as i said earlier this week, i think s5e3 wouldve been a great moment to end riverdale. however, that did not stop me from coming up with my own version of how the timeskip should go for each character
when he is on the cusp of death a sudden, miraculous rainstorm flushes him out of the chasm & deposits him at the outskirts of a small town where he is found by a young doctor fresh out of medical school (let's say.... brigitte reilly), who performs first aid & gets him to a hospital. he gives her a fake name & claims to have no family (his ID is all long gone so nobody can dispute it). she (a profoundly lonely person) offers to let him stay with her & her father. he claims to be a teenager to be permitted to go to high school (partly for a do-over, mostly to shed responsibility over his own life). the other students mostly avoid archie. he initially tries to do lots of chores around the house-- it exacerbates his injuries so brigitte makes him stop. brigitte's father barely acknowledges either of them. he had some kind of falling-out with his daughter years ago & they have not been close since, as brigitte tearfully confesses one night. within weeks their relationship becomes physical. brigitte is in truth only a few years older than archie, but she is wracked with guilt, believing that she's preying on a vulnerable teen. she tries to build up the courage to break it off, but is delayed when archie is suspended from school for brawling with a classmate who called her father a drunk.
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archie enlists in the military. he never sees actual combat. months into training (he is routinely overzealous to the point of spraining himself btw) he is dishonourably discharged for repeatedly getting into fights. he's too ashamed of himself to go back to riverdale so he starts hitchhiking across the usa looking fruitlessly for people to save and/or fix, all the while phoning his mom periodically & telling her he's still in training (/eventually deployed). while hiking he slips & gets trapped in a chasm for days, his phone broken. on the third day he starts having hallucinations of betty & veronica fighting over him before getting with each other & abandoning him.
a few months later archie's mom comes to the town (she has phoned the military base, who told her that archie is long discharged, and she's now travelling to every city near the base to put up missing person posters). brigitte bumps into her. she lies (out of fear, not malice) about not having seen archie. once mary is gone, brigitte methodically takes down all of the posters & confronts archie about them (she does not mention having encountered his mother). archie, desperate not to lose her, confesses his real age & name, and they tearfully agree to continue their relationship in secret.
years fly by. archie graduates without fanfare, his grades not good enough to get into the town's small college. brigitte's father gets archie a job at the local sawmill. archie has recovered from his injuries, but his slight limp never goes away. at the mill, brigitte's father acts like a different person: warm, jovial, energetic. archie forms a friendship with him & learns that he is a mantra-spouting AA devotee. he reminds archie of his own father (but less kind) & of hiram (but less dangerous). archie nonetheless convolutes excuses for skin contact with him. over years at the sawmill, archie grows resentful of his relationship with brigitte: the combination of feeling that her more prestigious job makes her "the provider", his disappointment that she does not need "saving" (her strained familial situation is not in fact a crisis but a mundane father-daughter schism resulting from whatever unspecified event removed brigitte's mom from the picture), & his inability to give a voice to his feelings of attraction toward brigitte's father collectively ferment into a general sense that he "deserves" better than what he has. meanwhile brigitte's feelings have gotten stronger than ever: her social existence has only become more constrained over the years, making archie a larger & larger piece of her life. her father still doesnt know about their relationship, & she has begun to consider asking archie to elope.
an accident at the sawmill gravely injures archie's coworker. archie's injury flares, preventing him from helping. brigitte watches the coworker die at the hospital. she went to high school with him. she always thought of him as a friend. he didnt remember her name. she comes home in tears. her father consoles her-- the warmest he's been toward her since she was a child. in a passionate moment she asks his permission to marry archie. he's stunned. he still thinks that archie was a teenager when they first met. brigitte tries to explain archie's real name & age. he doesnt believe her-- how can he, after so many years? meanwhile archie cries alone in his workplace's locker room (he'd never admit that he's jealous that he wasnt the one who was hurt). he resolves to break up with brigitte. he buys a bottle of whiskey to give himself courage: he cant drink it (he hasnt drunk in years & can no longer stomach the taste). he comes home to find brigitte & her father in a screaming match. the dad turns his anger on archie. archie misreads the situation & hits him with the bottle. he collapses, the gravity of his injury ambiguous. brigitte, stunned, tries to get archie to flee the scene with her, but he blurts out his intent to leave her. she, feeling that she's lost everyone she's ever known, throws him out.
