#except for the stuff where Cheryl and Toni were arguing over whether Cheryl should throw out Jason's taxidermied corpse

[thedreadvampy]

ummmm

Ok so at the end of S4. Penelope goes to prison after murdering Every Other Blossom except Cheryl then breaks out in a prison break orchestrated by Hiram, who blows up the wall of the prison HE OWNS in order to sow chaos. Chic and Charles break into Betty's house in order to get gay crime married, then make her do some stabbing. Toni and Cheryl break up. everyone graduates and goes their separate ways.

S5. timeskip. everyone is 25 now. archie comes back from The War. he is haunted by what appear to be literal ghosts of men who died under his command. Jughead got a blockbuster hit with his book about Jason but then fell into a Bukowski alcoholism haze and meet the rat king of new York in the sewers. he can't write and he's in Big Debt. Betty is in FBI school but also she got Silence of the Lambsed by a serial killer. Veronica did not business things and keeps calling herself the She Wolf of Wall Street but now she's broke bc her husband is bad. Cheryl went nuts and is turning Thornhill into the Winchester House.

Hiram is trying to unincorporate Riverdale to get at a Super Valuable Mine under a heretofore unmentioned swamp. to prevent this the core cast start running the town.

sex workers are disappearing off the Lonely Highway. Polly is one of those people. Betty is trying to find Polly through chainsaw torturing truckers, running a strip club in Pops, and pretending to be an FBI agent.

Semi-relatedly, there are mothmen. Jughead and his new girlfriend Tabitha, who is Pop's granddaughter, are trying to discover what the deal is with mothmen. Initially it looks like Riverdale is gonna do aliens but they let me down again and it's actually murder hillbilly Blossom cousins. Tabitha, Betty and Jughead's other ex do mushrooms together and bitch about Jughead.

meanwhile Toni, Fangs and Kevin are raising a baby in a bisexual polycule but Kevin is a bad boyfriend so now it's just Fangs and Toni. Veronica and Reggie are off doing some business crime bullshit I don't care about. Veronica shoots her husband in the face.

Cheryl starts a Christian cult with Penelope which Kevin obviously immediately joins but then she 180s and decided SHE'S the actual Messiah and they're a maple worship cult now. she attacks her mother with bees.

Archie meanwhile is doing almost entirely unrelated things about war trauma. He jumps between being a veteran advocate, briefly dropping back into vigilantism, being a firefighter and eventually settles on miner, whereupon he is trapped in a collapse but saves someone with the help of ghosts.

Toni is running the school and is also a social worker. she is trying to help a young lesbian with abusive parents and UNACCOUNTABLY decides the best way to do this is to send her to live with Cheryl, who is at this point actively insisting she's a living god.

Jughead, Betty and Tabitha discover that the mothmen are hillbillies who are doing the road murders so they go to fight them and ultimately they prevail. unfortunately Polly is SUPER dead. Veronica defeats Hiram through Business Machinations and runs him out of town but foolishly does not kill him.

they hold a town meeting and decide that Riverdale will now be run by a Council of Five and you think it's going to be them but no! they nominate. for some reason. Alice Cooper, Toni, Archie's Uncle Frank and some other people I don't remember who bc I stalled out on the concept of getting ALICE COOPER to run the town, a woman who has never once made a not unhinged choice.

all immediate threats seem to be resolved. hooray we've wrapped it all up. Cheryl bursts in and says YOUR ANCESTORS BURNT MY ANCESTOR AT THE STAKE AS A WITCH, YOU ALL OWE ME A BLOOD DEBT AND BY THE WAY MOTHERFUCKERS THERE IS A WITCHES CURSE UPON EVERYONE HERE

there is a witches curse.

end s5

in what I can only assume is a desperate and yet delightful attempt to somehow up the ante from the grimdark of an unincorporated Riverdale where ghoulies just do random murders, both Veronica and Betty have now full on violently killed a man on screen, and apparently there's a witch curse even if there aren't aliens, S6 begins as above. I am on episode 3 and so far it appears that we're doing 'Rivervale is the battleground where the final war between heaven and hell is to be fought,' Jughead and Veronica have canonically sold their souls to Satan, and Betty has stabbed a man to death with scissors for channeling the ghost of her serial killer father.

so in summary: you should know it's impossible to give a cliff notes of Riverdale anything but they are indeed successfully upping the ante after a frankly lacklustre season 4 that was about public school murder clubs and 12 year olds making snuff films but imo failed at having any like. uniting story thread or conflict.

Can someone give me the clifnotes version of the last couple seasons