1.It's the season finale, and it's been one full year since Archie, Veronica, Jughead, and Betty returned to Riverdale "temporarily," and for various reasons they are all staying. WHO WOULDA THUNK? For starters, Veronica has gone from "She Wolf of Wall Street" to "Black Widow of Wall Street" and so that whole thing where she dumped Archie to live in NYC...is irrelevant now.
2.Meanwhile, in a very convenient move for Betty (should I say Special Agent Elizabeth Cooper?), Riverdale's FBI office is reopening. This is pretty baffling for a town that doesn't even have a real fire department (sry, Archie!) but good for her!
3.Meanwhile, my fave one-gloved principal, Waldo Weatherbee, has asked Jughead to permanently run the Blue & Gold newspaper again.
4.Legit the five questions I ask myself daily:
5.Archie has decided to reopen Andrews Construction even though he is still basically running a fire department full time, and I'm fairly positive still runs the El Royale and teaches RROTC at Riverdale High. But OK, sure!
6.And Cheryl has put Britta to work digging for palladium, which is apparently essential to Cheryl's ministry for...reasons. And of course she absolutely MUST touch up her makeup in the cave:
7.But everything comes to a screeching halt when a Ghoulie throws a Molotov cocktail at Pop's, nearly burning the whole thing down, and Archie and co. almost don't make it on time because their firetruck tires were slashed.
8.And then Tabitha delivers my favorite kind of Riverdale dialogue — the kind that is so commonplace on this show that I merely shrug and then think about how any other living human being would react upon hearing it.
9.Sigh, I really don't want to get into all of it because it is so boring and we've been through it a billion times, but yadda yadda Hiram is guilty yadda yadda they need proof of his crimes yadda yadda they're finally gonna kill him once and for all except they're totally not going to do that...
10.Toni and Fangs DO kidnap and torture the Ghoulie for information about Hiram, and I do find it somewhat remarkable to see Toni go from being a wonderful guidance counselor to literally torturing a dude. Sir Ghoulie taunts Toni and Fangs and says the Serpents have gone "soft" and...he's not WRONG? But also who is even IN the Serpents anymore? Is it just Toni, Fangs, and baby Anthony?
11.And Reggie delivers perhaps his best line of the series after securing video evidence of Hiram murdering Vito and bringing it to Archie and Veronica:
12.In an unrelated scene, Betty gets a call from her old friend the Trash Bag Killer. Still all we know is that for some reason he is completely bloodied and he wears a trash bag mask that looks like whenever I attempt to do a spa mask.
13.Alright so, the whole beginning of the episode was all about finally bringing Hiram to justice, Toni and Fangs asking Veronica if she was "willing to do what it takes" to bring Hiram to justice, and basically just the whole thing was leading up to them killing Hiram ONCE AND FOR ALL. So is that what happened? LOL, no, they literally just let him...walk away into — as Taylor Swift and Bon Iver would say — exile.
14.A lot of couple updates went down in this episode, so I figured I'd pause and put them all in one place in this recap:
15.OK, now that you're up to speed, things take a turn for the EXTREMELY bizarre when Cheryl and Britta are back in the mines and...whaddaya know, they stumble upon a bunch of skeletons because of course they do!
16.Turns out, it's time for us to hear another absolutely fucking bonkers story about the Blossom family from Nana Rose — this comes a mere two episodes after the time we learned about the illegitimate family of Blossom serial killers who called themselves the mothmen.
17.Long story short is a Blossom ancestor named Abigail was accused of being a witch and was burned at the stake because she wouldn't sell her maple groves in the hunt for palladium.
18.But OK, here's where I started wheezing from laughter. It turns out that there were three people behind Abigail's murder — Archibald Andrews, Jedidiah Jones, and Beatrice Cooper!!!!!
19.Oh, AND btw, Abigail placed a lil' curse on all of their families, hence all those skeletons. NBD.
20.In present day, Cheryl is furious at her friends for their ancestors' sins, and honestly they're not as apologetic as they should be!
21.As the palate cleanser we all need and deserve, Pop Tate came back to save us all! Look at how he is THRIVING in retirement in Florida! I'm so happy I could cry.
22.Alright, so thanks to a bunch of plot that I really can't even think about...Riverdale has been SAVED, which means it's up to Archie and his friends to, like, figure out the government structure? What a truly weird town/show. So I guess there's a new joint mayoral council that will be made up of Toni, Tabitha, Alice, and Frank, because sure! Sounds good to me!
23.This recap is so chaotic, but we end up back with the Blossoms, where Cheryl decides to re-up Abigail's curse in present day.
24.And yeah, so the whole town is cursed with the magic scary wind curse!!!
25.Oh, and, BTW, Hiram plants a bomb under Archie's bed (and he really does not move fast enough for someone with a bomb under their bed, but that's neither here nor there) and maybe probably blew up Archie and Betty! OK, byeeeee, see you next season!
And that's all, folks! See you in November when the show returns for Season 6...with Sabrina Spellman??? Very confused and excited for the potential CHAOS, especially now that Cheryl is witchy too.
