calls directly back to ‘sometimes when people do nice things for me i short circuit.’ building another foundation. only this time he’s not a child, he’s an adult who doesn’t need to be told not to run away from his feelings and tabitha is a person who causes the opposite of short circuiting in him.

- also it Aches that tabitha, who has been supportive excited and attracted to him writing since she figured out what jughead is about, suggested earlier that he should take a break from writing if it’s too stressful. writing is so involved with jughead’s wellbeing and motivations, his everything, that advice sounds like death

- but it’s the right advice and exactly why she’s The person

- jughead’s arc so far has shown that his self worth is completely tied up in his writing. his relationship with betty was, especially by the end of them, very much About his writing. stories as flirtation, as an avenue for her approval, even homework writing was done for her. after they break up he’s still attaching it to her, calling her about his career, resolving to find enough success as a writer to earn her attention back. his other relationships center writing too. jess was someone who understood the writing struggle. when he hooked up with someone, they flirt thru his book. this is the one thing that makes him feel valuable.

- his relationship with tabitha buds around his writing too. first writing about pop, then asking if he can write about her, and her getting involved by bringing him ideas, talking it out, welcoming him to keep using the diner as a creative space. it leads to him asking for her help while he writes his manuscript. he calls her his muse. writing represents jughead and his future. it’s how he feels connected to people. it’s all he can bring to a relationship, right? without writing he’s just a terrible busboy and a drunk.

- but here’s tabitha telling him to stop writing and then at the end of the day she’s still there, still cares about him and wants him to be well, is still putting it out there ‘as his Friend’ that she’s interested in him. she knows there is more to him than his creative output and success.

- tabitha telling him to stop and focus on himself is also another neat contrast from betty in the past telling him to stop and focus on her

- lmao at the people who are like ‘this came out of nowhere’ u fools, this came out of four seasons of establishing what kind of relationship this character could truly thrive in and one entire season of steadily building that exact relationship for us all to enjoy

- eric ‘hurry up before i hurl’ never have i related so much to a character talking about an archie plot. but for opposite reasons, like. there are no stakes here, i don’t care, i just want it to end

- these long lingering emotional looks between archie and eric are really in there for no reason, huh

- i kind of hope archie just has a pack of dead imaginary boyfriends that silently follows him around from now on and he talks to them in front of other real people sometimes but it’s never addressed. i think that would be so fun

- also i forget when in the ep this actually fits but here look

thoughts

- i would like a nana blossom portrait for my home pls

- art frames are the candles of this season’s budget sheet. can i just say tho, how much i love how paintings have featured in s5′s storytelling? so much. like, this is a bizarre episode concept but i don’t even care

- however: is minerva leaving and they never moved her away from the cheryl-rehabilitation support character thing? 😒

- minerva’s sense of cheryl’s painting inspo is fun in the context of an episode that calls on greek mythology

- i mean, u could probably say this about any western painter, but goya, dali, and bacon all channeled greek myths, sometimes in super dark ways

- maybe worth noting, cbs clarice’s main plot also incorporates greek myth represented thru art

- man, the first thing we saw cheryl painting in 5a was like, a nice pretty flower. wtf happened girl

- therapy alternative i guess

.

archie

- ok so private ‘butler’ has gotta be a nod to the band of brothers sequel that’s in the works, and dr ‘winters’ is also a character name in the original series

- based on archie’s trench nightmares and his feelings toward his men + jackson’s line about ‘breaking,’ if there’s a band of brothers ep to look at in particular it’s probably 7: the breaking point

- the pov character in this ep is similar to archie - emotionally reserved with an affect almost as flat as archie’s, he’s not in charge but he feels very responsible for the men under him while they all deal with a flaky inept commanding officer who unnecessarily causes lives to be lost

- on the other hand, i still feel like the character arcs from the pacific fit present-day archie better - less focus on comradery and more on loss of humanity and idealism and the moral degradation caused by war

- shout out my college gf who made me watch these with her, not my jam

- archie, pouring beer into his body: but what if the anxiety meds have side effects

- bro....

- for real tho, best not to mix those

- reggie/rose blossom slowburn <3 i also love reggie immediately stealing archie’s lunch when he leaves to find kevin. honestly charles is the star of this season

- the face of a man perhaps having a thought

- does reggie know something about the mothmen or is he just very susceptible to ghost stories

- come to think of it, odd that cheryl is cool with having reggie on the crew when she’s worried about hiram stealing this stuff from her. she knows reggie was working for hiram and made several attempts to personally gain access to her land. then again, would not accuse her of being super rational rn so whatever

- archie’s therapy situation has more homecoming vibes - this time s1 of the show, in which participants in a veteran therapy program deal with paranoia and the possibility they’re being used in an experiment