he finds his way back to riverdale & can hardly recognize it. his old house is empty (his mom settled years ago that he was gone for good. she held a small wake & then left riverdale), his old gym is now a vacant lot, even hiram lodge has given up on riverdale & returned to new york. archie has left no mark on the city at all. he collapses on the football field & falls asleep.
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jughead studies writing at the university of iowa. he does not make friends. everyone is put off by his constant use of writing as a proxy for complaining about the people around him. he has minimal contact with his riverdale friends. he barely scrapes through his first year. his parents call him the day after his birthday. he compulsively googles betty's name. he returns to riverdale at the start of summer break to meet his friends, but they dont show. he regresses & reintegrates isolation into his personality.
by his second year, he is consciously sitting in the back corner of class. his grades keep getting worse. one professor in particular is especially harsh: a "D" grade (on a story about a group of students who conspire willingly to isolate their weirdo classmate) has jughead convinced of a personal vendetta, which the professor vehemently denies before making gentle suggestions about prose, tone, & pacing. he laughs at her. alone in his dorm he searches her up, digging up every piece of writing she's published & keeping a list of everything he thinks is wrong with it. once that well is tapped, he starts looking up her public appearances. he realizes that she is often near a certain other person in public-- an employee of lodge industries. he spends days tailing the professor: he follows her to stores, restaurants, appointments, etc. eventually he sees her meeting with the lodge employee. they smile and shake hands warmly. one passes something to the other. jughead snaps photos of every second of this exchange.
he has now missed several classes. the professor emails him, telling him he is welcome to make some changes to his story & present it during the next class. he changes his story to make the class's professor the ringleader of the conspiracy against the loner. midway through reading it to the class she interrupts him to say that the story is inappropriate. he accuses her of taking bribes from hiram lodge to sabotage his grades. when she denies it, he shows everyone the photos of her meeting. she tries to shut down the conversation but he wont let her. he presses until she is forced to admit that she is a closeted lesbian, the person she was meeting was her secret girlfriend (extramarital), & the reason for jughead's poor grades is his total inability to write anything other than barely-veiled analogies for his own life.
jughead is not reprimanded for this incident, but he immediately stops going to all classes and within days abandons the school entirely. he goes to toledo, intending to surprise his family. as he approaches the house he catches a glimpse through the window of his father putting a hand on his mother's shoulder. he's suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of being an intruder in his own life. he turns around & leaves.
he returns to riverdale & lives in the bunker. he bounces between jobs over the years. at first he goes to pop's with some frequency, but he eventually realizes that he's the only adult in a restaurant full of teens, gets embarrassed, & switches to takeout. he keeps writing. his style improves somewhat but he cant keep himself from inserting mean-spirited stand-ins for betty into each story. he submits his stories to magazines (like Barksworld) & they are rejected each time. a story by the professor he confronted makes it in to the magazine: he cant deny that it's good. he looks her up & finds that her life is going great. she's out now. he creates a burner email & types up a longer version of the list of things he hates about her writing, but chickens out of sending it to her.
