In this episode, Betty learns moral lessons totally unjustified by actual events; Jughead channels Humphrey Bogart to rather amusing effect; Archie continues to be an absolute bore; and Veronica’s outfits are by far the MVP of the episode.
Tag / Riverdale
Riverdale Season 3 Episode 10: “The Stranger”
It will, I’m sure, surprise no one to hear that last week’s ending was a fakeout. Nor will it surprise you to hear that this episode contains gratuitous shirtlessness, ludicrous plot twists that no one bothers explaining, and shaky understandings of legal concepts. But it combines a Silence of the Lambs homage with a classic high school show Taking-the-SATs episode as only Riverdale could do, and the jokes were on point!
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 9: “No Exit”
So you know all those cliffhangers from last episode, and the part where Hiram’s evil plan had finally come to complete fruition? Forget about all of that. This episode, true to Riverdale’s ever-more-incoherent form, careens into entirely new plot arcs with barely a glance at the supposedly climactic disaster at the end of the last.
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 8: “Outbreak”
This episode, as always, leaned in to the camp factor with toothy delight. And it also… maybe… got rid of my least favorite character, or at least freed Jughead from his clutches. All in all, rather fun if also bewildering.
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 7: “The Man in Black”
This episode takes place in several chapters, somewhat improving the viewing experience, which in recent weeks sometimes resembles an episode of TV less than it resembles a really intense Scrambler ride. I’m not sure how I feel about it overall, because Veronica and Archie are both still driving me crazy, but at least there are some genuinely scary moments in here.
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 6: “The Manhunter”
Previously on Riverdale: The warden told Archie how Hiram framed him, by paying off the witnesses, and suggested that the witnesses were hiding by Shadow Lake in the mines; Joaquin stabbed Archie at the warden’s command and was possibly-probably-definitely playing G&G with him; Veronica helped Archie escape, leading to the warden chewing some MAJOR scenery; Veronica retroactively declared that everyone in the room was in a pact not to tell about Archie; and Jughead went out to find the Gargoyle King.
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 5: “The Great Escape”
Um, good title. Spoilers much?
![Six teenagers (from left to right: Cole Sprouse [Jughead/young FP] in a fur cape, Lili Reinhart [Betty/young Alice] in a long black cape, KJ Apa [Archie/young Fred] in a weird helmet, Camila Mendes [Veronica/young Hermione], Madelaine Petsch [Cheryl/young Penelope], and Ashleigh Murray [Josie/young Sierra].](https://advers.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/riverdale-304-featured.png?w=1200)
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 4: “The Midnight Club”
This episode is pretty much automatically a winner in my book: it’s a flashback episode, a nineties episode, and a Breakfast Club ripoff all in one. What more could a girl ask for? It’s just made more amazing by the fact that, since each teen actor plays their own parent, it also includes Cole Sprouse playing a young womanizer FP and Lili Reinhart in bad-girl gear, a fun change for both of them.
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 3: “As Above, So Below”
Previously on Riverdale: The grownups met to discuss a Pact they had regarding the Gargoyle King and a mysterious Night on which something bad happened; Ethel had a seizure after mentioning the Gargoyle King to Betty and Jughead; Ben killed himself to be with the Gargoyle King; Edgar’s creepy daughter Evelyn introduced herself to Betty; and Archie had a fight in the prison yard and was “tapped” by the warden to be the “new Mad Dog.”
The lights come up on Archie, who’s in some kind of isolation torture cell. The sadistic Warden comes to check on him and, when he’s still intransigent, leaves him there for another week.
Meanwhile, FP and Alice are totally post-coitally snuggling in bed! Whoa. Actually I kind of like it. FP says he’s happy that the farm convinced Alice to make out with him. Alice, in return, softly says that it’s been three weeks with no mysterious blue-lip murder. Not so good at the pillow talk is she?
Riverdale Season 3, Episode 2: “Fortune And Men’s Eyes”
I’m going to start off by remarking that watching this episode–in which Archie becomes the ringleader of an almost-all-white juvenile detention center with a gang problem and teaches his fellow inmates to reclaim their humanity with football–and then almost immediately going out to watch KJ Apa in The Hate U Give, a sensitive and honest drama about blackness and racism and police brutality–was a surreal experience.
I have to wonder what KJ Apa thought of this episode himself. There is just such a difference between his work in The Hate U Give — playing a white boy with a black girlfriend who is slow to, but willing to, learn about the racism she experiences — and this episode, which creates a fantasy blithely oblivious to the realities of mass incarceration, a world in which it’s all white kids in the jail and the key to their spiritual liberation is for a white boy to tell them not to act like animals. I mean, at least they didn’t cast a bunch of black kids to play the other boys at the center, right? Because that would be an overtly offensive white-savior narrative, whereas what they ended up with is “just” a bizarrely out-of-touch dreamworld–still, I think, a creation of white privilege, but just more subtly so.
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