- idk what to make of this being the second woc therapist we’ve seen him being threatening toward. at this point it feels intentional

- i think of ‘hero’ as a generic role that archie fills more than an evaluation of his moral character. but his finest heroic trait is his persistence in running into burning buildings without ever questioning anything about it, like personal risk or if the fire is real or imagined

- since the main arsonist has changed jobs, currently the ‘fire’ is the town’s lack of osha mine inspections rip osha-official

- fangs brings up some mining lore but truly, yet another stephen king ref, the tommyknockers (itself a lovecraft homage) which then begs the question, is there something (other than toxic gas) in the mines

- like, reggie runs up yelling about monsters and we don’t get to see confirmation he imagined it. i’m reaching i’m also thinking about how hiram said his father was never the same after the cave-in. what if he saw something too

- some parts of the mothman mystery that are waiting for explanation: the maple mothman buddy, the radio chatter, events like the destroyed phone booth, the abductions and return of men, and possibly a connection to the women missing from the highway

- also potential radiation? jughead pointed out all the other men from old man dreyfuss’s crew died from cancer

- what kind of contract does cheryl have over them to make them keep working in terrible conditions? boys, go on strike

.

betty

- relieved and (pleasantly) surprised that betty cuts tabitha out of her federal crime torture interrogation plan. if only tabitha’s message that she should not be trying to do this by herself would also somehow travel thru her skull. alas

- tabitha’s world is getting darker and her boundaries tested :(

- her balance of concern, determination, selflessness, and common sense make her such a good fit in this group of characters bc no one else combines all those like she does, especially the common fucking sense

‘[getting info] is what i do’ line from betty intrigues bc the circumstances of her tbk capture are still unknown. did she go rogue intending to interrogate or inflict her own justice then too?

- if she means her hs era serial killer situations, i would argue she’s super wrong, and not just bc she didn’t solve those without jughead. it was less ‘what she did’ and more ‘what was done to her’ since all those people wanted attention to be known or captured or whatever

- hm that makes for an interesting tangent of, were betty to go full dark no stars serial killer herself, would she want someone to recognize her? to stop her? at the moment she’s on a mission and definitely not into being contained rn, which is a funny differentiation to have from the murderers she’s dealt with in the past

- the united state of betty, one nation under alice

- she’s insane <3

- is she confused about the unincorporation? is it an intimidation tactic? does she really believe her town is special and that ‘killers of women’ don’t have human rights? i’m curious bc with her choices lately it’s hard to tell how much is a front and how much she believes herself

- idk, is this a comment on the fbi? like, is this a ‘how glad are we there’s no institution legitimizing her anymore’ or is it a ‘look at who goes for these jobs’ kind of thing? both?

- in her tbk flashback she’s wearing a very betty-cooper-cute white and yellow dotted top under the fbi jacket. now i’m trying to think back on if she’s even touched pastels since the time jump??

- meanwhile alice wearing red like she’s been going to blossom church and drinking the meth-laced communion wine like seriously What is that cross stitch

- a volcano + pop’s

- hey that better not be foreshadowing that would suck

- addendum: everything But pop’s blowing up would be fun tho

- betty’s deliberate choice to engage with a likely killer and explore how he feels even tho she doesn’t want him to have rights, rather than ever talking to the living working girls that she says she wants to protect continues to be interesting

- i do want villain betty. love a good sociopathic vigilante

- but there’s something i’m uncomfortable with that i can’t put my finger on. i want to feel exhilarated but i just feel sad. is it bc she’s conflicted? she’s getting over that all the time so maybe not. maybe it’s that her identity has been so manipulated, this path is like the opposite of her finding her own way. doesn’t feel like there’s catharsis being set up.

- anyway. didn’t alice burn all the family photos? or was that just the ones of betty and hal

- speaking of hal, im wondering a lot about him again. still don’t want to spoil cbs clarice (i know i badmouthed it but it was thought provoking and i would recommend it just for the cast) but one of the most important relationships in it is between clarice and her memory of her father - and how her perception of him changes as she works thru her trauma. betty’s trajectory could hit that mark in an interesting way.

- not to mention the thread waiting to be picked up here with hal door hand hook car door and the topic of amputations

- gosh who made that one post that was like, betty comes back in s5 with a hook for a hand, zero explanation. we really almost had that

- we have been informed polly has an infinity symbol tattoo, seems important. google brings me to the tv series revenge, main character emily thorne (series spoilers). is this another suggestion that polly is alive and intentionally deceiving or punishing betty?

- tbk calls betty a tiny pretty thing which also has ref energy on that same wavelength

- man, what is tbk’s problem? there’s been some texas chainsaw massacre homage, but leatherface doesn’t speak and i don’t think (?) he tortures his victims like this? neither does buffalo bill, or hannibal.

