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riverdale-retread · 1 year ago

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Riverdale S7 E20 (Chapter 137) Goodbye, Riverdale

We open with Betty Cooper’s signature color as everyone around her thinks of her - pink and soft and fluffy. Cherry blossom petals are falling from leaves against a backdrop of a pretty yellow shingle house with pretty windows. (Betty doesn’t actually consider herself to be pink per se- one of her earliest fights with her mother that we saw were whether she has the right to scarlet lipstick).

A Jughead Jones (not THE, but A) tells us that it’s “the present day.” 67 years after 1955. It’s 2023. Not that it means anything in RIverdale where it was 2020 for 7 years. He starts to speed through people’s lives. The teenagers”have become adults.” We scan to black and white photos of Betty, Veronica, Cheryl and Toni looking very wholesome. There’s a glamorous photo of Polly Amorous performing that number she market tested on the girls of Riverdale. And a photo of Alice Cooper holding something up, looking very proud. There’s a photo of all the participants (with Cheryl in the center) of Riverdale Grandstand. In the most laconic way, this Jughead says people grew up and got married and had kids and raised them and also, uh died.

The knick knacks we are show are another shot of Polly Amorous, a tourist souvenir nightlight of the Statue of Liberty, an old hardcover copy of Kingsley’s Human Sexuality. The Riverdale postcard that adorned 1955 Jughead’s window in his train car, a little handout for The Annual Sock Hop, the button for Bee and Vee for Co-Presidents button. The final item we get shown is a photo of Betty doing her panty flashing turns on her mother’s tv show.

“The story tonight is about saying goodbye to a town that was once lost in time.” He says it’s going to start near the end with an 86 year old Elizabeth Cooper, who is hanging out with her granddaughter. Her hobby is apparently to check the obituaries daily. (I mean, obituaries are in every newspaper, so does this mean Betty reads ONLY the obituaries?) The dark haired granddaughter asks Grandma Betty about knowing someone in high school who is the subject of the obituary. She remarks that whoever is dead seems “like an interesting person.”

I had to pause to look. The obituary is for Forsythe “Jughead” Jones, in glasses, tie and suspenders. I can’t make out what it says.

Grandma Betty (there are multiple Betties in this episode just like Jughead so I’m going to have a heck of a time getting the nomenclature clear) says that the dead person was. Jughead Jones, in a blue S t-shirt, yellow suspenders and the felt crown flashes like a hallucination next to her as Grandma Betty fondly agrees that Jughead was indeed an interesting person. He’s smiling very brightly He rarely does actually, in this entire series, including the most recent season, so it’s nice that Grandma Betty specifically remembers him in this rare moment of unabashed grinning.

The granddaughter is named Alice.

Alice.

ALICE?

Immediately I don't like or trust Grandma Betty. It’s not my culture to recycle names so something about this western habit seems very ill-starred to me to begin with, but you named a girl child after ALICE COOPER on purpose! Oh NO!

Anyway, Grandma Betty says that she and her friends were all interesting people, and they had “marvelous adventures” the likes of which Granddaughter Alice “wouldn’t believe.”

Uh. If you’re in your 80s in 2023, Grandma Betty, you’re not the Betty that had marvelous adventures, per se. At least not with the other three members of the core four. Like, you barely ever even talked to Jughead.

Betty says that since Jughead is dead, she’s “the last of them.” With this thought she decides that she wants to go back to Riverdale before it’s too late, because she’s forgetting more things daily, and she wants to go back before she “forgets everything.” Granddaughter Alice agrees before taking her leave.

Mercifully the show shows me the obituary.

Forsythe “Jughead” Jones (no Pendleton or the 3rd), Prolific Editor of Jughead’ Madhouse Magazine, Dies at 84.

But the photo they use must have been when his Madhouse magazine did something because he is not in 84 year old make up. Grandma Betty lets out a heavy sigh.

It’s night-time now, and Grandma Betty has fallen asleep with her Riverdale year book. The nightlight comes on. (I feel like this nightlight is important somehow between the Cooper sisters but I can’t recall). This wakes her up, making her call out “Hello?”

There’s a jingle of bells. A Jughead Jones is sitting on a chair, staring at her, smiling. Watching her sleep?? Suddenly all the lights are on. Taking the entirety of this in stride, Grandma Betty calmly tells him that she was going through “our yearbook,” The Visitor Jughead Jones (I told you, nomenclature was going to be a problem) also acts like they just always talk to each other, asking casually what she was trying to remember. She tells him that she’s going to Riverdale tomorrow, and her granddaughter is taking her. She then says, “Going through these pictures, I just wish I could go back to how it was.”

Which the fuck Jughead is this that she’s hallucinating/ is visiting her? He’s wearing a beanie, an S T shirt, flannels. His demeanor is closer to the Brittle Sadness Jughead of S1, he’s not wearing the glasses of Adult Jughead, he also doesn’t have the manic-eyed chipmunk cheek demeanor of slick-haired RiverVale Narrator Jughead.

Anyway, Visitor Jughead tells her, like this is completely normal, that “You could pick a day, and I’ll take you.” He also warns her that even though this is possible, it will be painful, because she’ll have this double consciousness - one part of her will be living that day, and another part will be watching herself live it. So then Betty says that if it’s actually possible to “go back” then she will pick a day that she “missed.” The day she picks is the day of the yearbook handout, which she missed out on entirely because she “had the mumps and had to stay home.” She never got her yearbook signed.

It’s very disconcerting watching the young Jughead look at this old woman in a paternalistic way as she talks in an increasingly babyish way about how, out of 86 years of life, the thing she regrets with a lot of feeling is being sick on the day she could’ve gotten her yearbook signed.

Visitor Jughead, looking very lighthearted because she doesn’t actually want to relive a day that actually occurred, cheerfully tells Grandma Betty that all she needs to do is walk through a door (which magically appears) bearing the sign “Betty’s Bedroom,” and “you’ll have your day, the day you missed.”

There’s another magical twinkling of bells.

Ah. OK. So you see, every single thing that happens on ‘this day” absolutely didn’t happen. The actual day was a wash for Betty - she was sick in bed with the mumps. She has only a second hand (if at all) recollection of how that day went, maybe via phone call from Veronica or something. The things that happen on the other side of that door, DID NOT HAPPEN.

We’re on the other side of the door, when it opens and Betty walks out of a black void, looking young and played by Lili R and in a super pink outfit. The black void is absolute. She leaves the door open as she walks into a bright sunny day in her 1955 bedroom, to do a twirl, celebrating how “it’s exactly like I remembered.” Then she catches a glimpse of her 1955 self in the mirror and is stunned. I mean, anyone would be, to wake up and find yourself in Betty Cooper’s face and body with the 1955 styling - aesthetics 10/10, A++ etc. She gawks in wonder at herself, which is very funny, before turning around to ask Visitor Jughead (who hasn’t changed clothes or anything to make himself fit into 1955 better) if this is what she really looked like.

Bathed in gold light, Visitor Jughead nods at TimeTravel Betty.

“There were so many things I wanted to change about myself back then,” Betty says, before bursting out with “Why? I was perfect!” I mean, speak for yourself, I guess, but also I kind of know what she means. “We were all perfect!” she exclaims.

Visitor Jughead has an eerie agelessness about him, which is different from Angel Gabriel Inhabingting Jughead. He has no comment to make to Timetravel Betty about any of this, and just calmly, distantly observes how she reacts to this fictional world with 1955 trappings he’s constructed for her (reasons unknown). Reminder once again that she hasn’t been taken back in time to a day that happened. This is his personal magical gift to her (is he HER guardian angel? Why does he take the shape of a Jughead?)

Betty doesn’t really care what he thinks, and continues to exult over the perfect verisimilitude of this false world. “My window!” she cries. “How many sunrises have I seen out this window!” Well, technically speaking, none, because this isn’t in any way a real world. This is a fourth alternate universe (after Riverdale proper, Rivervale, and 1955 Riverdale) constructed specifically for Grandma Betty.

Then we see an Archie come into view, getting ready to leave his house for the day. “How many times have I looked out this window into Archie’s?” she says, her eyes suddenly full of emotion, her voice husky. This question, Visitor Jughead does answer: “In the thousands, at least.” (I mean, she and he lived in adjoining houses with the same assigned bedrooms since they were very small kids, so given the 365 days in the year, thousands seems like rather a lowball number).

Because Visitor Jughead is an omniscient narrator as well as a time-bubble builder, he tells a calmly accepting Timetravel Betty that Archie is “about to have a talk with his mom, about what he’s going to do after graduation.” She doesn’t ask like, How do you know that or whatever. She just turns to the window, apparently to … watch?

Then we cut to Archie looking at a pamphlet for “Building America’s Highways.” Inside, it says things like “Make an Adventure Out of It!” and “Everyone is Welcome” showing very cheerful, burly men in overalls doing manly work with other men. “Help build America for us, our children and those visiting our lands. Strong hands and positive minds are building roads for generations to come” and so forth. This is how you get trafficked, Archie, but okay sure, believe a pamphlet.

