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riverdale-retread · 2 years

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Riverdale s6 Ep 19 (#114: Witches of Riverdale).

Friends! Romans! This episode was unbelievable.

I watched this on the treadmill because I’m an #overseas Riverdale fan and I get these episodes a whole month and change after the stateside folks but I had to get off the moving walkway because I was laughing too much. I haven’t experienced this much untrammeled joy from a TV show in my recent (very faulty) memory.

Some disclaimers:

I don’t know anything about Sabrina Pun-Name (I mean really, they gave a witch the last name SPELL + MAN) so if you’re someone who knows the deep lore of that show, please let me know if I’m missing the point entirely. By the way, what I got out of this episode is that Sabrina is an unethical asshole but I don’t know if having context for her life would make me feel differently.

This recap is going to have a lot of fandom asides and performance commentary which I usually try to keep to a minimum.

First thing! Jughead is narrating even though he’s dead. He acknowledges that he’s dead. This is headspinningly funny because he calls himself the narrator, and he’s dead, and he’s also somehow fully aware of what’s going on while he’s technically mostly dead (in the Princess Bride way!) and telling us about it. He’s a dead, literally unreliable narrator who is also self aware that he is both in a story and also talking to me, a Netflix subscriber. Riverdale is genius.

The survivors of the Girls Count When It’s a Shitty Thing version of the Death of the First Born (sons) are in the lovely cemetery paying their respects to Nana Blossom. They are Heather, Betty, Veronica, Tabitha and Cheryl. Nana Rose gets a very beautiful pink flecked marble gravestone that looks like wounded flesh actually, so given that she died of asphyxiation following immolation, this choice is very Cheryl.

I’m assuming that everyone else got a headstone too just gauging from where people are looking and gesturing, but the production doesn’t actually show us, I assume for budget issues.

Poor Cheryl. How come fandom never talks about Cheryl’s trauma? She’s always been so tribal and family obsessed, but one by one all her family has died before she even reached 30.

Percival has the gall to show up to this gathering with Uncle Fucking Frank in tow.

Cheryl, in the throes of her grief, yells at him about killing “my Nana and my Tee-Tee.” Cheryl grieves literally nobody else.

Veronica yells at Percival about killing Anthony because Baby Anthony was a Baby. Percival takes his leave, which makes Jughead sound suddenly energized. He tells us with palpable gusto - “I’ll let you in on a secret.” To which I must wonder - Who does he think he’s talking to?

The funeral was a misdirect, he says, because it wasn’t a genuine funeral since no actual bodies were in the grave. They’re dead, for sure, and in the morgue freezers. Jughead says this like somehow this is exceptional, even though it isn’t.

We cut to Dr. Curdle (no longer referred to as Junior) eating a sandwich dead-eyed and alone in his work room (complete with apple!). I object to this. Dr. Curdle is a fun funky little weirdo - he’s a big fan of Josie and he’s music night date (boy?)friends with Principal Weatherbee. Why is he relegated to having a sad solo sandwich lunch in his depressing workroom? His meal is so wholesome too - milk, apple, sandwich. He is pivotal to all the Scooby plans and yet nobody thinks to invite him to lunch - he is no more or less off putting than Kevin or Jughead at their worst, so what gives?

Then we are given a glimpse of a moment that made the top of my head twist right off:

Kevin tends to a fussy Baby Anthony in his crib. Kevin touches Baby Anthony and tucks him in. Which is more than the now-dead Fangs ever did before his demise.

Kevin, Cheryl, Veronica, Heather Tabitha and Betty take in Alice’s newscast, which claims that it was gang warfare that resulted in so many deaths at the Toni/Fangs wedding celebration at the Whte Wyrm. Betty switches it off, annoyed. Tabitha speculates the reason for Percival not killing every First Born in town - that it would be harder to cover up. Otherwise there might be thousands of deaths. How big is Riverdale again??

We come to the Sabrina (What was Her Name Again) Spellman introduction. She’s Buffy, right? “Cheerleader by Day, Queen of Hell by Night” sounds like Buffy Summers, who had an intentionally silly name and not as on the nose as Spell-man. Heather is doing the exposition dump on Sabrina.

The resurrection attempted by the necromancing witches have to be performed within 3 days. You know. Like that other guy. The guy who came back on the 3rd day. They only have 12 hours left, is what Veronica says, but Sabrina is nowhere to be seen.

Cheryl has decided to display, among all her other art (like the one dedicated to long-forgotten Minerva Marble), her self portrait as a Vixen/ Furry / Fox Head thing to all her friends, who presumably are too wigged out to notice or ask about it.

