is anyone else watching Riverdale? i started a while ago out of basically morbid curiosity and found myself enjoying it a lot. good mix of like pulpy overwrought veronica mars teen mystery stuff and the bizarre distortions of tone and meaning that come from a 70+year innocuous gag comic being adapted to the 2017 tv drama format (v excited for the mary worth reboot next year). i became 100% onboard with this series after the ending to the first season finale where it turns out the entire biker subplot was an elaborate buildup to the “s” on jughead’s shirt standing for “southside serpent”.
watching the new season as it comes out and excited that it’s starting out at the same level of garish melodrama the first season took a while to rev up to. producers have been leaking rumours of an increasingly occult aspect linked to a sabrina the teenage witch tie-in as well as some DC comics ass shit about a “dark betty” and “dark veronica”. the final sequence of s02e02 was two teenagers spooning in a car at night being shot through the side window by a masked figure wandering up as a donovan song plays in what looks like an entirely out of nowhere callback to the opening of david fincher’s Zodiac??? is this another crossover??? i can only hope
cheryl remains the most fun character as her role as a generic reusable figure of plot complication in episode after episode means by now any actual motivation or personality she might have manifested is just mutated into some kind of pure, incoherent gothic malignity wholly unrelated to anything else in the show
jughead actually ate a hamburger onscreen this season and it was immediately folded into a melodramatic explanation of how eating enormous amounts of food is his way of dealing with the darkness
hoping that the scene of archie buying a gun is the precursor to a longer plot arc about him hooking up with dilton’s libertarian survivalist boyscout chapter and attempting to secede from the US
it’s good that archie’s in more of an active role this season as opposed to just being a sort of regular kid on the outskirts of the plot. i do love that his “i’m not scared of a biker bar” stuff has evolved into “i can fight a murderer and should be on patrol with the cops”
the serial killer on the loose is really upping the already heightened stakes to a wild degree
i thought they were keeping reggie relatively clean-ish last season, especially by not having him in with chuck’s creep crew, but now he’s a drug dealer so that’s…an escalation
can’t and can believe they named a street drug
am i understanding correctly in that moose was taking the jingle-jangle to get an erection with midge because he’s still in denial about being gay?
i’m honestly interested in seeing how the serpents clash with the lodge crime family in general
ohhh man i knew jingle jangle had to be a reference to something but i thought it was gonna be, like, a milkshake from the comics or something. serves them right for using up sugar sugar in the first season i guess
still throws me whenever hiram lodge appears onscreen and he’s this buff american psycho guy. the first time he appeared i wondered if they were going for a martin shrekli thing after they had this youngish dude in the context of illegal predatory wallst stuff? but it sort of makes it harder for me to take him seriously especially when he’s just hanging around the house all the time. i guess subconsciously i was hoping they’d go Full Ham with that character like with kingpin in the new daredevil…
will be happy for more reggie especially if he takes over some of the evil jock role from the coach’s kid in s1 since i don’t especially want a uhhh threatening sexual exploitation subplot in my goofy archie show tbh. jughead having a sex drive was bad enough >:[
i can’t believe archie and his beefcake boys literally promised to kill a serial killer on youtube and thought that would help the town feel safe
love mr. lodge’s overt glee at making archie put a target on his back
sure was wild that mr. weatherbee and i guess seemingly everyone but the cops was on board with Archie’s Illegal Football Cops (we don’t know after the video but…)
i’m kinda hoping that the serpents and the ghoulies and the red circle all end up in a wild The Warriors style clash through the streets of riverdale
i love that the flyers they put up around town to reassure people look like advertisements for a discount kidnapping service
also that hiram’s advice to archie is like perpetually one second away from telling him that he must become a bat
i’d like to think that the uh weirdly head-on way they display a preppy football squadron picking up masks and crowbars and talking about making the streets safe again is going to tie into the north-southside class divide subplot especially now that jughead is on the latter since if nothing else it’s hard for me to imagine they could replicate that imagery without knowing it has… associations…
the kevin scenes were kind of inscrutable to me because it feels like the show’s never been very coherent about what exactly homosexuality means in riverdale, like, for most episodes kevin is more or less The Only Gay In The Village and nobody else besides betty ever seems to mention it or care and all of a sudden it jumps straight to this very first 10 minutes of a 1980s serial killer movie type secretive cruising and death subplot even though we’re also told he could just use grindr and nobody would care?? idk. i like cheryl arbitrarily following him around smirking and dressed like a playable character from Obscure 2 though.
good luck to archie on forming the official jo crystal squadron
jesus, this show. i don’t know if it was just me but even the audio seemed slightly berserk in the last episode, especially archie’s max headroom-ish sampled hallway monologue and some of the red circle music.
the serial killer thing is still kind of out of nowhere for me especially since didn’t he only kill one person so far?? monogamy killer.
i love all the scenes of dilton looking on approvingly at minuteman archie and continue to hope this season will do more with the most bizarre thrown-off bit of plot characterization in s1. seems to be going more of a batman direction though especially “fight terror with terror”(??) and the slomo skyrim killcam fight on the bridge.
i keep forgetting betty’s mom’s name and when jughead mentioned the whole town being incited to violence by alice cooper i thought for a second they were all just psyching themselves up with 70s glam.
they pussycats beating the shit out of a date rapist to their own cover of a song from rent crosscut with jugheads gang initiation kinda sums of this show neatly i suppose
so like the black hood has to be hal cooper right? like there are literally no other suspects with that amount of specific information on betty that would make any sense. or at least because the handwriting doesn’t match on both letters, he’s pretending to the be the hood and using the situation to control her life? that’s the only thing that makes any sense to me
yeahhhh those are my thoughts too. but also he’s just one of the only recognizable background adult cast members left by now and S1 already portrayed him as a creep so the fact that that whole arc suddenly disappeared while he continues popping up as a background face already made me wonder what he was up to. it’s also possible all this is way too sensible and that the killer will turn out to be dark timeline zelda spellman or somebody. aren’t there like 16 more episodes this season??
the date rapist looked like the young version of dean stockwell’s character in blue velvet… origin stories…
the music continues to be weird! specifically the “thunder thunder thunder THUNDER” song for alice cooper appearing at the party (which led to nothing much?? and was replaced by some kind of even more out of nowhere jazz segue when cheryl walked in) and also the very halloween-preset synth music in the house at the end. it got funnier and funnier to me that betty would not change her fucking ringtone from “lollipop lollipop” no matter how many times it turned out to be a serial killer on the other end or how jarring it was whenever it came up. like you’d think that kind of juxtaposition must get old after… exactly one time…
i’m sure there are other sources for it but one part of the gang initiation seemed like it was just pulled from the 80s flash gordon movie
favourite quote: “nice article your girlfriend’s mom wrote”
edit: also i love the inexplicably haunted busstop
Dark Horse did a Predator series for years in the 90’s and 2000’s. While it sometimes crossed over with Alien and other Sci-Fi properties it was mostly about Predator stuff.
For the most part though, at some point I remember the series kind of becoming about a human woman who somehow joins the predator tribe.