Mary Andrews summons Archie to breakfast. Archie says that he has to let Vic known if he’s going to be “joining his crew on Monday.” This upsets Mary immediately. She sits down to say that it doesn’t make sense to her, wanting to “dig ditches.” Archie starts to riff on what we’ve just see in the pamphlet. He is all about Eisenhower’s call to build roads “from coast to coast, all the way to California.” Then he adds that it’ll “give him something to write about.” She points out that he’s been plenty prolific while staying put in Riverdale. Archie patiently reminds her he’ll be gone three months at the most. Mary tells Archie that he’s going to “take one look at the Pacific Ocean, and forget Riverdale.” He insists that Riverdale will always be “our home.” She then says the things you should never say to Archie Andrews if you don’t want him to do something- “You’re just like your father.” In any universe, including this fourth one, this is the way to unlock Archie Andrew’s heart. If Mary actually wants Archie to return home from his road building adventure, she shouldn’t say what she says next: “He always dreamt of settling in the West.”

It’s very bizarre that Fred Andrews who died in 1952 would think of California as “the West” like that, like he was born in 1852 but okay. Sure.

Then Mary says that Archie has her blessing to settle in the West. So at least, this third? (because does Mary Andrews exist in Rivervale??) Mary Andrews is consistent with the others - she doesn’t want that much to do with Archie Andrews, her son.

The scene ends with them telling each other they love each other and embracing. Mary starts crying.

It’s clear that somehow Timetravel Betty was in fact able to ‘watch’ all this along with the audience. She comes in from the side as Mary’s upset face starts to fade, to inquire of Visitor Jughead, “I don’t remember. What happened to Mrs. Andrews?”

There’s a whooshing sound, and Visitor Jughead tells her a made up story, which he also shows her in a sort of TV show hallucination. Mary was running her dress shop. A customer named Brooke came in, and they fell in love, and lived together until “the end.” There’s a whooshing fade out. Timetravel Betty skips over the any of the obvious questions - Mary Andrews wasn’t straight? Was she out? Did anyone give the two women trouble? - to simply say that Mary was “always a kind woman.” Which … that hasn’t really been evidenced by anything that’s ever happened with the story as far as Mary Andrews is concerned, but we have to remember that TimeTravel Betty is the same person as Grandma Betty who was the 1955 Betty grown old, and 1955 Betty was actively, alarmingly, intensely stupid. And once again, Time Travel Betty exhibits this same trait that sets my teeth on edge so much about all the other Bettys - “She once gave my mother hell for disowning me.” Either someone is directly useful to the life of Betty Cooper and their action counts, or it doesn’t matter at all.

Why even ask about Mrs. Andrews if you’re not at all going to be listening to the answer nor care about what happened to her?

I think Visitor Jughead feels the same, because he activates the Not Alice and Not Polly clones that he has invented for this bubble universe. Polly is heavily pregnant, seated at Alice’s table fiddling with ribbons or decorations or something, and laughing and talking with Alice Cooper, who is wearing a flight attendant’s uniform. Time Travel Betty bursts in on them to say - You’re talking again! after noticing they are both alive and so young. They both laugh at her in an affectionate way.

This is how you know this is completely not real. I don’t know what happened to Polly Amorous Polly but she definitely did not come home to have her twins in the actual timeline. This is just Visitor Jughead making things nice for TimeTravel Betty.

In any case, Time Travel Betty and Not Alice have an exposition dump type exchange in which Time Travel Betty tells Not Alice that she divorced Hal and made her dream of becoming a stewardess come true. Betty insists she isn’t sick with mumps, and then has a really wonderful hug with Not Alice, followed by the same with Not Polly, where she tells them she loves them.

This sort of exchange never, ever can be possible between any of the iterations of Alice and any of the iterations of Betty. It is so absolutely not true to either of their characters that I vomited a little into my mouth. Visitor Jughead is a very sentimental fiction writer.

Sitting on the stoop of the Cooper house, TimeTravel Betty asks Visitor Jughead how this version of the multiverse of Riverdale turned out for Alice: “Was my mom a stewardess for very long?” Still in his very, ‘I don’t know these people’ sentimentalist way, Visitor Jughead makes up some stupid story about how she managed to land a plane because the pilot died mid flight. So then TimeTravel Betty picks up the story from there and further invents another OC who takes Alice out to dinner for sheer gratitude, after which they got married and the man took her around the world. TimeTravel Betty, at age 86 obviously has long since lost her mother, so she has to finish with her death, but in a really nonspecific way: Alice was sending post cards from new locations, and then stopped doing that and hence that’s how, in this false universe full of stories of things that never happened, is how Alice Cooper died.

As for Polly, TimeTravel Betty again leans on Visitor Jughead to give her the headcanon. The thing is, Visitor Jughead just doesn’t know a lot about Polly, so his sketch for her is the most ridiculously barebones - she had twins, “she was very fulfilled with her family” and ummm she also just stopped performing as Polly Amorous as soon as she was weighted down in motherhood with twins. There’s some nondescript dark haired white man in a suit in the hospital room when Alice and Betty allegedly meet the twins shortly after birth, but interestingly Visitor Jughead doesn’t say she got MARRIED, so I am feeling very validated in not believing Polly about her so called engagement to her so called uptown gentleman in the alternate universe that DID actually occur.

Visitor Jughead takes TimeTravel Betty to school.

The episode directly addresses the fact that everything that happened past the point when TimeTravel Betty walked out of the void into her ersatz bedroom to her ersatz version of her family did not occur. “Is this real,” she asks, “or a dream?” Visitor Jughead says what she’s experiencing is something ‘in between’ → it’s most definitely not real.

Time Travel Betty says some pablum about how everyone looks young and beautiful and are unaware of how special this time is and how it goes by so fast.

I guess this is what a fabricated flashback to a day that never happened feels like to someone who peaked in high school? I really wish I could find some way to connect with Betty, since they’re making her the focus of the show’s final episode, but really, I feel nothing but irritation about everything she’s ever done or said.

Thankfully, we run directly into Veronica. Betty is ecstatic to see her. So this Not Veronica’s appearance managed to make Visitor Jughead completely stop existing. The two of them march into school, and they talk about how emotional they feel about this day when they are about to get their yearbooks.

Toni comes onto the intercom to tell everyone that she is senior class president. Then she recites a poem as “the final” one as Weatherbee looks on in adoration. My schools did not have this thing of having some kid make an announcement first thing in the morning, and thank god. Some girl reciting a poem like this before 9 a.m. followed by some earnest speech about ‘making lasting change’ after ‘dreaming it first’ would’ve ended my high school ‘career’ prematurely with murder charges. In any case - this is odd because in the early episodes of this season it was Cheryl who was making these announcements. So an ‘improved’ world is one where Cheryl doesn’t say anything and Toni forces her political views on people.

We’re at the Blue and Gold office now, where Visitor Jughead is suddenly back. There are a lot of framed articles on the wall, all of which are Social Justice oriented. Time Travel Betty says that Toni always insisted that they report on national news about race issues. Visitor Jughead says that engagement with the “larger world” would continue, then starts to speak of Toni’s future when Time Travel Betty stops him. She doesn’t want to know, yet, so she requests that he doesn’t tell her. Look like he has a thousand more things to say, Visitor Jughead simply says, “ All right, I won’t.”

The slightly embittered expression, laced with a sadness, that Visitor Jughead keeps on his face is the only thing keeping me watching this saccharine disaster. Who the heck is he?

Next we’re watching Cheryl hand out Yearbooks to people standing in line, behaving as though she’s the principal handing out diplomas. Somehow she knows precisely which illness Betty had on the actual day, so she is very alarmed. (“I don’t want your lumpy cooties!”). She hands a yearbook to Betty but refuses to sign right then, because she will see Betty later. They’re having an event at the Dark Room, and then a party at Thornhill.

The first person seen signing Time Travel Betty’s Yearbook is Fangs, who is with Midge, who tells Betty that Fangs has a song on the charts. The huge accomplishment of a hit single got Midge’s parents to agree to let them get married. Fangs adds on that he’s going to go on a tour. Betty starts to cry immediately.

Visitor Jughead is with Betty again. If I’m to posit that whatever it is Visitor Jughead tells Time Travel Betty was “Really What Happened” to the S7 characters in their timeline, I’m supposed to believe that 86 year old Betty simply FORGOT what happened to her mother and her sister but had total recall of exactly how and when Fangs died. Which is a very long winded way to say, I don’t believe any of this happened to the actual people we knew from 1955 S7.

Dementia from old age manifests in people in a LOT of different ways, and I’ve read about examples of people who remember their earlier lives but not their adult ones, sure, but the framing device for this - that this is the alternative, fanfiction, The-Way-She-Wishes-It-Was version of the day she didn’t get to have because she was sick in bed - makes me doubt everything about the life stories that are told by Visitor Jughead.

So, to return, I don’t know what Visitor Jughead’s reason is, but he gives Fangs a pretty dire ending. The tour bus crashed in the Rocky Mountains and he died immediately. He was the first one of ‘us’ to die, apparently. Visitor Jughead invents a super successful posthumous music career for Fangs - his songs made so much money that Midge and daughter were able to live off of it forever.

….Sure OK yeah.

Time Travel Betty says that she’s ‘remembering’ more and more. Disbelieve. Truly. It’s more like, you’re getting a comforting false memory implanted into your head by Visitor Jughead who, like all fanfiction creators, is trying to make sure his audience stays engaged with his vision.

Visitor Jughead disappears in a jingle of bells again when Kevin enters the room to fetch Betty, who is wiping away tears. She goes out to sit with Kevin and Clay for lunch. Kevin signs her book while waxing sentimental about this is the last time they will do this experience, of sitting to lunch together.