Kevin wants to know how and why Baby Anthony didn’t die, even though he was a First Born. So how exactly does the First Born business work though?? First born to either parent qualifies? (Jughead wasn’t FP’s first born but I suppose he was Glady’s). Betty points out that Kevin is also a first born. But then again, not every single first born in Riverdale died, so what gives?

Apart and hidden from the others, Kevin tells Betty that he thinks the reason he was permitted to survive this very shoddily constructed plague was to be punished with survival. This is bullshit. He has no answer to what would be worse than murdered or how survival counts as punishment. No answer, none. He just says this so he can join Moose, who has already absconded to NYC. He makes shit up about doing this to ‘protect’ others. Betty arbitrarily says that ‘everyone else will understand’ but actually I think Kevin is RUNNING AWAY FROM single fatherhood with Baby Anthony. Betty understands the urge to run away from being a parent, apparently, but the facts are these:

Baby Anthony is an orphan now, and the person who would’ve been his third parent, the person who in fact began court proceedings to gain sole custody over him is completely abandoning him now that he’s alone in the world (notwithstanding the complete faith that everyone decides to have put in Sabrina). Kevin is a POS.

Meanwhile, Reggie, who I think is also a first born, has just made a delivery to Percival of the Daggers of Megiddo (which google says is a thing invented in the Omens movie series, and are weapons intended to defeat the antichrist) all the way from Rome.

He did what now? Reggie went to Rome and obtained “arcane objects of immense power” on his own and we don’t get to see any of it?

Reggie is a very precise speaker. He says he did enjoy the trip to Rome, but is irked by the death of his ‘high school friends.’ Not “friends from High School days,” not “old friends,” and definitely not “friends” in the present sense.

While Veronica was absent from the Babylonium for all of exactly 60 hours, Percival has managed to call a board meeting, mind control everyone into both showing up and doing his bidding (I presume mind control was involved, though Veronica was not actually beloved by her own board) and got Reggie installed as CEO.

Either Veronica doesn’t know or she doesn’t care, because she’s ensconced at Thornhill with all the surviving girls of Riverdale. Betty bursts in on the sad group, who are just staring off into the middle distance, to say that Mary Andrews asks her what’s going on with Archie, about whom she had a ‘bad feeling.’ Betty sounds rather frantic as she asks what they will tell Mary Andrews if the resurrection plan doesn’t work.

I’m going to do two things here : 1) snort at the idea that Mary Andrews gives enough of a shit about Archie to have any sort of long distance intuition about him whatsoever and 2) be sad at the thought that absolutely nobody, not JB, not Gladys, nobody, has any sort of need to keep in regular contact with Jughead to make the same kind of inquiry.

Remembering she is Catholic only in moments of need (like most of us), Veronica cautiously asks where ‘the souls’ of the deceased are, so that we can get the theology download. They’re all in the Sweet Hereafter!

We get shown what that is!!

They’re playing Fred Astaire’s Cheek to Cheek throughout for this portion. I love this song and in this rendition. “Heaven/ I’m in Heaven/ and My Heart beats so/ that I can hardly speak” is the way the lyrics go. In case we the audience might be confused about what this place is. (The lyrics will do the heavy lifting the scriptwriters refuse to engage with!)

Archie’s Sweethereafter are a wife and two kids in front of a heavily laden dinner table in his house that he never wants to leave. The wife is Betty. They named their kids Polly and Fred.

I don’t understand this culture of naming people after other people, especially not those who lived unhappy lives or died violent deaths. My culture doesn’t do this. Plus there’s something frightening about Betty naming her kid Polly - it’s not as awful as naming her ALICE perhaps, but Betty had a lot of intensely negative, conflicted feelings about Polly. Same with Archie naming his son after his father. Grandpa Fred is such a sainted presence in Dad Archie’s mind, that I am immediately worried about Little Fred.

Little Fred is great at music and sports, but performs academically poorly. How interesting! In Archie’s perfect world, he wants a son who struggles academically and is only good at the things that he himself tried to be good at. I say tried to be, because it’s not clear whether Archie ever got actual A’s in music or if his one child molestor teacher gave him those grades for obvious reasons. This is the opposite of, say, the desires of Forrest Gump, who also struggled but wanted his son to be really good at school. Archie’s heaven is appallingly self serving - he wants his kid to be bad at school so he can comfort his kid about bad grades. He will concede a daughter to Betty that achieves as much as she did.

Oh and his same dog from his childhood is an immortal freak animal that never died. OR he did the Michael Jackson thing and insisted on owning a series of dogs that he called Vegas over and over.

Jughead’s heaven is markedly different. He is served coffee by Pop at the thriving Diner, with an array of Mad House Glads, his comic book, laid out in front of him. I know this is exposition but the egotism of this is so funny. Jughead in heaven is only inspired by the evidence of his own prolific creativity. Oh, and further, Jughead has great draftsmanship in Heaven, instead of his sad stick figure art that he had to make do with in reality.

