“It’s been two days since Bailey’s Comet almost decimated us and we were somehow zapped back to the 1950s.”
This is an actual line said by Jughead Jones in the latest episode of Riverdale. There is no sense in trying to explain how we got to this point — to do so would mean having to summarize multiple insane seasons featuring cults, witches, superpowers, and so much more, and even people who have seen every episode of the show have a hard time making sense of how it’s ended up this way.
Back in 2017 when the show first aired, Riverdale was nothing more than a teen drama murder mystery, its main focus being who killed Jason Blossom, football player and twin brother of Cheryl, the head cheerleader. It got its fair share of critical acclaim — critics praised it for being stylish, addictive, and even having moments of self-awareness.
The first season hasn’t aged very well since then. Neither has any season, really. It only takes one Bing search to discover the plethora of articles making fun of Riverdale’s terrible dialogue. Still, now that the show is finally at its last season, it’s time to ask: was there ever a good show in Riverdale?
Jesus Christ, no. I don’t care what the critics say — the show was a trainwreck from day one. The decision to turn the light-hearted goofy Archie Comics into a dark teen murder drama was a terrible one indeed, although not a head-scratcher. Pretty Little Liars, another young adult murder mystery show that ran from 2010 to 2017, had the all-important teen demographic in such a chokehold that of course networks everywhere were going to try to recreate that success.
But Pretty Little Liars was based on a series of murder mystery novels. Riverdale is based on a comic book where the characters deal with problems like there being nothing fun to do at the beach. It’s like turning Peanuts into a horror movie with the Great Pumpkin as a Freddy Krueger-type demon: sometimes two properties just don’t make sense mashed up together, no matter how popular they are separately.
The creators of Riverdale must’ve known this, too, because somehow — somehow — the show ended up far more insane than anyone could’ve predicted. Granted, the first two seasons were already shades of insane, with the supposed “teen” characters somehow having the time and skills needed to solve mysteries despite not even having graduated from high school yet.
However, Season 3 was when I found myself constantly asking, how is this an actual show that was written and got filmed and aired on TV? That season featured, erm, floating babies? A cult called The Farm? A schoolwide obsession with a board game called Gryphons and Gargoyles? An actual Gargoyle King?
What the hell is going on? If you want me to make sense of how all of this came to be in the show, I can’t — these elements felt like they came right out of nowhere for me, too. It was like the writers had no idea what to make Season 3 about, so they went with whatever they could think of first. I should have stopped watching right after that season. We all should have. And yet, I couldn’t look away. I needed to know how insane the show would become.
Riverdale continued to lose its mind the more it went on, introducing even crazier things to the mix, like time travel, witches, superpowers, and way too many musical episodes. At one point, someone plants a literal bomb under Archie’s bed which explodes when he and Betty are on it, which this sends everyone into a parallel universe called Rivervale, because that’s just what bomb explosions do in this world, apparently.
And then, to send them all back to Riverdale, Jughead goes, “We just have to accurately recreate the events in Archie’s bedroom.” Did the writers read their own screenplay? The solution to escaping this parallel universe is to accurately recreate the events that happened when Betty and Archie are on top of his bed at night? How does this multiverse even work?
They all go back from Rivervale to Riverdale and this has given them — wait for it — superpowers. Archie has super strength, Betty can sense auras, and Jughead can read minds. “I’ve started to see people’s energy, if it’s threatening,” Betty says in regard to her power. “Like, their auras. Is that crazy?”
In real life? Of course. In Riverdale? Nah, it’s just an average Tuesday morning.
We’d be here all day if I were to list down every crazy thing to happen in the show, but it doesn’t get crazier than the Season 6 finale, where the characters have to stop a literal comet from crashing into Riverdale. “Bailey’s Comet is going to crash into Riverdale in less than 24 hours and it is going to be an extinction-level event,” Cheryl proclaims.
Which, of course, leads us to where we are now — the comet somehow zapping the Riverdale characters back to 1955. They’re teenagers again, too, despite the fact that most of the cast is and definitely looks like they’re in their late 20s, and only Jughead can remember their lives from the future.
It’s only been one episode but already, the final season feels somewhat disappointing, since it mostly feels like the first season all over again, except set in the 50s. There’s no murder (yet), but everyone being teenagers again just has them going through the same teen drama of love triangles, queen bees, and parents just not understanding.
Still, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, I think I’m going to miss Riverdale. A decade or so from now, a group of people are probably going to be obsessed with this show and calling it an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece, and they are going to be dead mistaken. Riverdale has presented some of the most ludicrous writing I’ve ever seen in a TV show. And yet, Riverdale somehow transcended itself from being another Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl rip-off to one of the craziest, most unpredictable shows to follow.
Even if almost always unintentionally, Riverdale was wildly entertaining and often made me laugh harder than actual comedy shows ever did. Anyone into the so-bad-it’s-good genre should have the show high up on their watch list, as long as they have the energy to watch seven seasons of dialogue like, “Getting closer to you, the one thing I know is, I don’t want my darkness to overtake you.”
And give Riverdale its due: it made movie stars out of many of its cast members, something not a lot of teen dramas can claim to do. KJ Apa, Cole Sprouse, Camila Mendes, and Lili Reinhart have all starred in their fair share of recognizable titles — The Hate U Give, Five Feet Apart, Do Revenge, and Look Both Ways, to name a few — and look to have strong careers even after the show is over.
Perhaps sometime soon, we’ll get a far more faithful adaptation of the Archie comics. It’ll be funny and light-hearted, and I’ll probably like it just fine, but I’ll probably be thinking about Riverdale all the while. After all, what are the chances that adaptation gives me lines on the same craziness level as, “Let’s do it, let’s make out to save the universe”?
READ NEXT: 10 Worst Netflix Original Series of All Time
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