I think I get what my problem is with this episode, and it’s deeply personal (but hey this is my blog and my reaction). High school was not a good time. I only endured high school as a way to get to college and then grad school (and yeah I planned to go to grad school well before I graduated from hs) then on to my adult life, which I expected would get exponentially better the closer I got to adult life. And I was right, by the way. Being an adult has been awesome so far, incomparably so compared to how life was daily in high school, so I feel zero nostalgia or warmth about high school whatsoever. So for me, the last day of high school was not this like, sniffle-sniffle Farewell My Friends type of a deal. I was very much uh, come to think of it, ETHEL as in - I AM FINALLY GETTING OUT OF HERE, NOBODY CALL ME, BYE BYE~! This is yet another thing I do not understand Betty about, at all.

Anyhoo-

Riverdale, possibly because of the educational pedigree or, more likely, the educational insecurity of the maker, is very snobby about school. Instead of saying “going to school in New York” like most normal people who go to any school in NYC, Clay specifically says I AM GOING TO COLUMBIA and KEVIN IS GOING TO NYU. He also says that they decided it “made sense to get an apartment together.”

It…. really doesn’t. I am not going to bother looking up where NYU was located vis a vis Columbia University in 1955 but no, it doesn’t. If one of you was going to Fordham, maybe? Or Julliard? Even then it’s quite a distance between Lincoln Center and Harlem.

Kevin admits as much - he immediately adds that this is the excuse they each gave Kevin’s mother and Clay’s father, and even made lovey dovey eyes at each other right there, and even reached out and held each other’s hand, and both parents (a white woman whose former husband is fucking Uncle Fucking Frank and Clay’s African American father) seem extremely pleased with everything. In 1955. So, this is something I very much like about Riverdale. If you’re going to imagine gay people, then HELL YEAH imagine for them good supportive families that are happy that they found love. This show is more than half magical realism fantasy anyway, so go with that. I’m all for it.

There’s that jingling sound effect, and Visitor Jughead is there, sitting in mimicry of Clay’s pose, across from Betty and visible only to her. TimeTravel Betty asks what happens to them, but then she puts in a specific fan request: “Nothing awful, I hope.”

So, in acquiescence of her request, Visitor Jughead makes up something that I think he thinks the very stupid 1955 Betty can handle. He tells her a ridiculous fairytale about an interracial gay couple in NYC who lived there through more than one race riot, Stonewall (1968) and Studio 54 (the 70s) and AIDS but had the most insulated, untroubled life on planet earth. Like, THEY NEVER EVEN HAD TO MOVE. I guess they got one of those super prized rent-controlled apartments that I’ve read so much about and just lived in that one place for sixty years. What??

See, this is how you know it’s a lie. Betty pretends that she remembers visiting them - at this point I wonder if Visitor Jughead is just implanting memories in her head the way that Angel Tabitha could edit the Riverdale S1-7 episodes to be only good memories (such as, erase the homophobic abuse that Cheryl suffered but recall the happiness of Toni coming to Cheryl’s rescue and their romantic kiss).

Clay got tenure, Kevin ‘started’ a theater company, and they both lived into their 80s ,and Kevin died first (causes unknown but given his age probably just old age) and Clay died very soon afterwards.

I want there to be more story. Like, if Kevin was in the theater arts, and even moderately successful, he would have experienced the decimation of the performing community that happened in NY in the 80s. He did zero AIDS related activism? OK wait actually, 1955 Kevin was a self serving hideous asshole, so he might well have. But Clay??

Visitor Jughead only relates the very start - they moved in together into an apartment in Harlem, which to reiterate they apparently never moved a single time, IN NYC, for SIX DECADES (sorry, I’m hyperventilating from all the trauma of apartment hunting in the same city omg), and the sequence of their deaths. The rest, 1955 Betty is too stupid to understand. She cries very prettily about it, thinking about their deaths.

Somehow, Kevin notices her tearing up, asking if she’s OK. She tells Clay and Kevin that “you two are soulmates.”

I despise this. Kevin really REALLY REALLY needs to be taken to hardcore TASK for how he abused Betty during the time he was using her as an unwitting beard. Betty rolling over like this makes me not respect her at all, whatsoever, given how vicious she can be about her mom in the 1955 universe.

Then Kevin, on the day that never happened, asks Time Travel Betty, who is getting fed fiction by Visitor Jughead, asks if “the four of you have figure out what you’re gonna do yet?”

Time Travel Betty has no idea what he means by “the four.” When she says as much, Kevin tells her that she is not only dating Archie but she’s also dating “the others.” Time Travel Betty still has no clue what he means. So then Kevin says she can’t “suddenly have forgotten” that she “Archie, Veronica and Jughead have been in a quad this entire last year.” Time Travel Betty has no idea what a quad is either.

When she looks over, the other three wave at her, with the tall boys flanking the very tiny, very happy looking Veronica on either side. The waving clues her into what a ‘quad’ means.

There’s a cut to commercial.

Then Betty is in the bathroom, smiling blissfully into the mirror. Cheryl comes by to wash her hands, wanting to know why Betty looks so smug. Betty tries to explain that she is in a very different place from “a year ago” right before The Teenage Mystique came out. Cheryl impatiently waves it away - “Yes yes, we all read The Teenage Mystique.” The last time, ahem, ‘a year ago’ allegedly, that Cheryl knew the identity of the Teenage Mystique author, she was a huge fan of it. She was an important part of the book. This is very not how Cheryl is about that book.

Time Travel Betty smiles to herself as she says it’s been a very fun year. Cheryl’s response is ‘ugh.’

Next up, Time Travel Betty has tracked down this alternate version of Reggie Mantle to get her yearbook signed. He expresses regret that the two of them could’ve had a fun time together if only she’d chosen him over Archie. Scooting closer, Time Travel Betty, who has completely bought whatever these Marionettes of Visitor Jughead versions tell her, tells Reggie about the Quad she is in with The Other Three like she literally had no idea what any of that was about until the Marionette Kevin put that in her head.

You know what I think? I think at this bend in the story, Time Travel Betty has become a co-writer with Visitor Jughead, for this final story. It’s just a story, remember? By telling Marionette Reggie this story, Time Travel Betty is making this real for herself in her fantasy.

So her version of the story is as follows: That after the visit of Angel Tabitha and the strange mind-wipe she sort of kind of did on everyone except for Betty and Jughead, Bughead and Varchie both had recalls of what it was like being in those couplings, so that the 1955- established Barchie and Jeronica (I refuse to call them Vughead) pairings felt that they didn’t have to make a single solitary choice, and could just do a mix’n’match among all involved individuals “at the same time.”

And see, this is the bit that rankles me. Archie and Veronica remembering their sexy times (without the burden of how their attempt at an adult relationship entirely failed, or um, how much Archie made Veronica cry, or how taxing and painful it was for her to keep it all together for the three of them after she discovered the Archie-Betty cheating situation) wanting to regroup, I can kind of understand. But Betty and Jughead chose to remember the bad with the good, did they not? Jughead also chose to remember Tabitha as she had been. So … Uh.. No. There’s something very fucked up about Bughead reuniting when they BOTH remember what happened in the previous seasons.

So.

I’m tired. I think the playfulness of the music and the very funny Marionette Reggie performance is supposed to inspire feelings of delight in watching exactly how this foursome supposedly worked in their senior year, but I am mute with disappointment and honestly, a dash of horror. But before we get to that - I wish we’d gotten to see more of this wide-eyed doofus funny 1955 Reggie in the previous season. He’s carrying a HEAVY load, here, being made responsible for selling this hogwash to me.

There were double dates among the four, which lead to Jughead and Betty holding hands. Then it graduated to Archie visiting Betty in her bedroom (which is permissible because Uncle Fucking Frank has been exiled from the Andrews house) and Veronica going home with Jughead. And other time, Archie would visit Veronica at the Pembrook, with Jughead being the lesser, unofficial partner and hence being unable to come to the Cooper house. Betty also visited Veronica a lot at the Pembrooke.

I would do some hollering about Jughead and Archie but the thing is, they were setting us up for there being no Jarchie in the mix even if Beronica is a reality in this bubble universe, because Jughead and Archie in the 1955 time bubble really don’t know each other very well at all. They are somewhat close at the start of the year - such that Archie is the one to tell Jughead that he sounds insane when he starts spouting off about the future from whence he’s just come - but as the season went on, they spent almost no time with each other. 1955 Reggie inquiring about Archie’s friendship with Jughead got an ice cold non-reaction from Archie, because whatever closeness they had in their preadolescence was completely obsolete by the time Archie wanted to take Reggie to fuck a prostitute together or whatever.

Reggie is upset that he wasn’t asked to join, and Betty says that this is because Reggie seemed too focused on basketball. Reggie insists that he would’ve completely made time for the sort of busy nights that Betty is making up - err, describes - had he been invited.

Betty had the flattering experience of Reggie competing outright for her against Archie, but Veronica actually got roundly rejected by Reggie for being too much of a handful and then had the missed connections problem. Plus, what was the highlight reel of ‘good’ that Reggie and Veronica would’ve been shown? Was NONE of it good? (This is where Time Travel Betty making up this quad completely falls apart for me- why it is that Reggie and Veronica don’t remember THEIR connection. Is it condemnation for the entirety of the Reggie-and-Veronica friendship, relationship and situationship in toto? But their relationship deteriorating was no more toxic than Bughead’s implosion and the extremely bitterness they exhibited about each other in S5.)