Toni and Fang’s joint heaven is a very weird mishmash. I suspect (because I don't like Fangs) that this is Toni’s heaven and Fangs is just along for the ride (much like Heaven Betty is in Archie’s fantasy).

Serpents and the Ghoulies sign a peace treaty on what looks like parchment paper. They have expensive pens in a little marble and brass stand like they’re at a summit of actual political leaders. I am surprised they don’t have tiny flags arrayed to mark the occasion. Toni’s vanity is on a scale I had not expected from her to date. She wants to act like head of state, and for GANGS to function like sovereign nations. Toni takes the title Serpent Queen really very literally. (I also think she doesn’t know a whole lot about the way treaties between warring nations frequently DON’T function, but she studied social work and not history or polisci so I will have to let this go.)

Fangs says that Riverdale will be ‘more unified’ but I’m not sure what this means. The two gangs are no longer at war, so are they diving up territory? Did they merge??

Anthony is all grown up and looks older than both of his parents. And Twyla is there with her son Timmy. The two boys look at each other meaningfully. I’m very surprised by how much Anthony is styled like Malachai, formerly of the less Disneyfied Ghoulies - cut off sleeves, curls, muscular. And Timmy the Ghoulie Prince is Jughead coded.

Back in the real world, Kevin is hurriedly packing up. I hate him because he takes care to pack a big framed photo of Baby Anthony in the act of abandoning Baby Anthony wholesale. There was no discussion at all whatsoever for who should be responsible for keeping this infant alive in Kevin’s absence, you know, but gosh, Kevin will take A PHOTO with him. He is met at the door by his father and Uncle Fucking Frank, who say Percival wants a word.

Meanwhile, Reggie invites his father to come over and enjoy himself at the Babylonium, dancing and swaggering alone in the CEO suite in front of his own Lodge-esque portrait. Reggie’s main connection to anything in this world, love or hate, is about his father, but his main influence is Hiram.

And finally! We are introduced to Sabrina Spellman, who took her own sweet time coming over to Riverdale because there were other things happening in other “realms.”

Then follows what must be a crossover or something because I just lost my mind.

But I have to also ask: Am I supposed to hate Sabrina Spellman after seeing her in action? Is this what she was like on her own show? A self serving, obnoxious liar?

The next bit is loosely organized into a list of Sabrina Spellman’s Sins Against Riverdale:

Sabrina Sin 1: Forced conversion under a situation of duress

They are down to a precious few hours to resurrect the dead, and the first thing Sabrina makes everyone do is convert to a new religion. They have to do a bunch of things - sign a document, chant a chant, do a dance. All while the confirmed actual witches wink and smile at each other like creeps. By the way, the conversion ritual is done in common speech, but I will note that Sabrina also uses Latin for her spells! The ones that count!

However, the ceremony looked like a lot of fun and the Catholic Church could take some notes.

Sabrina Sin 2: Give incomplete information

Sabrina forced desperate people to convert to her religion, then tells them only in implication that there are OTHER ways beyond the thing she wants to do first, for her own personal reasons.

She also only explains that the dead have to WANT TO return only after they have Jughead out of the freezer and on their ceremonial table. Except, of course, this also turns out to be a bald-faced lie.

Sabrina Sin 3: Sabrina doesn’t have to pick the body of a person she finds fuckable as the test subject to bring back from the dead as the No 1. candidate. But she picks Jughead on the basis of finding him more fuckable than Archie. (Given that they’ve left a baby behind, shouldn’t Fangs or Toni be the first one she picks, you know, for humanitarian reasons??)

Sabrina Sin 4: Sabrina does not need to be the one to go, at all, to persuade the almost-completely-dead to return. She has no connection to Jughead (or anyone) but she insists on going so she can fuck her boyfriend using Jughead’s reanimated corpse.

The truncated bits of information she delivers is passive-aggresively designed to dissuade Jughead from coming back to life, more than anything else. This is a complete nonstarter, to say to someone who is in some version of heaven, Come Back and Fight a Terrible Battle.

Jughead turns out to be aware he is dead and in heaven and to have a memory of his own death which he recalls with pain. To be fair, Jughead’s death was the most terrifying - he was absolutely alone, underground and afraid and in pain. Jughead also has retained all of his memories, including the fact that Tabitha told him they are overwhelmingly likely to lose.

Jughead also mentions as a passing point, almost, that he can hear in heaven. Which means being unable to hear had persistently been upsetting him while alive, even though he did not ever, ever complain about it, to anyone, Tabitha included. After a childhood in which those he loved most barely ever noticed his very serious troubles and pains, he just carries this behavior of being completely silent about his misery into his adult life. He’s a very heartbreaking character, if you ever take a breath to think about it.

