Riverdale Queer Watch season 5 episode 14: Mining my business
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.
Last week’s episode gave us some classic Riverdale storytelling and relationship drama with Kevin and Fangs (and Moose). Though not as much happened for the queer folks in Riverdale this week, let’s go ahead and dive in.
Riverdale queer watch: Mining madness
This week’s episode featured Cheryl as a sort of narrator of individual storylines via her (now trademark?) paintings. But the main act that saw Riverdale‘s LGBTQ characters intersect involved a palladium mine under the Blossom property.
Because this show really doesn’t know what to do with Cheryl–Is she a fraudulent art dealer? A religious evangelical cult leader? Invested in the Blossom family enterprise?–she shows up on Archie’s doorstep with a plan for him to mine her property for palladium before Hiram Lodge can get to it.
Archie agrees and brings Kevin, Fangs, and some other straight people along. Shockingly, Archie and Cheryl’s collective lack of mining experience and expertise lead the boys to get mining space madness as they hallucinate the Mothman underground, but at least Kevin and Fangs can continue to come together for random muscular assignments with Archie.
Cheryl is unfeeling about the situation, which tracks, but unfortunately, we don’t get a bigger glimpse at what is happening with her character in the episode, much like has been happening all season.
Cheryl is rarely seen outside of the Blossom estate these days yet still feels disconnected from her family’s drama. (Remember, when she graduated high school, she chose not to go to college in order to work for the maple business…)
On the romance note, we did see Cheryl reunite with her art dealer turned lover at the end of the episode, but we can only assume that poor Min-Min is a placeholder until Toni returns.
Next. Riverdale Queer Watch season 5 episode 13: Moose, is that you?. dark
What did you think of this week’s episode of Riverdale? Tell us in the comments below!