After the two of them very nicely tell each other that they would’ve liked to have hooked up but it’s too late now (but why?), and also say that they think the other is destined for greatness, Visitor Jughead is back. Time Travel Betty wants to know what happened, so Visitor Jughead says that Reggie Reggie’s life is Kansas State, then a short professional basketball career with the Lakers which apparently didn’t make him a whole lot of money because he still had to work the farm during the off season for his still very invisible parents, after which he had to sell the land upon their death. He had an unnamed wife who is killed the second she is introduced so she can be buried next to him (she predeceases him), and he had to return to Riverdale to be a coach, where both his sons were also on the basketball team. Betty tears up again, apparently in reaction to the thought of Reggie dying. Or maybe she’s crying because he ended up back at Riverdale, coaching

Visitor Jughead tells her that they have to go to the Babylonium now. She looks a bit scared. They’re showing “The Big Sleep.” Since Riverdale (intentionally?) misquotes cultural chestnuts all the time, I think the title “Big Sleep” is meant to be a pun on the fact that this story we’re being shown is a big dream that the 86 year old Betty is having. A lucid dream, in which she’s controlling all of what she allegedly ‘remembers’ via the narration of the invented Visitor Jughead.

Veronica’s opening line is “How’s that absinthe, Betty?” It’s in the middle of the day, so Veronica Lodge being an unacknowledged alcoholic is a weird theme they are carrying through to this season for reasons unknown. In any case, Veronica says she’s given Betty the alcohol because she has news which she hasn’t “yet shared with the boys.”

The news is that Veronica has been haunted by Josie McCoy’s kernel of inspiration about being a producer of movies, so she’s gotten herself a job straight out of high school to go work at a studio in L.A. Her long term plan is to work her way up the ranks to become a studio executive with the power to gatekeep film production in the future.

I really love the scale of Veronica Lodge’s dreams, and the fact that she just launches businesses and careers for herself all the time. Whenever she works at a place, even as an actual child, like the Diner, she goes, OK but one day I’m going to OWN it and then open a bar underneath it and also I’m going to be the direct producer of the alcohol that I sell in the bar under the diner that I own. So Betty, looking very very teary eyed all over again, says that what Veronica has set out to do seems like “the opportunity of a lifetime” then adds “of all the businesses that you’ve started, this move feels the most right.” Veronica says it feels like destiny.

When Betty says California feels so far away, Veronica says they will always be in each other’s lives. They tearfully hold hands.

OK so this is the second time that California is talked about like it’s Cape Good Hope, and I would think that for small town upstate New York people, New York City also feels very far away, no? I mean, Frank Sinatra used to sit on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, which is literally a mile wide, and stare across at the City vowing his dreams to himself, because NYC felt unreachable.

Another woosh, and Visitor Jughead is back, pretending like he has ever seen a single movie at the Babylonium. (No he has not). “I always loved this theater,” is what he says. So maybe this is one of those like, multiple eternal universes theories where every moment in every possible universe also exists for eternity? This Jughead has never seen a single movie in this theater, I repeat. He also says, “Lots of kids made out here” before flipping up the seat next to him to show a lot of gum stuck underneath - ew - and his signature crown graffiti as well as some other markings. The 1955 Jughead went to see B-horror movies and watched them with full concentration, completely ignoring everyone who was making out all around him.

Time Travel Betty asks what happened to Veronica. The usual lie comes out of Visitor Jughead - Veronica started out at the bottom of the corporate ladder (I mean, maybe the Hollywood nepotism helped??) then “within a few years” she was running the place, leading to “two Oscars” and she produced “iconic movies.” I’m happy that the two of them are concocting a nice narrative for Veronica’s life, but what I notice is that she isn’t given a wife or a husband or children. She just had her career, and was buried in Hollywood. Betty is crying again and it’s getting very tedious. She regrets that they - the two of them but also in the larger sense of the four of them, did not keep in better touch, because they were “so close.”

Um.

I think maybe you weren’t, Betty. I think 86 Year Old Betty is expressing some sort of Crone Sexualityawakening, something along the lines of - instead of fighting the one girl who I was really good friends with over the boy we both had the hots for I should’ve just fucked all my friends! The false narrative is that the four of them were “so close, inseparable” suddenly in their final year, and Betty can’t actually say the truth. “And then we just … dot dot dot.” That faltering has the truth hidden inside of it - none of this happened. They did not have this kind of senior year. And there was no quad.

Visitor Jughead isn’t really necessary anymore because Time Travel Betty has just taken over the fiction making, so he’s staring off, not even looking at her as she has her self-serving memory-induced breakdown about her lost friends (based on the fictional relationship she is just now coming up with), and the flat, cold way he looks down at her has that same eerie disconnect he was exhibiting earlier.

“That’s what today is all about,” he says, “Remembering. And getting one more chance. And no regrets.”

This long hallucination is that Betty remembers she was sick that last day of school, and then as everyone moved on to the next bit of their lives, they all grew apart, so her second chance is her wishing she’d had more sex when she was younger. She’s just getting to write a fix-it fanfic of her life.

So then we go to the Choni fanfic segment. I’m getting very tired. Cheryl and Toni are fully out, at least in the confines of the underground coffee shop. Cheryl says that “there’s no separation between our art and our love.” Toni just looks at her, but doesn’t say a single word of support about this so called perfect love, which fits in with how nasty a user fail girlfriend she’s been this entire season. When she does talk, Toni talks about Black Athena, her accomplishment she was very reluctant to take Cheryl to and from which Cheryl on her own cognizance banned herself.

The theme is “Beefcake Meets Cheesecake.” This seems like Toni forcing her bisexuality on Cheryl, who wouldn’t seem the type to voluntarily draw shirtless men. Time Travel Betty really likes the paintings.

The most important thing about this scene is that 1955 Jughead with his felt crown is there, with his arm around 1955 Veronica.

The very nice, kind future that Visitor Jughead weaves for Betty’s benefit about Cheryl and Toni is that Cheryl had a super successful career as a painter, and that Cheryl and Toni stayed together for life, in California (he says Oakland, and for some reason this doesn’t merit a third mention of how very, extremely far away California is), i na big rambling hippie house. They “lived as artists and activists” - I assume off of Cheryl’s family money. They also “had a son” which they named after Riverdale (poor boy). They both died “peacefully.” Time Travel Betty doesn’t really care about either of these people, so the details are extremely hazy - no age, no sequence of death, no cause of death, no place of burial. Their lives were long and sexy, apparently. OK Sure.

Visitor Jughead and Time Travel Betty take in Julian, sitting alone, taking a drink. She wants to know what happened to him. He’s the second man who caused problems for Betty, so he gets a really sad, bad ending. He was not “just a lost soul” - what, no invitation from Kevin to perform at the theater company he founded?? - and he died in Vietnam, leaving behind no lover, no children. I mean, the Vietnam War technically began in like, 1955, so it was already ongoing by the time they all graduated in 1956, but damn that’s cold.

See, and I understand now why Fangs had to be killed in his version of his life story. His impregnating Midge, and Betty’s very limited intelligence making her unable to understand how that happened was a pretty humiliating conversation for her. Fangs had to die for sins of his dick. Julian was the one that clued in Betty to the fact that Archie and Reggie had gone to a prostitute, so that’s why HE had to die. Poor Julian. He was 28 when he died, by the way, which means he would’ve died in 1966 (the US military presence in Vietnam peaked in the late 60s so this tracks, but what was he doing before??).

Nana Rose, who somehow is at this event, is asked after by Betty, and Visitor Jughead just makes something up - She reincarnated multiple times. (Rivervale is real?)

Weatherbee and Mrs T got married, late in life. (No other story).

OK so then we come to Frank Andrews, who Betty has a lot of reasons to be mad at, and Tom Keller, which she had less of an interaction with, also meet a bad end. WHY would either of those men be HERE at this event? They wouldn’t but of course, as I’ve been saying all along, this isn’t happening, not really. This is the dying 86 year old Betty telling herself a fanfiction of her own life. Anyway, what happened to them was this: “A hustler they picked up one rainy night named Chic” murdered them both. Betty in earlier seasons of Riverdale very much disapproved of gay pick up culture, so again, instead of dying of AIDS or homophobic attacks, these two assholes died of gay on gay murder. Uhhh. That’s a bit homophobic of you, Time Travel Betty.

Veronica, in the corner, is telling 1955 Jughead and 1955 Archie about her pending departure for California. Visitor Jughead says of himself and Archie, “We are not taking it well.” Betty says a true thing that was already established - she wasn’t there for any of these conversations. So Visitor Jughead offers her another fix-it fanfic writing opportunity. “You should be.”

The “boys” are very down in the dumps. Veronica calmly reminds them that they all knew “they would be going their separate ways after graduation.” Time Travel Betty is writing the story now, and marionetting all these people. They are all utterly silent and still and devoid of reaction as she catches them up to her fantasy’s narrative - that their senior year was “incredibly” physically fulfilling as well as emotionally a great experience. Veronica immediately agrees. Then Jughead says the most unJughead thing of all time, because Time Travel Betty’s narrative is forcing him to: “If I had to live through high school twice, I’m glad it was with you three yahoos.”

Jughead, you barely saw Archie all through junior year. We have no idea what happened senior year. He would not say this.

Betty says what she wishes she’d told all these people: “I love you all so much.”

This episode is her party and she can make it do whatever she wants it to do.

Betty does acknowledge that there were in fact “heartbreaks and all.” The four of them hold hands, so then Archie suggests a last ride to Cheryl’s afterparty. For some reason it’s not night time, so they have a long ride on the jalopy in slow motion.

Ok I really liked this. The world OPENED UP because we see the huge Canadian forest, the Sweet Water River, the bridge - just this big huge space the show used to inhabit before the cramping down of the available sets from both the pandemic and budget constraints. They start to look very bittersweet (emphasis on the bitter) as the ride goes on - Betty looking rather askance at Archie, not meeting his eye, Jughead looking away from Veronica at the river as she stares stony faced straight ahead.