Sabrina really does not try, at all, whatsoever. In some ways, she CAN’T because doesn’t KNOW any of these people, and in fact never bothered to ask key questions before she made the leap into the supernatural. She did not bother to ask Tabitha or Betty or Veronica or Cheryl (Jughead’s current VIP, former VIP, and people who’ve known him the longest) what would be motivating factors to bring up to Jughead to get him to leave heaven.

I can only conclude that Sabrina never intended to succeed in bringing Jughead back, and she only pretended to come up with this idea of fucking Jughead’s body at the last minute, even to Jughead.

By the way, getting Riverdale information initially through fandom Tumblrs can be a very confusing experience. I saw the gifs about this episode weeks ago, and you know, anti-Jabithas did some bad faith editing there. Jughead does say about Tabitha, “I do hope to see her soon,” but that’s where the gifset ended. They left out the smirkily joking context of the rest of the scene, because Jughead immediately adds: “NOT TO SOON THOUGH.”

While all that is going on, Kevin is being mind-invaded by Percival. Kevin’s touchstones to sanity are - his childhood friendship with Betty and Veronica in S1 before it fell apart (this is very honest of the show), the brief moment of domestic cohesion with Toni and Fangs in S5 before that fell apart, and the one time he dressed up in a beehive wig with a full face of make-up during the Hedwig episode. He asks to be killed instead.

Anyhoo.

We are back at Thornhill where Sabrina walks out of the portal with the reanimated Jughead corpse. Tabitha is elated to see Jughead, runs into his arms, says how much she missed him.

The fact that Betty has absolutely nothing to say is a little shocking to me, but we’ll let that go. ( No we won’t, actually. I mean! It seems so out of character! Does Betty now hate Jughead? But how is that possible?? It’s only when Nick says “What’s up ladies?” that Betty snarkily comments that it can’t be Jughead - why? Because he talks to women? But Jughead has never been shy or incompetent at wooing women, ever. It’s MEN’s romantic attentions he has a hard time with. What the heck?)

Sabrina Sin 5: Sabrina the asshole smiles with inappropriate glee as she tells Jughead’s girlfriend and buddies that she’s inserted her own boyfriend’s soul into Jughead’s body. Tabitha is both tearful and furious. She says all the right things - You stole his body?? - and the suddenly super articulate Sabrina has all the answers lined up. It’s understandable that Jughead didn’t want to leave heaven! She “borrowed” his body “with Jughead’s consent” because we are not in a Wonder Woman movie!

Sabrina Sin 6: Sabrina does not say she needs Nick there to do what she should have done to begin with - send in people who have an actual emotional connection with the dead to try to get them to come back. This only proves that the entire shenanigans about shoving Nick Scratch into Jughead’s body after deciding Jughead’s corpse is cuter than Archie’s was just a way to get a warm sex toy.

Because Sabrina has this unfair advantage of power and knowledge, none of the new witches dares to question her for wasting ALL THIS TIME in doing this bullshit with the Jughead corpse.

I suppooooose you could say that Sabrina had to do this magic trick bit with reanimating Jughead’s corpse with her boyfriend’s soul so that she could get the buy in from the rest to temporarily die in order to visit the Sweet Hereafter to get their people back, but I still say that’s a post-facto justification and not persuasive. These women were willing to call in a necromancer, and dance to the goddess Hecate and do all this other stuff, so she could’ve probably persuaded them without getting herself this nice bonus. And wasting time (I cannot emphasize this enough).

At this point though, I started to find this entire thing kind of funny. Jughead has officially the most desirable body in Riverdale. Like, literally the most attractive and the most fuckable, even 60 hours after death, chilling in a freezer. Not Archie of the Abs and the Square Jaw. Not Fangs, also of the Abs and Long Lashes. It’s Jughead.

Then the two best people in Riverdale - who are a) Cheryl and b) Veronica - agree to die temporarily so that they can, respectively, retrieve an ex girlfriend who married a man and that man, and an ex boyfriend who cheated on her with her best friend from high school after the two of them flaunted their relationship in her face so much that she had a minor nervous breakdown at someone else’s rehearsal dinner. Oh and Cheryl will go in for Dagwood and her Nana as well. Betty can’t go because she is confirmed by Nick Scratch on sight to be the Whore of Babylon.

Maybe you needed to be a CAOS viewer, but the degree to which Sabrina completely accepts her boyfriend’s conclusion without question struck me as very odd.

