Riverdale: What lies ahead for Archie and company?

Due to social distancing guidelines, Riverdale suffered from an abbreviated fourth season. With plans for a time jump announced, how will season five look?

Due to social distancing restrictions regarding the pandemic, Riverdale, like many other sets, shut down production early. Because of this, “Killing Mr. Honey” functioned not as the intended finale, but the de facto finale, making it a bit difficult to judge it on its own merits.

The bulk of season four focused on the mystery of how Jughead’s supposed death – whether he actually died at all, and, if so, who killed him – all centered on his new role as the “wrong side of the tracks” kid at Stonewall.

After wrapping up the Jughead storyline in episode 16, Riverdale was left with three episodes (with an original episode order of 22) to develop and wrap up the ongoing voyeur tape mystery.

Of course, without those extra three episodes, a lot of stories got left untold in season 4. Beyond getting to the bottom of the voyeur mystery, there was also the question of Charles and his supposed relationship with Chip (a bomb Riverdale dropped early in the season and never picked back up).

Skeet Ulrich and Marisol Nichols have already announced that they will not be returning for the series fifth season. And it’s currently unclear whether the actors will be able to return to film proper departures or whether their exits will happen off-screen.

We also missed out on the typical high school storylines and resolution, the long-term payoff that teen shows give you when their characters head off to college. We didn’t get to see any of our Riverdale faves graduate, go to prom, or celebrate this milestone in their lives together.

Presumably, all of this will somehow be resolved in season 5, which promises to shake up a lot of things on Riverdale. At this point, we have no idea when studios will be able to resume production. It may be a while before we get to have season 5 and know the answer to the voyeur mystery.

However, TVLine has confirmed that there will be a mid-season time jump next year. After the core four and friends graduate from high school, Riverdale will speed forward about five years after the events of season 4, taking us into the group’s post-college lives.

TVLine also reports that the show plans to resolve its outstanding season 4 stories in the first three episodes of the next season, before making the time jump in episode four. It may make for a bit of a clunky start to have an adjoining end of one season as the beginning of a new one.

Hopefully, the break from production will give the Riverdale writers time to come up with a satisfying conclusion and a fresh reset for their time jump that moves the story forward in a natural way. While I love Riverdale for its messiness, it still needs to have some logical consistency.

And frankly, these high schoolers have been behaving as salacious adults for a while. For a show that likes to cash in on Americana imagery, Riverdale‘s characters are not as wholesome as it would like to think. It’ll be a refreshing alignment of tone to see them out of high school, at least.

To watch Betty be an actual detective; Jughead be an actual writer, Veronica be an actual businesswoman; and Archie do…whatever instead of just playing at it like children promises a lot of drama that will inevitably be more grounded than Riverdale‘s first era.

There’s a lot of opportunities for Riverdale to reinvent the wheel in an exciting way while staying true to its characters we know and love. Until then, see you next year, folks.

What do you hope to see in season five of Riverdale? Tell us in the comments below.