Betty is outside the house, fidgeting, which then brings Visitor Jughead. He wants to know why she hasn’t gone inside. Time Travel Betty has fully bought into her own bullshit - this evening, this party and basically NOTHING FROM THIS WHOLE DAY ever happened, but she is now weeping because “this is the last time that that all of us will be together, ever.” Betty doesn’t want to say goodbye to these fictional versions of her high school friends she’s invented as she lays dying at age 86 on the other side of the close door void. She says even this idealized version, the act of saying a proper farewell to all her friends that she, even in her made up memories can’t help but decide she never saw much of ever again, woul d be too painful.

As Visitor Jughead looks at her with that same cold, disengaged affect he’s had this entire time, Betty regrets the entire venture - “It was a mistake to come back here. I should be at home with the mumps.”

Visitor Jughead gives her a weird little koan, that the whole arc of a life is to say hello, “walk alongside someone for a while” and then the relationship ends. This pat summary seems to upset Betty, but at the slightly threatening reminder from Visitor Jughead that “every minute counts” she girds her loins and goes into the party that didn’t happen and even if it did, she was never there.

First speaker at this event is Archie, who is going to read a poem. Julian ribs him meanly about being a poet (“You won’t shut up about it!”) and Reggie coos flirtatiously at him, (“Are you going to give us the weeps?”). I’m bracing for impact here, because Archie’s poems have been hideously painful.

What Archie mentions in his strange little ode reveals the truly bizarre things that apparently counted as worth being included in the “happy memories only” cut from Angel Tabitha that almost everyone opted for:

And here it comes: “And no, I won’t be mentioning the epic highs and lows of high school football.” This is said to ironic affectionate laughter. The scene in which it features, which happened in juvenile detention for Archie, and was mentioned a second time in universe by a very miserable grown up Jughead Jones when he was having to work as a waiter in the diner where sometimes he served his sneering students - made the cut for a ‘happy memory’ that everyone got to have via Angel Tabitha.

Betty Cooper having the serial killer gene which could also be set off by the word Tangerine (which was the incident in which the plot played with whether she really killed Jughead Jones or not) was another ‘happy’ memory that everyone gets to remember. And laugh about.

Veronica not ever being prom queen is mentioned by Archie (because??) and then also the fact that she was a human dialysis machine in S6 is also in everyone’s memory. Veronica even addresses this: “I specifically asked Angel Tabitha not to let anyone remember that.”

Jason’s death, his exhumation and mummification, then being hauled around the house while in such a state is another happy memory that everyone remembers.

????

Toni looks very displeased at this mention, but Cheryl acts like this actually was merely embarrassing rather than distressing.

Maybe I don’t know what happy means, after all, to Betty Cooper, because this is still Betty Cooper’s fanfic of what she thinks could have happened if there had actually been an afterparty like this.

Betty Cooper is possibly a meaner girl than I ever gave her credit for. Or Archie Andrews is. I don’t even know anymore.

Anyway, Archie really doesn’t have much to say about Toni in particular, other than to point out that Southside is one word not two, so the South Side Serpent jacket logo is stupid.

Heehee ha ha? (I think this might be both a cultural problem and a personality trait of mine coming together. I hate practical jokers - not the jokes, but the people who come up with them - and I don’t see the point of roasting. It’s hardly ever done well, and never has good consequences.)

We come to Jughead Jones, of whom Archie begins, “Jughead Jones needs no intro.” The first thing Archie addresses is the suicide of Chipping - “he made his teacher jump out a window.”

I mean. You got groomed and child molested by one of yours and tried to redo that relationship again in this timeline asshole, and also this is inaccurate. Jughead didn’t make Chipping do anything.

Further, why is everyone remembering this? This can’t possibly be anybody’s idea of a happy memory, least of a Jughead’s. Was Angel Tabitha fully lying about leaving only the happy memories for people? In narrative, that doesn’t seem likely, because there has never been ambiguity about Angel Tabitha’s goodness. Which brings me back to - this thing is being written by Betty, who remembers all the bad things along with Jughead, and she is the puppet master behind this Marionette Archie being deeply unfunny and meanspirited to everyone. Because my general thesis about S4 was that Betty was furiously resentful of Jughead being given the opportunity to ‘pull ahead’ of her by getting himself this plum spot at prep school, so the first major indication that things were about to go seriously awry for him (Chippings’ suicide) may well have been a happy memory for Betty after all.

I have also garnered from Tumblr fandom that the actor who played Chipping annoyed the writer’s room at some point by seeming to mock the plotline of which he was a part, so I think this may be them settling scores in a really bitchy fashion, and not giving a shit what happens to the character arcs by having ALL of these assholes laugh about someone’s suicide, regardless of how cartoonish.

The rest of Jughead’s ditty goes:

Thinks himself a private eye/ Chained himself to Southside High.

… Again this was, at the time of presentation, shown to be deeply hurtful to Jughead, because he was making a stand for something (in his usual grandiose way) and his person, who was Archie at the time, more than Betty, betrayed him in a publicly humiliating way.

This is so mean.

Betty the fic maker has Kevin eagerly volunteer himself for this put down which by rights in the flow of the story if it really happened should have been 90% utterly incomprehensible to him.

Archie starts out by saying that Kevin has a beautiful voice and should be singing always (fair point) but then adds: “But he spends most of his time Cruising Fox Forest.”

This! This is evidence absolute to me that Betty Cooper, the one who remembers, is the one writing this entire scene. The only person who was ever deeply upset about Kevin’s cruising was actually Betty Cooper. Fangs, his actual adult sexual partner, was puzzled by it but did not take it upon himself to mock Kevin. Cheryl, his gay semi-ally, knew about his compulsion but also never publicly attacked him or outed him or tried to punish him for this activity. It was only and ever Betty. And what a hypocrite 86 year old fanfic author Betty Cooper is. She imagined a very sloppy smorgasbord of teen lovers for herself (Archie AND Jughead AND Veronica but NOT Reggie oh my!) but she’s going to STILL DO THIS about Kevin’s S1-6 sex life. I want to chuck the angry spirit of George Michael, he of the immortal This Is What Men Do quote, at her.

Next up is Fangs, whom Archie-as-Puppeteered-by-Betty mocks as being “a long way from a cult member who stole organs to put in freezer.” Of course, Fangs and Kevin worked together to attack Betty when she tried to overturn the Edgar Evernever Cult. This is the only time that Fangs was significant in the life of S1-6 Betty. Other things he could be mocked for that were equally terrible- such as the killing of Tall Boy - did not have much to do with Betty, so she doesn’t mention them.

Archie-Puppet goes on to roast Reggie, to say “Pound for Pound/ You’re my closest equivalent.” To whom is this true? Since when? Possibly only in S7 when Reggie suddenly replaced Jughead as the primary best boyfriend and then got all the affection from Archie that Jughead never got? “But there’s that other Reggie/ So how do we know you’re even legitimate?” Then it gets weirdly racial, which everyone hoots about like it’s funny. “I’m going to need to seem some sort of birth certificate.”

You know how I have been curious about exactly how it is Reggie is American and 17 in 1955 when we never see his parents and he’s visibly biracial and it’s just not clear to me at all? This is not… funny. After creating a super awkward and strange episode dealing with Anti-Korean racism, they do this. Reggie answers, “You know I’m sensitive about that,” and it’s not clear if it means his immigration / naturalization status in S7 or the other Reggie existing at all.

Dilton, the other boy doesn’t get any sort of mention, and Julian, the other Better Archie than Archie, doesn’t get a single line.

They - as marionette by Betty - give him a standing ovation. God knows why. This is Betty applauding herself for being mean to these paper dolls.

As a grand finale, Archie comes to Time Travel Betty after everyone has left, to say a special goodbye to her in particular. “I know we’ll see each other again,” he says, including a very flattering confession that he’s always felt that it would be Barchie end game, because it started with them, “a boy and a girl next door to each other.” But just like she reacted to his proposal in S6, this Betty also rejects Archie. She tells him the future - that Archie settles in California for good. He marries some girl (unnamed), settles down in Modesto, has an unnamed number of children, he never breaks into publishing (“amateur writer”) but he’s content and happy. She even goes to invent a death for him - she insists that everyone has to fucking be buried in their place of origin - but she does get this right about him: Instead of being buried near is “sweet, strong” wife or his “beautiful” family of children, Archie Andrews in Betty’s imagining will seek to be buried next to his father (but not his mother).

After this self-serving self-insert fix-it fic is over, Betty tells Visitor Jughead that she has one last place she wants to go, so they visit Pop Tate’s grave. Even though Pop Tate in S1-6 got to actually have a retirement, and see his gorgeous, smart granddaughter take over his business with big ambitions for it and also not coincidentally take up with the boy he’s adopted in his heart (Jughead!), Time Travel Betty wants to kill of Pop Tate as soon as his usefulness to her as the proprietor of the diner is over. Self centeredness taken to the point of homicide is basically the show - not mine! - the SHOW’s repeated thesis about Betty Cooper.

Like any good improv partner, Visitor Jughead doesn’t argue with any sort of thing that Betty Cooper wants to do in this universe he’s created for her, so he just plays right along, to say that the death of Pop Tate was “a terrible blow” to the town.

What can I say- the cemetery is gorgeous, and I’m so excited (in this last episode) and sad to see the time and potential that was lost because of the limitations placed on television productions during the pandemic of 2020.