So Sabrina is going to summon Charon to do the crossing over. Betty is the one that nudges Veronica into dying for Archie. It’s a form of full circle, I suppose - Veronica once gulped down a goblet of poison for Betty, so she might as well be a full service third wheel.(I hate this place. Please let me out.)

Percival demands that Reggie execute Kevin, in exchange for giving Kevin’s heart to Reggie’s ailing father. Reggie’s reaction - adorably appalled - and his reason (he and Kevin go all the way back to “rugrat” days) were a balm given how much pain I was in about Veronica at this moment.

Then we get to a truly wonderful part of this episode (sincere!). The three best girls of Riverdale (Tabitha, Cheryl and Veronica) are lying on the floor, ready to die. Veronica is worried about it hurting, but Cheryl, truly faithful, is “excited” to be able to say she died and came back. Veronica lets the air out of her sails by saying, not incorrectly, that a lot of people can say that in Riverdale.

Nick Scratch has to use an English language incantation, but so far, out of everyone who has done one of these, he gives it the due weight and seriousness of an actual magic spell. Or maybe this is an innate Jughead ability that Nick Scratch is making the most of. Jughead had such a good time using the formalist portentous language of the G&G game back in the day after all.

Then Sabrina summons Charon with another English language doggerel poem.

AND CHARON APPEARS and we are in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the 1990s. Like TOTALLY this is a Buffy episode! I’m so into it now! The red glowing eyes of Charon (no face to minimize special effects costs), the dorkily choreographed way he moves, the magic trick of collecting the coins on the girls’ eyes without touching them, the twinkly music, the very basic fog effect, and the fact that the ‘dead souls’ are expressed as glowing technicolor versions of the girls - just SO BUFFY. It’s so FUN!! Betty and Heather are appropriately creeped out by Charon. I LOVE that little performance detail Betty has where she just does not want to make eye contact with Charon.

When the souls of the three brave girls leave for the beyond, Betty as The Responsible One asks what should happen next, and Sabrina puts her and Heather on guard duty. Then Sabrina and Jughead as occupied by Nick Scratch smirk at each other about ‘going on a date’ and get a TERRIFIC nasty look from Betty. (I love Lili Reinhart so much- she makes really fun decisions about how Betty reacts to any outlandish scenario.)

Veronica, in Archie’s heaven, lives right down the street and comes over only rarely. Archie is living in a version of heaven where he won the war and then died. This seems slightly different from the heaven Jughead was occupying during Sabrina’s visit. Veronica says to a very stubborn Archie, who doesn’t want to leave his heaven, that he’ll “do the right thing,” not least because the Real Betty is still on the mortal plane, needing his help. Dream Betty comes home. Dream Betty cooks and is able to offer to set out an extra plate at her table on a whim. Dream Betty and Archie’s ideal Veronica are most definitely not best friends, definitely not B&V. Dream Betty will look at a clearly rather upset Veronica, smile at her like a robot and blandly say “It’s nice to see you” before breezing off.

I kind of hate Archie.

In Toni and Fang’s dream world, they’ve stayed married for however old this tall muscular curly-haired Baby Anthony is supposed to be. Very straight looking. But! Their son grew up gay (or bi, unclear). The level of unnecessary ambiguity they’ve built into his coming out about who he wants to marry is annoying. He wants to marry Twyla Twyst’s son Timmy. When his parents act overjoyed at this announcement, No-Longer Baby Anthony says, joyfully relieved, that he wasn’t sure how they were going to take the news.

Why? Because they are going to become in-laws with the Ghoulie leader who once cooperated with Percival to kidnap Anthony? Or because he thinks his parents are straight married people who are uncomfortable with gayness? (But how can that be? Toni and Fang’s generation of Serpents could barely scrape together a single straight person.)

Cheryl comes bursting into their domestic bliss with a very loud record scratch sound. She should’ve gotten her slowmo entrance with a hair whip, but I suppose Sabrina wasted too much time up front for that.

Cheryl is a trooper. Or maybe she doesn’t pick up on this but in Toni and Fang’s joint heaven, Cheryl is a vile evil person, permanently left out in the cold as all the straights and bis get straight married and leave her resentful gay ass behind. Fangs says that in his version of heaven, Cheryl was a person who tried to sabotage her brother’s marriage to Polly, and also tried to sabotage Toni’s marriage to Fangs. Cheryl advises Toni to search her “mother’s heart” for the truth, then leaves forthwith.

When Tabitha bursts in on Jughead’s heaven, the sound track plays the song Guardian Angel. Yes OK, we get it.

Jughead’s heaven has grown to include more people than when Sabrina visited earlier in the day. He now has fawning fans, and I must say, rather adorably Jughead fawns right back at them. In particular he is given the proper fan freak out moment by a lanky kid who is obsessed with his works, sounds lonely, and says that not only did Jughead’s work get him through tough times, Jughead’s imaginary characters are really friends to him. To this last part, Jughead says, Yeah, Me Too.