- nah i don’t want to think about it

- vaguely but not pressingly curious about why the school has a chainsaw

- TIL that chainsaws were invented for human surgery and i would like to unlearn it. definitely an interesting weapon to reclaim from violence against women

- nothing about mr. chainsaw here added up as the highway killer tho, including and maybe especially the part where he just happened to have an unlikely weapon with traumatic significance for betty

- but bc she’s alone and unwilling to hear other people’s input, like when she dismissed jughead’s ideas, she’s too blinkered by the desire for her own revenge and redemption to notice what doesn’t add up. what if she’s asking all the wrong questions? she just assumed at the start that it’s another serial killer

- i’m not suited for this kind of story bc i just get worked up and yell wyd at the screen :/

- this will be awkward to tell tabitha. oh that guy? yeah so before i update u, i promise u i didn’t touch him 😬

- lol @ alice: just kill him   alice later: so he took his secrets to the grave huh

.

jughead

- oh he’s so uncomfortable just saying his name

- i wonder what name he gave himself in the outcasts

- wonder if it will ever be directly addressed how jughead feels about his names and how they interact with his identity. as a trans person this is always an interesting subject to me

- on that note, this felt like the first time, or at least the most noticeable time, that the camera has lingered on a butch-styled person (another group attendee). which stands out Distinctly on a show where masculinity is reserved for men while all women and girls are very feminine. even betty, who is sometimes tomboyish, always has feminine accents in hair makeup and jewellry. and when occassion expects it, she enjoys dressing up as pretty and girly as the others. same with toni, even at her grungiest she’s always softened by very feminine details. this show’s gender spectrum is stark and it divides groups into ‘traditional’ roles - football players and cheerleaders, etc, with zero mingling until recently and still minimal

- but here’s jughead in a room of people who are an odd mix, kind of fringe, outside the binaries of the town. dare i say.... outcasts? right where he’s always felt himself to be. in the pages of his book seen later, his teenage self is so alienated he can’t even figure out why his father’s gang wants him to join. plus there’s the implication that to fit in anywhere, he would have to change to suit the group

- but this group proves people exist here who will welcome him and listen patiently to his weird story and not ask him to be someone else im Not crying

- anyway

- love how compact and neat the storytelling is here. the painting as a stand-in for iowa’s nothingness, chef’s kiss, so satisfying

- so i forgive him for completely eliding the boring parts, like everything about his gf or how he was moving between iowa and nyc so easily while still needing a metaphorical ticket out of there

- and school graduation lol. pretty sure he did finish tho - is his ring not a class ring? plus the timeline is like, subtract 2 years for the night of his book launch, subtract another for the year he moved to the city and worked on the book, and ur left with four years for school. not a lot to say about iowa.

- jughead looking forward to that prequel. watching the sopranos while stuck in the midwest is very homesick energy to me but i’m biased. i never watched tho, i’m too emotionally scarred from when i was a kid and my dad always made me leave the room when he had it on. i know how it ends tho 👀

- what does it mean to move to ny and ‘become a proper writer’? what is a proper writer?? to jughead, since the only other writer he knows outside of a school setting was his grandpa, i assume it means dressing like a grandpa. love this, good work

- rd has always had ash trays + cigarette butts + there’s a cigarette machine in pop’s. but i think the cigar on pansky’s desk is the first time a character has ever actually had something to smoke?

- pansky is my Favorite addition to the show. i want to smoke cigars with him on a patio set in my uncle’s driveway

- feels deliberate

- st vincent’s was demolished like ten years ago i love this show’s commitment to an au that’s just slightly different

- imagine ur in a group therapy session and one guy’s share starts off normal and sad and escalates into batshit insane but u also grew up in riverdale so u just nod sympathetically. yup, rabies, been there

- not quite werewolf jughead but i’ll take it

- imagine ur ex whom u just stole a manuscript from turns up at ur door and ur like, shit this is it, but then he just wants to know about that time he had rabies. she literally turns away from him to hide a smile. i want to know jessica’s deal!!

- despite being literally the only person ‘there’ for him in this story, jughead makes jess into such a minor figure. but he also doesn’t depict her in a negative way?? he says they fight but we see none of it. what he shows us is she’s helpful (providing drugs... ok, enabling.) and physically present (drinking company + the hospital). it’s like in his telling he allows no excuses for himself about why their relationship failed - he blames it on himself hanging onto the past

- this makes a big contrast with his outburst in the voicemail, which had to have been simmering for years. but emotionally messy is not the same as toxic. it’s sweet that he feels bad about it tho

- jughead just is not built to acknowledge and release his negative feelings about the people he cares for

- I Love When They Do Greek Shit

- can hardly believe how perfectly orpheus and eurydice fits him

- like, there it is. in the fantasy, jughead believes betty is saving him from the pit. but she’s not leading him, she’s behind. in the myth orpheus enters the underworld to retrieve eurydice bc he can’t conceive a life without her. but he loses her and that possibility when he looks back. jughead ‘looks back’ by returning to the spot with a sober mind and realizing how completely alone he was in that time. there was no betty, she didn’t save him, and clinging to the idea of her is what kept him that low and isolated. (example: being so upset at her not coming to the party that he doesn’t go to the party, misses out on being with people there) he got himself out then and he has to let go of their dead relationship and get himself out now and learn to be present in his life with the people who actually want to be there. ‘looking back’ is what returns him to life.