I can’t help but recall that 1950s Betty was much, much stupider and less creative than all the other iterations of Betty in seasons prior when she finds that she can’t imagine a theology of death for herself in her own self-insert fanfic, and has to ask Visitor Jughead about it. “What do you think happens when we die?” Visitor Jughead says that Pop Tate is still going to make burghers and making people smile FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY. This is extraordinarily cruel, and see, Betty can’t not recall Tabitha Tate, but she absolutely won’t mention her in the context of her own grandfather’s death.

Sitting at a bench in a really truly lovely bit of wilderness, Betty tells the Visitor Jughead, whom if she has any intelligence would know is NOT the 1955 Jughead that went on to die at 84 after founding “Madhouse Magazine,” that she read “your” obituary. But as I’ve been saying and the show has been showing all this time, 1955 Universe Betty is deeply, exceptionally, stupid.

The nice thing about this is that the show shows me more of 1955 Jughead’s obituary.

“Forsythe Jones III, Jughead to his friends and followers, passed away on Tuesday at his home in New YOrk State. Jughead took fledging Pep Comics, popular for it’s (TYPO IN THE TEXT, TRANSCRIBED FAITHFULLY) horror themed comic books in the 1950s and created the wildly successful Jughead’s Madhouse Magazine. Jughead spent his youth devouring comic books and short stories and turned that passion into a profitable enterprise that gave an outlet to the misunderstood, twisted minds of America’s teens for the better part of two decades. A young horror writer and [illegible] for Pep Comics himself, Jones [illegible] the magazine in [lots of words illegible] comics [illegible] back in 1955, [illegible] the first issue of Jughead’s Madhouse which still [illegible] high school in Riverdale.

Jughead is remembered as the…. satirical …[Illegible].”

Anyway, Time Travel Betty gives the Visitor Jughead (WHO WASN’T THAT JUGHEAD) her assessment on his life. “Yours was a life well lived.” Ever the faithful improv partner, Visitor Jughead simply Yes-Ands her. He pretends to be speaking for that Jughead, the 1955 one, by answering that “it was swell.” He knows what she knows, because he’s not living the narrative, and possibly has just read he recall of the obituary that she recalls reading earlier in this episode. “I put all my eggs in one basket.” When she tries to praise him about the magazine he founded being an institution, Visitor Jughead (oh whom the captions suddenly refers to as ANGEL JUGHEAD by the way) says modestly that it was “juvenile satire at best.” Betty keeps praising him, because Jughead, whom she has decided she would’ve had a fun time fucking in the 1955 universe but without the intensity and purity of the one-true-love type relationship that he tried to have with her from S1-4, is one of those who are going to be gifted a nice (enough, and according to her very twisted rules) life by Grandma Betty. Angel/Visitor Jughead keeps playing along, saying in answer to her saying that people adored his work 70 years in, that he had an audience of “mostly teens and adults” even though the ‘self’ we are shown in flashback is a mutton chopped, rather portly man who seems like a cranky middle aged dude.

Anyway, Visitor/Angel Jughead, now pretending to be 1955 Jughead, says he’s happy with the legacy (that Grandma Betty is inventing for him) and then asks what Time Travel Betty thinks about legacy. She says she doesn’t. Then, in improv partner mode, Visitor Jughead creates the most improbable series of events for 1955 Betty to have lived through: the Teenage Mystique becomes a “best seller” even though it was “self published.” Sure. Then there was an advice colum called “Betty’s Diary,” then it was New York City, then starting She Says magazine (a sort of Ms. I guess). “Exposing hard truths and still being published today.”

Time Travel Betty echoes more or less exactly what Visitor/Angel Jughead said about the life she wrote for his 1955 iteration, but saying she could have done worse.

Then the show drops some really, really weird summary bombs.

Bomb 1: Revealed by Visitor/ Angel Jughead - Betty never got married, but adopted a daughter, whom she named Carla. Carla is the mother of the dark haired Alice that we saw at the start, and Betty says she loved being a mom and a grandma. Then she says something incredibly retrograde to me - that her true legacy is her family. Okay sure. Even though apparently you didn’t have any sort of relationship whatsoever with Polly or your niece and nephew.

Bomb 2: Revealed by Time Travel Betty - Jughead also never got married and never fathered any children either. She’s only doing this because she’s just not very creative, and also because demonstrably mean. She doesn’t WANT Jughead to have moved on to some unnamed “sweet strong girl who makes you laugh” like Archie. She definitely doesn’t want Jughead to end up with someone like S5-6 Tabitha either. Visitor/Angel Jughead, speaking for all the Jugheads that have existed, sounds very, very sad when he says that he “sometimes” regrets “not getting circled” in her words. Her improv partner doesn’t like the direction she took his story.

Then because Betty is upset for the umpteenth time in this episode (I’m getting very tired of her tearing up non stop with no real reason for it. I feel absolutely nothing.) Visitor Jughead holds her hand. Betty expresses a strange wish: “I wish we could stay in Riverdale forever, with all of our friends, as we were. Young and beautiful.”

This is a very dangerous thing to say to a genie. He’s looking at her in that same calculating way, though his face is reflecting some of her intense emotion.

It’s only when she says something patently untrue and not shown so far that Visitor Jughead looks away. “Bursting with love for each other.”

Erm. Okay so the Core Four were rarely ever bursting with love for each other. Bursting with lots of other complicated emotions, yes, but if the show was about four people bursting with love for each other it would have been a) fucking boring and b) I wouldn’t be here writing an extremely long winded blog about it, trust you me.

She keeps fishing for reassurance from him, easing Visitor Jughead out of cosplaying 1955 Jughead for her into being his magical self, because she says “I know it’s not possible” twice, until he finally confirms, “No, it’s not.” But that strange ambiguity of expression remains in this Visitor Jughead’s face. She wants really not to return to her 86 year old expiring body. She says, in the end, that she’s ready to go back because he tells her it’s time.

We cut to Grandma Betty being taken to Riverdale by car by her granddaughter. She starts to say goodbye to things, out loud:

Town Sign

Sweetwater River and all its mysteries (there was only one mystery)

Fox Forest and its haunted trees

Red Door and secrets behind it

Room (empty), window, Archie’s room (empty) Pembroke (with furniture covered up) “with its crackling fires and sexy sleepovers.”

Then we are shown a really weird space. It looks like the bombed out remains of the train car that 1955 Jughead, except it looks cruddy without all the fancy improvements that 1955 Veronica made to it. Instead, what’s in it are a bare mattress, a cruddy couch, and on the floor, some weird objects that do not belong in the 1955 train car: a ceremonial looking bulls’ head mask (minotaur?? Gargoyle King????), and an abandoned G&G game complete with the gate prop. The voiceover by Betty describes this as “Goodbye to cups of coffee and late nights of writing.”

Then we move on to the emptied out set of Thornhill, and tumbleweed rolling across very inappropriately (Riverdale would not have tumbleweed) the front of the Babylonium, then “music and poetry and art” are bid farewell to the completely scuppered and emptied out set for the Dark Room/ the Speakeasy.

Next comes the farewell to Riverdale High, the basketball court set, with Betty solemnly intoning “Goodbye to basketball games and pep rallies and dances at the gym.” The main high school sets of the show are shown - the school hallway, the classroom where the beat poets and heteronormativity were discussed, the Blue and Gold workroom, the boys’ locker room, the music room, the time capsule…and time.

“I wish, I wish there were more of it,” Betty says.

OK so this last bit really did get to me. I did get verklempt. I also wish there were more of Riverdale.

The final place we along with Grandma Betty are taken to is the diner set, which has a leaf-strewn empty parking lot and is adorned with a for sale sign with this number (914-555-0157).

“It was wonderful getting to grow up here,” Betty says, and my sentimental feeling is entirely gone just like that.

No it wasn’t.

NO IT WAS NOT.

Granddaughter Alice tells Grandma Betty they are “here,” then looks around at no response to smile at her, telling her no-name male companion that Grandma Betty is asleep. The man, whose name is apparently [Robert] according to the captions, somehow knows on sight that Grandma Betty is dead. Alice sees is too, and start to get upset.

Then we cut to the ominous red lights of the Sweet Hereafter, or hell, or whatever it is, bathing Betty, young again, who opens the door to a different car (a 1950s design) to walk up to the fully functional diner as Visitor Jughead watches her approach the silent Jason, who is the doorman to the reanimated Diner.

A song creepily starts just before she gets there, and the lyrics are “You’re Miiiiine” and goes on to say, “And we belong together… for eternity.” Inside Betty’s personal afterlife diner, everyone is already dead and delighted to see her:

Toni and Cheryl in one booth. 1955 Jughead with ARchie and Veronica. Dilton sitting with Ben Button, and Dilton looks absolutely ecstatic. THERE IS NO ETHEL. There’s several black students, whom she did not interact with at all during S7, but they’re all delighted too. Julian and Reggie are playing Foosball together, and Reggie looks excited and Julian looks at Betty with a sort of brotherly affection he has absolutely no reason to exhibit. Betty gives Reggie a big hug as the song goes on to say “You’re mine” again as I break out in hives. The big pink ribbon tying up Betty’s long hair in a ponytail really bothers me. She then goes to greet Pop Tate who is going to be flipping burgers for her benefit for the whole of eternity. Then she hugs Kevin and Clay (song: “They belong to only me/ For eternity”), followed by Fangs and Midge. She skips over to Choni, and Cheryl is also ecstatically happy to see Betty, as is Toni. “I swear by everything I own…” says the song, as Dilton and Ben, who had been the most demonstrably happy to see her, get only waves, and no hugs.