betty calls him one day. he doesnt answer. he changes his number. he doesnt get informed about the wake for archie because no one can reach him. he maintains email contact with his parents for a while (mostly on special occasions) but holds the unspoken rule that he will not try to initiate a visit or a phone call unless they do it first. he eventually stops writing. he runs into toni at a grocery store. he tries to avoid her but she wont let him. she tells him about the serpents (now a mostly symbolic group) & the school (she's working there as a gym teacher). he cant answer when she asks how he's been. she says she could probably get him a job at the school-- a janitor, maybe, or clerical work. he refuses. he blames her for not having spoken to him in the years since he returned to riverdale: when she retorts that she never knew he was there, he walks away. he drafts an elaborate suicide note & doesnt kill himself. a year later he returns to writing & concocts an elaborate story about the town of riverdale (personified as a seven-foot-tall woman) having a sexual affair with a young man before choking him to death. he rereads it, hates it, & deletes it. the rest of the timeskip flies by, jughead barely speaking to anyone.
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betty studies forensics at yale & excels. she makes plenty of friends, none of them close. there's one guy (let's say...... frankie valdez) who hits on her now & then. she reciprocates but it never goes anywhere. she's still not over jughead or archie. she keeps in touch with her family, mostly to inquire about her older sister. there's an element of genuine care there, but betty is secretly using polly as a roadmap for her own future, trying to gauge potential health concerns & the general course of aging.
craving contact but petrified of rejection, betty's solution is to micromanage herself. she keeps a diary to monitor her food intake & sets a rigid daily schedule. it gets worse during a dissection assignment, when a classmate notices her smiling while making an incision & points it out. she freaks out, convinced that her expression must evince an unconscious pleasure in violence (one that speaks to a "truer" self than her conscious choices & personality). she starts hyperanalyzing her emotions & actions for signs that she is dangerous (was i too eager to swat that fly? what do i feel when i see a baby? do i get too angry when inconvenienced?). she becomes less & less attuned to her own body. days pass by without her noticing.
she gets the call about archie's wake & nearly has a meltdown but restrains it for fear of being perceived as aggressive or 'unwell'. she goes out for drinks with friends. she drinks way too much: she's good at concealing her drunkenness, but frankie notices & walks her to her dorm. she propositions him. he declines (because she's drunk) (she takes it personally anyway) (she doesnt let it show though). he stays with her & they chat. he asks her about forensics. she tells him a little about what led her to the field, without making any mention of her father or riverdale or the "serial killer gene". he jokingly asks how to get away with murder. she starts outlining, in detail, the scenario of how she would murder him & conceal the evidence. he takes it as playful & interjects with lighthearted suggestions ("dont forget to pull out my teeth!"): she refutes or accepts each of them as if they are serious. at the end he jokingly congratulates her on successfully murdering him. she starts sobbing. she tries to tell him about archie (& jughead, & polly, & the black hood) but is too drunk & distraught to be coherent. he fruitlessly tries to console her. he stays until she falls asleep.
she wakes up four hours later: it's barely dawn. frankie is gone. she's about to text him when she catches sight of something out the window: a lump on the pavement a little ways away. she goes outside to investigate. it's frankie, murdered. she calls the police. no culprit is ever found: no evidence, no witnesses, no apparent motive (nothing was taken from him, the crime was passionless, & he had no enemies). he was stabbed to death. the murder weapon is never found. a knife is missing from betty's kitchen. the police never consider betty a suspect. no one knew that frankie was at her dorm, & she never tells anyone. she tells herself that she didnt harm frankie, but she believes that she did.
the school offers her counselling & leniency, but she doesnt need it. her academic performance doesnt suffer at all. rather than inspiring doubt, this incident redoubles her commitment to joining the fbi, perhaps as a roundabout atonement. she makes excuses for why she cant visit her family, until they eventually stop asking. she breezes through school & is recruited as a rookie. she starts off with low-profile cases & naturally excels. eventually she learns about a new case-- two proximal homicides, a man & a woman, each killed in public in the middle of the night through passionless stabbings. betty is the only person who makes the connection to frankie. the murders happened in riverdale. she begs to be put on the case.
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unfortunately this is where i had to stop because veronica's psychological quirks dont conduce an interesting timeskip, & cheryl's psychological quirks arent interesting period