- at least, i hope that’s his realization bc it would be fucked up to jump back into his idealization of her after realizing how abandoned he felt

- also interesting to see his soft angelic dream ‘betty’ in the same ep as real life leather-wearing about-to-dismember-a-man betty. hm

- the betty he thought was saving him was from that other doomed romance scene where he’s also literally moving upward, ascending a ladder to her clean suburban bedroom, at another lonely personal low point, secretly living in the school closet.

- i’m Obsessed with the idea of jughead eventually handing over his new manuscript to pansky with This character based on him in it, who lives in a sewer and is insane. how much moola is that now samm?

- i’m not an engineer but i’m uhh pretty sure the flooding danger in nyc’s underground is the opposite of on purpose and scheduled. could be that c.h.u.d. reference tho. also here’s a long read i like about the mess under nyc and how dire the water problem already was almost a decade ago

- not to be a gamer for a second but is this? portal 2?? no come back lol hear me out

- absolutely getting doug rattmann vibes. here’s a video that might help show the similarity. if ur not familiar with the game, it’s like a creepy/funny sci fi puzzle game from wow, so many years ago

- rattmann is never seen in the game, he’s probably long dead, but despite his absence he helps ‘lead’ the player character toward her escape with clues and encouragements he left behind in hidden places - usually inside the walls - in the evil science testing facility ur trapped in. which is located deep underground.

- the game also makes references to greek mythology, specifically to tartarus and to the myth of prometheus. there might be more too idk

- also rattmann chose the player character, chell, to help bc she has the quality he believes necessary to overcome the situation: tenacity. a quality betty used to bring to her and jughead’s relationship until for whatever reason she stopped. i mean, she’s still tenacious elsewhere tho

- oh my god wait, glados betty comparison? ?? y e s

- anyway i don’t expect rd to deliberately be nodding toward this game. but there’s enough to make me wonder. addendum: on second thought, half-life: alyx came out in the 2020 quarantine, v plausible for this franchise to be an inspo while writing a horror+sci fi season

- jughead makes the amazing discovery that talking out his feelings does not instantly kill him and may actually help :’)

- left with questions about the mothmen tho. will his investigation proceed now this baggage is out of the way? or will he assume the mothmen were part of the baggage??

.

- idk how i feel about cheryl relating herself and minerva to cupid and psyche. i love when they do greek shit. the myth of this couple lines up in a cool way to the episode - minerva listening about the paintings is almost like psyche completing the 3 tasks set to her. on the other hand, the parallel frames minerva as the one who transgressed against cheryl for not trusting her and their ‘union’ as redeeming cheryl’s past misbehaviors. it’s an.... interesting fit

- also super interesting how the structure of cupid and psyche’s original story relates to the structure of the episode, as a whole but especially jughead’s story-in-a-story part.

- also, last week before this ep aired i got this ask speculating about jughead’s book:

- anon, i love this line of thinking

- i’m answering this in here bc what ur suggesting about him like, transferring his most vulnerable emotional truths onto a queer couple that wouldn’t be associated with his real relationship, doesn’t feel like a stretch after this episode where cheryl and her wlw relationship is used as a storytelling device

- we still know only a few things about the outcasts. we know he only gets around to describing his narrator character almost 200 pages in. there’s no mention on those pages of a betty character or of his proxy being in or even considering a relationship. there’s no mention of a toni character either, tho in our canon she was the one to guide jughead into the gang, not sweet pea and fangs. so she’s elsewhere in the outcasts story.

- the prominence of greek myth in both the story jughead tells within his segment, as well as in the greater frame story with cheryl’s ‘telling’ reinforces the feeling to me that these are the same narrative voice, that this is all part of another of jughead’s books and he’s using cheryl to tell it. after all, she may have a semi-plausible reason to be aware of what’s up with archie, and maybe that could stretch to cousin betty. but she has no business knowing jughead’s business unless someone in that group immediately spilled the story which tbf i could buy

- lol i’m getting too into contemplating the blurred lines between the narration and the past and present plots. watch upcoming episodes blast this apart

- anyway

- cheryl really said, sorry veronica i don’t know how to paint helicopters