She joins the core four booth, giving Veronica a hug, then reaching out hands to hold with Jughead, followed by ARchie. “You’re mine/ we belong together.” Archie tells her that her timing is perfect, and they have a strawberry milkshake waiting for her. She says thank you.

Cut to the outside of the Diner, which is bathed in that unholy red neon light. In a red T shirt with red flannel we see Angel/Visitor Jughead, who breaks the fourth wall to say:

“We’ll leave them here, I think.” His summary for what is going to be going on in the third iteration of the 1955 universe (this is another pocket universe, and Grandma Betty’s own personal afterlife, that she specifically order from this Jughead) is depressing and reductive as hell. These are “the moments that make up a life”: “Forever seventeen” and “always grabbing a burger” “always going to or coming from some dance” “talking about school” “who is dating who” “homework” “movie playing at the Babylonium.”

He brings it around to say that this is where “they”- quickly amended (lying?) to say “we’ve” - have ALWAYS BEEN, IN THIS DINER, IN THIS TOWN.

This is a magic spell/ curse that he’s weaving, to trap all the puppet version of all the 1955 Universe characters in the heaven/hell of Betty’s making, for her personal preferences.

He just names it: This is The Sweet Hereafter.

Visitor /Angel Jughead has been Death all along.

He invites all of us to come into this little personal afterlife he’s made for Betty Cooper, whenever it is we are destined to die. He says that we should come in, because we’ll “always be among friends” and “Riverdale will always be your home.”

To the sounds of typewriter clickety clacking, Visitor/Angel Jughead refuses to go into this little hell himself. and instead walks off.

1955 Betty got exactly what she said she wanted, at the end. Which is to say, perhaps, that everyone else may have as well. They may have ordered a very different Sweet Hereafter, from the one that Betty requested for herself. Jughead’s Sweet Hereafter was him inside the diner having fan meetings, AWARE that it was an artificial construct full of puppet versions of people, and enjoying himself so much that Tabitha couldn’t bring herself to yank him out of it. Betty, who was aware of all parts (well, as many as she considered salient and had the cognitive capacity to understand) of S1-6 summoned a Jughead shaped Angel of Death, as the prime fiction maker, to create her Sweet Hereafter for her, as well as a last-day hallucination of the life she did not live to send her off in comfort. The actual 1955 Betty’s life was not worth recalling for her on her last day of consciousness, because the quad never happened, and because people didn’t live in the ways or die in the order that she would have preferred. On her final day of consciousness, Betty got to rewrite Riverdale to HER tastes, and this is how it worked out. She made a thing wearing Jughead’s face give her the story she wanted, for herself.

I wonder what really happened to 1955 actual Betty, because it was NONE of this.

The least believable, most ungrounded portion of this very shallow set of stories Betty wrote for her people was the path she gave Jughead Jones. If anything, Jughead Jones has been a compulsive relationship maker. There is no way he never got married. He got married multiple times. There is no way he never had children, either. It’s just telling to me that the possibly infertile Betty refused to imagine a future for Jughead where he got to have even the short amount of time he DID have to Tabitha Tate before the world ended.

As far as finales go, I’ve seen better and I’ve seen a lot worse. I do appreciate the consistency - Betty Cooper is indeed a very dark character, not for the reasons her stans think is dark, but because of her hypocritical victim-stance-stealing malevolence and self absorption.

On a meta level, I also wonder if this is from the power of the actual fandom, the vast majority of whom I think really were Bugheads. They produce a lot of fiction and art - and the only way the show can avoid any and all accusations of cribbing from those fanworks is to work out a cramped ending like this- Betty never had a great love in her life, never got to have her own kids even though in the final analysis she found that her core value was motherhood, and oh fine, neither did Jughead!

What a strange, odd, supernatural way to end this strange, odd, lovable show.

Goodbye Riverdale, I will miss you!

#riverdale opinion #anti-betty cooper? I think?#but i call it as THE SHOW has shown it to me #i think this episode is a great prompt for future fanfic writers who engage directly with canon #each of the core four and choni besides would have a totally different final-day and sweet hereafter #riverdale s7 recap #riverdale s7 #riverdale episode recap

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riverdale-retread · 1 year ago

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Riverdale S7 E 15 (Chapter 132) Miss Teen Riverdale

Betty’s idea about giving a forum to the young women of her high school to air their grievances was a huge hit immediately, as we saw at the end of the last episode. The first letter she gets is from Veronica. We know it’s from her, but Betty doesn’t immediately scream “Oh this is Veronica!” even though Veronica basically outs herself wholesale: “I’m sick of living in a world that doesn’t take me seriously as a young business woman.” Who else talks like this or thinks like this or runs her own business in the entire high school? Nobody but V. Lodge! However, Veronica says she can’t open a checking account and I’m confused because then how does she own things? What? Also, I do understand that this is supposed to go towards women not having access to full adulthood by being denied participation in financial life, but nobody should ever take a high school student seriously as a business person. This… is not… a real problem.

Toni also outs herself in her letter: “I’m Black, I’m bold, I’m beautiful” and wants to be celebrated for those things. The only other black girl who gets to talk in Riverdale High School, Tabitha, is out of town and has been for weeks (months). First, I don’t understand why Toni doesn’t have any sort of feminist/ gender consciousness. If she’s presented as so smart, why is she dumb enough to want to fuck with fashion magazines of all things? I thought she was so off the beaten path? Secondly, she keeps pretending that her real issue is racial justice but she does not give two hoots. What she wants is to be celebrated not for being Black, which is a political stance and a still (sadly) radical one, but celebrated for being pretty, which has never not happened in the history of men objectifying women. You see, I think Toni’s real problem isn’t that Black women are not yet, in 1950, a large enough spending demographic for glossy magazine advertisers to target via fashion magazines. It’s that she’s decided to be the prettiest of the Beats or the Outsiders or whatever, but actually that she is super square and super mainstream and very very boring. What she wants is to be a cheerleader, and thought just as hot as a blonde cheerleader. She’s a stolidly normcore provincial pretty girl pretending to be an outsider. In short, being Black was and remains the main framework of oppression and injustice for millions, but it is NOT TONI’S ACTUAL ISSUE.

Cheryl, being in the closet, manages to actually not out herself except in her very formal way of writing “forever worried that I will reveal myself.” She posted this letter - in an abundance of caution - from the post box downtown when she was on a fake heterodate with Kevin. She is wearing a marvelous outfit. Navy coat with red collar, and perfectly matched red leather gloves and patent leather red handbag which has a very very 2023 fashionable shape (it looks almost exactly like Prada’s reissue of the 1990s bags, and I suppose if we posit a 25 year fashion cycle, these bag shapes and materials really were de rigeur in the 50s??). OK so this really is a problem. Cheryl is the first girl with a real problem here. Her dad and mom are psycho, and she’s gay.

Next up is the pregnant Midge, who - pardon the pun - has the mother of all problems. She’s pregnant, inexplicably determined to keep the baby and marry Fangs and also has not told her parents about this. I’m so sorry, but Midge is so dumb. I’m shocked that she knows the word “stigmatizes” and also apparently how it’s spelled.

Evelyn is so annoyed at the poster that was shoved into her locker that she sends Betty the first hatemail. “Should I say Little Miss Busybody? What makes you think that you have all the answers anyhoo?” She is not wrong. She is not wrong! Why is this show making me agree with goddam Evil-Lyn Forever-Never. Also sidebar to gush that the cream sweater navy skirt 1950s cheerleader uniform, worn with the bright red lipstick everyone sports, is SO FLATTERING on all of them. I wonder if some lucky souls nabbed one of these at the Riverdale going-out-of-business sale.

Then comes Ethel. Ethel is sketching a long legged thin woman with a tiny waist, wearing a swimsuit and sash. She says that she’s finding it difficult to be grateful because she’s surrounded by beautiful people and the world “constantly reminds her” that she’s not. Betty, looking not coincidentally exactly like the imaginary beauty queen Ethel is sketching, arrives just in time to see it. She says, “That’s a beautiful sketch.”

It turns out it’s not for art class, but for the sign up sheet for Miss Riverdale Teen Queen Pageant. The person who conveys this information is Alice Cooper. The very strange echoing of clothing that’s going on between Ethel and Alice in this scene creeps me out. Ethel is wearing a yellow inner top that matches the gold-ish tone of the Cooper sofa, and over that, an unadorned magenta cardigan. Standing right behind her, Alice is wearing a blue inner dress or top, and the exact same shade of magenta cardigan, except hers is bedazzled all down the front.

Ethel is so polite. She says that Alice has ‘asked her’ to be the assistant for the pageant (instead of, you know, made it clear that Ethel is in no position to refuse Alice Cooper anything if she doesn’t want to be sent back to the 19th century insane asylum). Betty finds the entire affair an “embarrassing cattle call” but Alice is extremely proud that it’s going to be broadcast live on national tv from the RIVW studios. Betty is not interested in participating, even though Alice lays it on very thick, saying it’s “glorious, and wholesome, and all-American.” She tries to manipulate Betty into participating by dangling the prizes - a new car, Hollywood screen test, or a scholarship.

OK that last one is huge. I mean the US college tuition inflation has been extraordinary, but this is from a Time Magazine article I just googled: At the University of Pennsylvania, students were charged $600 in 1950 (nearly $6,000 today) (This article is from 2016, and $6,000 in 2016 has the same "purchasing power" or "buying power" as $7,642.05 in 2023). $30,000 is not anything to sneeze at!