(Is this a wink wink nudge nudge commentary about the fact that Jughead is The Narrator?)

Jughead’s heaven does not have any meaningful intimate relationships, which is very interesting. Is Jughead’s heaven one where he’s asexual? Or is it that he’s less controlling and prone to delusion as Archie - Jughead isn’t going to do anyone the injustice of inventing a false version of themselves to be his personal Barbie. He wants to eventually spend eternity with Tabitha, but will wait for the real Tabitha instead of inventing one (unlike Archie and his Dream Betty).

Tabitha also finds Jughead’s joy in having someone give him positive feedback too adorable to interfere with, so she decides to let him enjoy himself. Immediately after seating herself at the counter, she is greeted by the Angel Raphael from RiverVale, who wants to tell her some things. We don’t get to hear what they are.

Meanwhile, Cheryl walks into someone’s heaven. It has Polly married to Jason, Nana Rose is still alive, and Dagwood is buddies with his father whom he’s never met in real life.

Did Polly Cooper want to be married to Jason and be mistress of Thornhill (with the Parentdale generation of Blossoms long dead and forgotten?)?

Is this Jason’s heaven? It can’t be, because Jason has nothing to say in this heaven either.

Does Dagwood, as a minor, get to choose his heaven? If so, is Dagwood’s heaven one in which he is not a twin and is an only child to boot?

And Nana Blossom - I’m not sure what Nana Blossom’s heaven would be (being courted by smarmy young men armed with red roses a la Reggie, perhaps) - but being the great grandma in this sort of setting hardly fits the Nana Rose we’ve seen to date.

IF this is Jason’s heaven as well then he shares a weird code with Dagwood - because in this world, Cheryl does not live at Thornhill and is also an infrequent visitor, given the way Polly greets Cheryl (“Cheryl! [big pause, then, hesitantly] We weren’t expecting you!”). Why are all these het people so gross and refuse to appreciate Cheryl?

By the way, to the right of this cute /creepy family tableau, there is a decapitated baby doll’s head on a side table next to the blank easel in the living room. Just FYI.

What Polly tells Cheryl makes me wonder if this isn’t somehow Cheryl’s heaven. The maple business is booming, trees are swollen with sap, and Polly is going to have a triplet of Blossoms, so now there will be 5 little Jason progeny running around. Because Cheryl’s heaven is - now that I think of it - to get out of Thornhill but have it prosper and be allowed to visit whenever she wants.

But since Polly is the one doing all of the talking, the most reasonable conclusion is that this is Polly’s heaven. (Jason too, likely wanted to escape Thornhill, not be master of it.). This makes me think very different thoughts about Polly than before.

Polly the Dead invites Cheryl the Living into staying in Polly’s Heaven forever, but even though Cheryl is so pleased by this vision and what it gives her, she doesn’t fall for it.

Then we cut to Jughead the Possessed on a date with Sabrina the Asshole. I am going to assume that this is a post coitus meal.

Sabrina confesses that her taking Jughead’s corpse specifically so she could fuck her dead boyfriend with it was absolutely a deliberate choice made out of pure opportunism, without a single care that this was wasting the time of people who counted on her to help them prevent The Apocalypse. She even suggests that they abscond with Jughead’s corpse to live in a cabin somewhere.

Was the intention of introducing this character supposed to result in my despising her? Is she meant to be a villain? But she’s not being treated like one in the text.

Nick is an asshole just like his girlfriend so they only talk about their own interests. She weeps about whatever situation they are in, and I have no idea what she’s talking about and I frankly don’t care because she’s a dick. I’m glad she doesn’t get what she wants. Who the fuck are you and why are you in my show?

Then Sabrina Spellman kisses Jughead Jones’ corpse on the mouth and I got my first taste of what it might be like to be a diehard Barchie or Bughead watching the other ship’s scenes. I HATE THIS! PUT IT AWAY.

Back at the casino, the Mantle men are having dinner. Reggie gets his father’s absolute approval for the first time ever. Then the worm turns and his father tells Reggie that he knows he’s dying. Reggie, at this point, is completely willing to kill Kevin for his father.

Reggie’s father says that even though he failed at business, marriage and fatherhood, he wants to die with honor.

OK. Three things.

One - I don’t know about the word choice of HONOR here because I just get the heebie jeebies when English language programming give Asian people any line that mentions the word HONOR. (Nobody in contemporary Asia talks like this and in the East Asian self imagination of the past they also do not have people prattle on about HONOR. This is a white stereotype of Asian people all smooshed together and it’s always completely shit. Yes, I am the authority on this. Accept it.)

