Riverdale review: Forget the gargoyle, melodrama is king now

Riverdale never ceases in its bold claims about what a handful of plucky high schoolers are capable of. Consider our disbelief suspended.

Riverdale is at it’s best when it shucks off the expectations of its genre and just leans into the completely bonkers. This week’s “Chapter Forty: The Great Escape” is just so exquisitely campy and unbelievable, that it might just be a thing all unto itself.

This, at first, was not such a selling point for the show, as it teetered between a gothic telenovela and a tropey teen soap. Not so, anymore, Riverheads. It has firmly found its footing as a campground for the beautiful, yet outlandish, and I’m eating it up with a spoon — every juicy morsel.

Here are some of the moments that tested my capacity for suspension of disbelief:

Jughead chews up every scene he’s in

There’s this old phrase critics use to describe an actor that is just doing the most, in every way. It’s called “chewing the scenery” and there is no better way to describe Cole Sprouse’s performance this week.

I’m usually a big fan of Jughead and his wiser-than-his-years musings. I don’t even mind when he gets a little too self-serious. But this episode, his zeal for Gryphons and Gargoyles is just doing the most. I get that we’re supposed to get the whole cultiness of it all, and Jug’s enthusiasm is just a symptom of the game. Trust me, we get it, Jughead. Your bulging eyes and jerky shoulders are just extra at this point. We don’t really need them to understand that G&G is a big deal, even though it’s so fun to watch. Jughead’s fevered reveal that G&G is an allegory for Riverdale proper was particularly inspired, so it’s worth it all.

Betty can see the dark rabbit hole down which Jughead is spiraling, but she needs his insight to get to the bottom of the Featherhead murder and the mysterious game master of ’90s yore. Jughead, Toni, Cheryl and Sweet Pea are all drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid, (or Fresh Aid in this case), and the entire episode is told with Jughead as present-day game master, narrating the game with wild-eyed zeal, with a strange parallel, Archie’s prison break. (More on that, next).

Not one, but two blond wigs

Archie surprises nobody when his prison break attempt was quickly thwarted. They were gunned down in a hail of rubber bullets before they even made it halfway over the fence. This results in some very negligible behavior by the Warden — who we now know was neck deep in his own G&G game — resulting in a dinner with Archie that could be his last meal.

This alone is too much. Do they think we’re gonna buy that Hiram (via the Warden) is going to murder Archie? Yes, readers. They absolutely do, because Veronica believes it. They don’t even pretend to deal in logic and rationality anymore. We’re buying whatever they’re selling at this point.  Subsequently, Veronica hatches a scheme to get to Archie after the fight, and then get Archie out of the pit. Her scheme involves a 1940s blond wig that she wears not once, but twice. She looks like a vampy, Girl Friday knockoff, and it’s brilliant. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Veronica and Hiram interact more like a mob boss and his wife, a la Tony and Carmella Soprano, and I find it disturbing, yet wildly compelling. They just traipse around, under the same roof, openly plotting against each in really sinister ways, yet still eating from the same plate of bagels. So weird.

When Veronica isn’t living the world’s most awkward domestic situation, she’s dressing up to sneak into the pit fight to watch Archie win, using her own mob connections. I guess illegal, underage fighting makes Veronica and Archie super horny, because they go at it in the abandoned locker room right after the fight. Who says Archie doesn’t love a blond?

The blond wig is really just a stand-in for all the insane stuff they let Veronica get away with. She runs a speakeasy for heaven’s sake, and even worse, she feels completely free to comment on Archie’s “broad shoulders.” To his face. Wonders never cease.

Being a Serpent is a part-time endeavor

When she’s doing bad, dangerous things, like springing a child criminal from juvie, Betty wears her Serpent leathers. You can also tell she’s in “bad girl” mode because her trademark pony is conspicuously absent. You can also tell she’s up to no good when she’s got those fingerless gloves on. She might as well have a sign around her neck that reads “BAD GIRL DOING BAD THINGS.”

It’s this lack of subtlety that makes Riverdale so glorious. It’s like they’re reaching right through the screen and tapping us on the shoulder. I wouldn’t mind if “good girl” Betty went the way of Dilton Doyle, and Serpent Betty was here to stay.

Cheryl, as well, slips in and out of her honorary Serpent title, although they are consistently writing her as an extremely coo badass. I’m still a little wobbly about when she became an expert archer, but it definitely comes in handy. Now that she and Toni are an official item, her Serpent status is a little more concrete, I guess, but it’s apparently not all that serious anymore. Anybody can just wander in and join.

Mad Dog is a really, really unfortunate character

Even as tongue in cheek as Riverdale can get sometimes, this whole Mad Dog character is wildly problematic. Aside from his tokenization as the only African American male character, the way in which the writers first characterize him as less than human, then give him a heart, then quickly sacrifice him for Archie feels yuck. I liked their fight scene, and I found it touching that Archie wanted to help him. However, it didn’t take Archie long to leave Mad Dog as bait for the white guards, while he slips away to freedom. I don’t like it.

Archie is the Red Paladin

Whatever that means. As I said, Jughead narrates the game that he, Toni, Cheryl, and Sweetpea are playing while they’re (inexplicably) camped in the woods. But while he tells the narratives of the game, with a super intensity, it’s played over Archie’s storyline.

At first, we’re meant to think it’s a metaphor, like Jughead suggested. But it becomes very clear, with the Warden’s suicide, that there really are some bigger forces at work here. It also seems, much to my disappointment, that they’re going to revolve around Archie, who is now hiding out in Dilton’s bunker as the whole town searches for him.

Less Archie, more exuberant and histrionic Jughead, please. And more scenes with these two, in the woods, confronting the super scary Gargoyle King.

Join me here every week as I run down the major happenings in all things Riverdale. In the meantime, tweet me (@SundiSRose) your thoughts, theories, hopes and dreams for Riverdale season 3.