Riverdale Queer Watch season 5 episode 8: All keyed up

Welcome to Riverdale Queer Watch, where we look out for the LGBTQ+ folks on The CW’s Riverdale each week. Whether it’s a snuff film or prom night, we’re watching.

This week’s Riverdale primarily focused on relationship drama as everyone discovered the truth about Toni’s baby: After learning it would be harder for her to conceive the older she became, and that Kevin and Fangs wanted a baby, she decided to have a child with them.

Cheryl reacted as poorly as one might imagine, planning an old-fashioned 1970s key party (something that would only happen in Riverdale in 2021), while Kevin, with the most screen time he’s seen in decades, began to spiral about his fears of his impending marriage to Fangs and fatherhood.

A lot happened this week, so let’s dive in.

Old Habits Die Hard

This week’s episode opened with Kevin in a PnP scenario with a truck driver, something we’ve seen Kevin do multiple times (one might say too many times for a CW show with limited queer representation), but not in recent history.

For Kevin’s fans who were happy to see him settled down with Fangs, it came as a shock out of nowhere, especially considering the overall lack of dedication to Kevin over the last season.

After they announce their news to everyone else (though, why did they keep it a secret for so long?), Kevin’s anxieties only deepen as he explains to Betty he’s an emotional masochist after Fangs says he’s going to invite a friend to the party.

And, of course, the friend is Kevin’s trucker hookup. They both manage to play it cool, even as he and Kevin get paired together and Fangs and Reggie weirdly get paired off. (This show does not have enough queer people to make a key party truly interesting, but at least Reggie tried.)

Of course, the key party is a total bust with no excitement happening, leaving Fangs and Kevin plenty of time to wind up at home early and break up due to Kevin being “messed up.”

I love Kevin and Fangs, and for once, accurately predicted something in Riverdale, but am not necessarily opposed to them breaking up. However, they haven’t had any focus on their relationship, or individual identities for that matter, since season three.

Aside from musical theatre, one of the only other things we know about Kevin is that he likes to cruise the woods in Riverdale, but the show, aside from one episode in the first season when Kevin tells Betty not to judge him, never explores this behavior or tendency.

As a result, due to the general lack of depth and the fact that Kevin is the most prominent gay man on the show, it reinforces a pretty dated stereotype about queerness that is dangerous for multiple different reasons.

Add to this the fact that the previously featured gay male characters turned out to be criminals (Chic and Charles), Riverdale has a horrible track record. I’m not saying that every single queer character needs to be some beacon of inspiration on a pride poster. However, for a teen show, the representation and storylines need to be thought through more carefully.

If Riverdale is going to feature Kevin taking jingle jangle and having casual sex, the least it could do is have an honest conversation with its young audience about the real life consequences of combining sex and drugs, especially in the very vulnerable queer community.

It could be that is where Kevin’s story is headed, but I doubt Riverdale will follow through. Instead, I’m sure the Kevin and Fangs breakup is entirely suited to engineer Cheryl and Toni’s reunion and immediately sideline Kevin to cruising the woods again.

RIP Choni

Many of my columns this season have been devoted to Cheryl and Toni’s progress (again due to the lack of Kevin and Fangs screen time). We’ve seen Toni extend multiple olive branches to Cheryl, both in a montage during the time jump and in basically every episode post-jump.

Inexplicably, Cheryl doesn’t budge, lashes out, turns inward, and is increasingly unlikable. While Cheryl was always highly sensitive and tough, this season, her character makes no sense at all. We’ve never been given a clear picture of why she refuses engage with her friends or why she’s so mean to Toni.

So it does track that when learning the truth about Toni’s baby, Cheryl is jealous and lashes out, angry that Toni didn’t tell her first. Toni responds coolly that she didn’t know if Cheryl would have listened based on the way Cheryl has behaved recently.

And even then, there’s one final olive branch:  Toni says that she’s having the baby with Kevin and Fangs, but she and Cheryl can still try to make it work. And Cheryl still says no. Why? Why is Cheryl so insistent on shutting Toni out? Who knows?

Especially because by the end of the episode, after her predictably horrific key party when the two of them have matched, Cheryl takes Toni into the room she’s set up for her baby, a dark and nightmarish nursery.

Toni, of course, sees through Cheryl pretty quickly, and gets her to admit that the key party was devised to break up Kevin and Fangs. While Cheryl says she finally realizes she restored Thornhill so she could have a family with Toni, Toni responds there’s no way she’ll raise her baby with Cheryl’s creepy family again.

It still doesn’t make sense to me why Cheryl said no Toni earlier in the episode, but then set up the nursery later. Even if she had just said, “I need some time to think,” that would have felt a bit more realistic and the plot could have unfolded the exact same way. But Riverdale isn’t about realism.

I am positive Cheryl and Toni will end up together, especially now that Kevin and Fangs are broken up and Toni will soon find herself raising a child alone. But Toni deserves so much better, and Cheryl needs to grow up.

What did you think about Cheryl’s key party this week? Tell us in the comments below!