Two - That said, Jughead sneering at him during his early Serpent membership days that Reggie doesn’t know what “honor” is provoked Reggie into trying to punch Jughead in the face, so nice callback, I guess?

Third, Marty Mantle is selfish to the very last. His personal desire to ‘die with honor’ is so unhelpful to Reggie, and doesn’t ameliorate any of the failures of his life or what he did to Reggie as a child. He just wants this last vanity for himself. I reject this redemption arc attempt for Marty Mantle. Plus this is very gendered of me probably, but I much prefer that men stay alive and live long to do the dishes and change the diapers and wash the windows than ‘die with honor’ in some stupid glorious annihilation. Please stay alive and scrub the toilet bowl.

At the morgue, Sabrina and Nick say solemn farewells to each other while little birds come to watch. Sabrina sexually molests Jughead Jones’s corpse a second time before Nick Scratch eases back into the land of the dead. They play very obtrusive sad piano music over this but I’m repelled and confused. Would it have been impossible to give us a very small short exposition dump about who the hell these people are and what is going on via Heather?

The sourness of this scene is immediately washed away though by the very next scene.

Reggie, in his lonely big luxury bedroom that he stole from Veronica using the help of the devil (I love Riverdale) cries out, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ about his father’s unknowing rejection of the plan to harvest Kevin’s heart for a transplant. He’s immediately answered by his own voice emanating from the Reggie Puppet. Reggie’s conscience is much more intelligent than his normal self but the thing is, I am inclined to think that Reggie’s conscience refuses to cohabit with Reggie in his body. Reggie’s conscience works via Puppet Zoom.

Reggie’s distant relationship with his conscience is shown by his calling it “Bro.” Riverdale is brilliant.

Reggie says that this is Percival testing him, and is advised by his own conscience that the best course of action is to skip town with the whole test - Kevin, his Dad, himself.

Sabrina comes back to Thornhill, where again, nobody is asking about the Cheryl-with-A Fox’s-Head self portrait given absolute pride of place. She asks, not very interested, on how they all made out with the highly dangerous mission to the Sweet Hereafter. (The show also skimps out on telling us how they got back. I wanted to see Charon bring them back.)

Betty, the one who wasn’t Good (™) enough to even get to visit, is the one who loudly blares out that everyone failed. This is very in character for Betty. She’s annoyed at everyone else’s failure. Cheryl adds that ‘some’ of them were hostile (meaning Fangs, mostly).

I want to punch Sabrina in her perfect pretty face for the way she smirks at Tabitha as she asks if Tabitha managed to “pull at Jughead’s heartstrings.” Oh. My God. You bitch. I don’t know what happened to you on your show, but I’m glad your boyfriend is dead and you have Aunties who did whatever it was that made you cry.

Tabitha says she just could not bring herself to ask Jughead to come back, to pull at those heartstrings. Jabitha are fascinating - it’s sort of what happens when two too-good people, used to sacrifice and duty, get together. Tabitha cannot bring herself to insist that her happy boyfriend come back to life, especially because she told him the truth about the overwhelming number of realities in which their mission fails and he dies.

Betty decides that everyone who doesn’t want to do what she needs them to do is crazy, and she’s backed up by Veronica who decides that the best thing to do in the face of resistance against what she thinks is right is to use brute force.

So, Sabrina, playing hide the ball TO THE LAST, finally reveals that Cheryl has the power of the phoenix and can summarily yank people back from the dead.

Cheryl, going from reclining to gesticulating, is delightful. She asks what the hell the Power of the Phoenix is. Even though Heather wasn’t allowed to give us the Sabrina-and-Nick exposition dump, she unhelpfully gives the useless definition of what a phoenix is. (Did Cheryl really not know?).

This is coo-coo bananas. But I’m also kind of feeling it.

You said it Cheryl.

Heather finally lays out what the risks are: Souls might return incomplete! Infected with malignancy! And will (she says MIGHT but actually it’s WILL) resent you for the rest of their (un)natural lives! (Just like Buffy did, when she revealed she’d been in heaven to her necromancer witch friend in the musical episode!)

Betty seems to do a quick calculation of who has died, and she’s very indifferent to most of their potential resentment and further seems to trust that Archie probably won’t resent her. (Whatever Toni, Fangs, Dagwood and Jughead might feel about anything is of no interest to her whatsoever.) Tabitha, the only one armed with real information about the potential futures, says that they really don’t have a lot of choice, because the worst is “yet to come.”

Cheryl is the best person in Riverdale. She really is. She’s told by Sabrina the Asshole that she has to burn all the corpses so that they may HOPEFULLY rise from the ashes. This thesis is untested then. AND she has to do it all alone, and given the hostile presence of people like Betty, take on all the blame if it fails. But she steps up and says she’ll do it in the mines without hesitation.

