RIVERDALE’z RETURN
New Season, New Motives, Same Old Sus Town
Picking up just after last season’s gunshots, season 2 of RIVERDALE begins with Archibald Andrews racing against death to save his father. Adolescent ills aren’t subtextual in this show. They manifest as violent melodrama — and wear their sordid, psychological and erotic thriller influences (Jughead and FP’s VHS collection, no doubt) on each episode’s title.
In the first quarter of its (22 episode!) second season, two things have become clear in intent:
- The South Side, as an antagonist, isn’t the source of crime, but a reflection of the North Side’s social roots in corruption.
- This killer’s spree encompasses the town as a whole, signifying Mayor McCoy and the Lodges, or either side of the North Side divide, as complicit to whatever ends the Black Hood seeks.
For Bughead and Varchie fans, these six episodes are a treasure trove. We’re treated with a handful of new characters are introduced into the treacherous web and plenty of snooping as the CW’s coming-of-age thriller saga prepares to debut an imminent teenage witch’s spin-off in the neighboring town of Greendale…
This time around RIVERDALE’s mystery centers around a Zodiac-esque killer known as the Black Hood. His victims, up ’til now: Fred Andrews, Ms. Grundy, Moose, Midge, and teacher-cum-pushaman Robert Phillips.
Supposedly, the Black Hood murders in honor of Betty Cooper’s righteousness. Voice-distorted phone calls and letters encoded in a Nancy Drew cipher end up printed in the town’s paper, the Riverdale Register, run by Alice Cooper, Betty’s mother. We expect the voice on the phone is the same person as the killer, they mailed Grundy’s sunglasses and Fred Andrew’s wallet as proof. So for now, we’ll assume the same person calling Betty is the Black Hood. He tells her she’d know him face-to-face.
Crisis in RIVERDALE begets dynamic shifts. Jingle-Jangle peddling and gentrification move so coyly that the serial killer’s frustration could be convincingly pushing any of these characters into a frenzy. Archie starts a (short-lived) shirtless vigilante gang. Betty retaliates against her mother with a South Side mugshot of Alice in her teens, which Betty received from the Black Hood. Jughead’s a newly inducted drug runner, on the hook for whatever his father owes the Serpents. Veronica’s father, meanwhile, corners the town’s financial despair in order to leverage his own equity.
Clifford Blossom’s filicide leaves Riverdale grasping for familiar ground, legacies reach out for power. Parents in professional stabs and covert affairs, the killer in some semblance of moral terrorism. With their children as witness, ground splits into contentious turf. Cheryl puts it plainly: “If you tell anyone the truth about what happened with the fire, I’ll tell everyone about what really happened in the barn with Daddy. You were cruel to me, Mother. It was abuse.”
So when the Black Hood tells Betty to look in the mirror as rebuke to his identity, is it their bloodline or a penchant to push life against its perimeters that binds them? One popular theory posits Alice’s secret child (FP and Alice’s kid?) as the voice behind the calls. Possibly Hal as the murderer. Runner-up as the murderer is serpent gang boss Tall Boy. For now, much remains in the dark. The town’s collective trauma, meanwhile, is out in the open.
Reconciling family legacy with our scars recalls Robert Redford’s film Ordinary People. It’d be easy to imagine the Andrews split in a manner not unlike the Jarretts, and it takes no effort at all to see the correlation between Cheryl Blossom’s loss and Conrad’s. That film, too, frames its character against mirrors, in friendships and domestic tug-of-war.
Americana’s heritage (or is it inheritance?) is at its loudest in the classic coming-of-age mashups (Why, hello, Grease + Rebel Without a Cause!) but this szn’s plot chips away at nostalgia as Riverdale’s blatant Post-Modern hypocrisy via its sense of perverted loyalties, those learned patterns and proclivities. Not that out-of-towners are any better. Nick St. Clair would have date raped Cheryl if it weren’t for Veronica and the Pussycats. Now that Chuck has resurfaced, romancing Josie, questions of forgiveness are highlighted as immediate dilemmas. It’s clear Hiram underestimates his daughter,he might be underestimating the town’s nature, too.
If you’re looking to dole out blame, it belongs to the town as a whole. Grudges from the past seep into the lives of Riverdale’s youth through each part of their growth. And as for reactions to crisis, to the tempo of a thriller, there’s no need for morals, in so far as behavior or what to expect from its depiction. As truths develop, the teens confront new bits of themselves piece by piece. So it goes that a river stays the same even as it changes.
Next episode, the South Side Serpent prince hosts a homecoming.