Reggie’s escape plan does not quite work. Reggie, Kevin and Marty are caught before they even gets to leave the building. Percival is not surprised, but is disappointed by Reginald.

Cheryl is not as good as Jughead’s corpse in reciting an incantation, but the spell works anyway.

To let the audience know that at minimum, Archie will not resent Betty and Toni will not resent Cheryl, we are briefly shown that Archie was willing to come back to “Fight the War” and Toni came to the realization that her reality in heaven was a fabrication. Whoever constructed the Toni-Fangs heaven did a shitty job. They didn’t bother making up any further photos for the photo album!

As their corpses magically burn, the heaven-selves start to heat up. Jughead is not given any chance to have a change of heart about coming back alive. He’s going to be the only one yanked out of a perfect-for-him heaven in which he was perfectly happy to be resurrected in a reality in which he knows he is overwhelmingly likely to suffer a SECOND miserable death in his twenties.

We get a Harry Potter fiery phoenix CGI effect to prove that the spell worked, after which we are shown Jughead, Dagwood, Nana Rose, Toni, Fangs and Archie walking out whole and hale from the blue flames.

Sabrina is walked out of Thornhill by Cheryl looking gorgeous in a red dress. What Sabrina does next puts the final nail in my I Hate Sabrina Spellman casket. Sabrina tells Cheryl to “just be careful” which is a slap-buying offense for being fucking vaguefor something as serious as upsetting Death. Sabrina didn’t give the warning for the potential risks for the spell caster before the spell was cast, and doesn’t give a proper explanation for what the risks are now that she’s taken the risk.

Jughead is silent in his misery as he always is, and this time his pain is about being brought back to corporeal life on the mortal plane. In very gentle, kind tones, Tabitha tearfully explains that he had to come back to the cold miserable reality of actual life in order to fight off the apocalypse. Then, because she’s Jughead-coded Tabitha says secondly that she wanted her boyfriend to not be dead because she loves him.

It turns out Jughead can hear AND read thoughts. He says that this ‘cushions the blow.’ Which means it had REALLY been bothering him but he never spoke of the misery his hearing loss gave him.

I’m worried that Jabitha are going to self-abnegate into oblivion. And maybe this has to do with fitting into camera angles, but Tabitha is developing the same terrible hunched posture as Jughead.

At Thornhill, Heather asks Cheryl how things really were in the Sweet Hereafter. This suddenly made me a huge fan of Heather. Heather understands that there is a public and private Cheryl, and also that access to the private Cheryl requires a soft touch, to be made in utmost confidence and discretion.

Cheryl admits that she was pained to see her family happy without her, but that she took matters into her own hands. Cheryl resurrected Polly, Jason and Dagwood! As Heather looks very freaked out, Polly and Cheryl smile creepily at each other. Polly came back wrong, right? Right?

Betty and Archie are cuddling, because Archie is given lead boy cushioning and went from being with Dream Betty to Actual Betty. Betty is a smartie and laughs at the very dumb choices that Archie made in heaven to name their kids Polly and Fred. The show is not as vicious to Archie as it is to Jughead, but it is unkind. Archie is not very talented at music from the point of view of a teacher who doesn’t want to molest him and he didn’t have very good boxing skills from the point of view of a coach who knows the sport, and in his heaven he picked names for his dream children that his living actual girlfriend thinks are uncreative, because he’s just not smart.

Tabitha checks in on Veronica. Veronica is given not great news that she could be Endgame with Archie in the same percentage as Barchie being endgame. Um. Tabitha says as a conclusion that Veronica’s future is ‘up for grabs.’ Which could mean I dunno JERONICA endgame or VEGGIE endgame just as well but oh man.

Why is Veronica not more upset about what has happened with the casino?

In the vault of the casino Kevin Keller’s father has abandoned Kevin to be executed by Percival in the morning. I mean, the Mantles are in there too but wow that is COLD. Reggie turns out to have a magic knife in his possession. He’s determined to kill Percival.

Tabitha is doing the rounds. She checks in on Toni and Fangs. My general impression of that apartment is it being dank and dark, but with Tabitha there it’s revealed to be a bright yellow interior, with flowering hanging plants. Is this the magic of Tabitha?

Fangs, by the way, still has not touched Baby Anthony. He and Toni are seated next to the crib staring at the baby, but he doesn’t touch him. At all. What gives??

Tabitha tells them that Baby Anthony is immortal. Then she announces that she is Riverdale’s guardian angel. She is lit like the Virgin Mary in Renaissance paintings as she says this.

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