Betty is very enticed by this scholarship money, as Alice knew she would be. Apparently this is the first time this particular pageant is giving an actual scholarship. Riverdale is 10 years behind Miss America, by the way, which made itself a scholarship program in 1945.

While Betty is thinking about it, Ethel is trying to hide her bitterness at Alice’s assumption that she wouldn’t even want to try out.

At school, Betty runs into Veronica giving a speech to the other girls about how Edith Head wants to design something for her to wear that would be perfect for the pageant. What is it with Veronica insisting that these very ancient people born at the end of the 19th century (Edith Head was born 1896, a few years after Cole Porter) are all about Veronica Lodge. Is there a chance she’s lying? I mean, that song that she sang with Betty which she insisted was written by Cole Porter didn’t sound like his style whatsoever. Betty is very disapproving, but Veronica says that if she won a beauty pageant it would be great publicity for her movie theater business. It’s a business decision.

Her saying this doesn’t seem to ring any bells for Betty in terms of the letters she’s read, but maybe she’s fixated on the one singular hate mail she got, which okay, fair.

Betty says that the pageant objectifies girls. Cheryl is very defensive of this pageant, so she attacks Betty. She brings up the fact that Betty flashed Archie from her bedroom that one time and also that Betty flashed her underpants on live television. This is very interesting though, that Betty outwardly pushes back against her mother while Cheryl appears to defend the family against any and all attacks (while insisting on being herself to much higher risk of peril).

Anyway, Veronica agrees that pageants are objectifying to women but since she “loves being beautiful” she enjoys participating in a game that she can win. Cheryl rolls her eyes at hearing her say this as Veronica leads the way to the In Group Sofa. Ahead of her is Midge and behind her is Toni, who is wearing a really very odd outfit. All the other girls are covered up right to the collarbone but Toni is wearing a super low cut, like, barely covering her nipples low-cut, top with extremely thin spaghetti straps. She looks like she forgot to put on a shirt. Veronica’s logic gets very very twisted up. Even though she is going to be participating in a pageant in which “old fuddy duddies will decide” - this is literally what a pageant is - she says that in the end, she “decides if I’m beautiful or not. And I am, as are we all.”

This is something I find myself between a rock and a hard place about. In my country & culture (I’m not born or raised in America, I just sound like I am, because cultural softpower of the US is immense) there is no such thing as ‘we are all beautiful.’ Exactly one type of body is beautiful, exactly one shape of face is beautiful, and they will tell you down to the last cm and kg what beautiful is, and you can see how far you are from beautiful using the metric. The inability to meet this standard means all sorts of indignities happen to you, ranging from people being mean and dismissive of you all the way to being unemployable regardless of your qualifications. This sucks.

HOWEVER, this same shit is reported to exist in the US (fat women are underpaid by factors more than thin women are, even though all women still lose vis a vis comparison to men doing the same work) but the American cultural norm is to tell this stupid fucking lie about it, which I find insulting to my intelligence. Every time I hear this idiotic “we are all beautiful” bullshit I want to holler NO I’M NOT AND FUCK YOU FOR LYING.

If you aren’t the ideal, I think it’s just more efficient to know you’re not and flunk out of that race and do something else with your time. This is our way. The American way is to keep insisting that being beautiful is essential to being allowed to exist as a woman, which I find truly offensive.

Plus, it’s only standard issue pretty girls who are thin (like Veronica Lodge and the actress that plays her) that say bullshit like this. Are all men tall? Do all men have good hair? No, right? So it can’t be true that all women are beautiful.

Now, in the context of the show, Veronica is saying this to Betty, Toni, Cheryl and Midge, who all of them have perfect skin, lovely hair, symmetrical faces,perfect teeth, huge doe eyes and very narrow waisted shapely figures soooooo - Veronica is correct that “we all” are beautiful if you limit it to these five people.

And this is the point at which I started to truly, deeply, genuinely despise this episode. I hate this even more than the very strange Racism Against Koreans is Bad episode with Reggie.

Veronica says that the way to subvert the girl-on-girl implicit violence of a beauty pageant is for all the participants to stick together and ‘support’ each other.

No it isn’t. This is just reinforcing toxic femininity in the American style where women are never allowed to actually openly compete and show actual human feelings like aggression, power-hunger, the urge to dominate, disappointment or anger.

Toni of course is all about hypocrisy. Betty is shocked that Toni is going to participate because unlike me she believes Toni’s hype about herself. There is something VERY INSIDIOUS going on with Toni’s character hideousness this season. I hate it so much. I know that ‘playing the race card’ is a racist tool specifically designed to prevent racial minorities in the US from bringing up any topic which might lead to their being given fair compensation and recognition. The thing is, Riverdale the show keeps having Toni actually use ‘the race card’ over and over. Riverdale thinks playing the race card is a real thing for black women. The stupidly reductive thinking seems to be that if you’re a ‘real’ black woman who ‘really’ cares about racial injustice you should just disappear from white society like Tabitha Tate and deal with the problem of wrangling the ‘really bad’ white people who are elsewhere, not here. If you choose to continue your education and not place yourself in mortal danger all the time, then you forfeit your right to bring up racial prejudice unless you’re a ‘race card player’ like Toni. Toni just wants to do what she wants to do - indulge in her inner square that wants to wear ball gowns and have the other squares smile at her and call her pretty - but she will stick some racial element (“This is the first year this pageant is integrated” but see also, “I am the first black cheerleader”) as justification.

The only two with rights about this ar Cheryl and Midge. Cheryl says very simply that she has to compete because her family sponsors the pageant. Casually, she drops the fact that she wins every year. It made me wonder if this is why Betty is truly not interested - she’s not any more interested in playing a game she can’t win than Veronica, and she has insider information to know that it’s more likely to be Cheryl than anyone else. But see, at least Cheryl’s answer is honest, both to herself and to others. High marks.

Midge later tells a concerned Fangs that the reason SHE is participating is because she just wants to do something silly and lighthearted, where she gets to be a mainstream one-of-the-girls before her pregnancy is inevitably revealed.

Veronica comes to find Betty later in the locker room to finally come honest. She wants one of those prizes - for Veronica it’s a toss up between the car and the scholarship (I’m pretty sure she’s had her Hollywood screen test). That’s why she’s participating. She openly admits that she was bullshitting the other girls. She only tells Betty what her real intentions are. Then she asks Betty if she isn’t deeply tempted by the scholarship - the ability to pay for college.

Sidebar - a 4 year full expenses paid scholarship, which is what Veronica seems to think the prize is, is massively more powerful an incentive than the actual prize given to the Miss America winner in 2021. She would’ve gotten $100,00, which would cover literally 1 year and some change at Yale University which costs $88K a year minimum, all in.

Of course, Betty is extremely tempted. In the direct antithesis of a Cheryl slow-mo walk down the hall, which are usually to express Cheryl in a really great, world-conquering mood, Betty does a nervous, worried slow-mo walk full of hesitation towards the sign up sheet immediately after. She signs her name right under Veronica’s.

In the kitchen of the Cooper house, Alice needles Betty about having signed up after all. She interrogates Betty, wanting to know if Betty plans to win and then pull off some stunt (“pull down the temple”). When Betty says she genuinely wants the scholarship money for college, Alice scoffs at her, telling her that she could probably earn an academic scholarship. Alice wants Betty to not go to college, which makes this Alice consistent with the Alice of the OG timeline. And this is how you know Betty is not going to get the scholarship money - Alice is involved.

Alice reminds Betty that she won the pageant one year, calling it a major highlight of her life, before she reveals that she had a dream of a career as a stewardess, which she gave up as soon as she married her husband and had two kids in short order. Betty is so nice - she wishes that the dream could’ve come true for Alice. But of course, Alice always has to puncture any kind gesture by Betty by bringing on the bad news: The pageant is not a one-and-done event. It requires spending a huge amount of time with Alice as she makes the participants ‘rehearse’ for the pageant. Betty is deeply aggrieved by this news. Too bad there wasn’t any fine print on that poster Ethel drew up.

All the participants in the pageant are walking in a circle with a book on each of their heads to give them better posture. Apparently this is going to be a two hours-long ordeal - Alice orders “one more hour of posture work.” Alice sounds absolutely deranged as she lists out the femininity checklist for all the things the girls are supposed to aspire to be. Toni, even though she’s participating just as obediently as all the other sheep, pretends to be above it all and makes a little self satisfied joke about how she’s proud of her “shapely backside.” Evelyn calls her “Greaser Garbage” to which Toni shoots back “Preppy Troll.” I’m with Evelyn. Shut up, Toni.

In the corner is poor Ethel, who is so humiliated at being disregarded that she has a full on hallucination. She imagines herself as having won the pageant. And it turns out her parents are still alive! Ethel also wants her paintings - not comic book work - to be hanging in a gallery or a museum. And voila - her self portrait is at the Guggenheim!

(By the way, I’m reading The History of Art Without Men and this is history -accurate. Many of the earliest Renaissance women painters’ most famous works are their self portraits at first, because that was a permissibly feminine topic and you could just look at yourself in the mirror so it wasn’t a disadvantage you weren’t allowed to learn anatomy). The final thing that Ethel wants in this perfect night to start the rest of her perfect life fantasy is to have Jughead Jones be her boyfriend. (“Just the ginchiest” is what she says.) Alice thinks that this is a terrible choice, because Miss Riverdale Teen Queen as the pick of the litter and Jughead is substandard. (I mean. I love Jughead Jones but he kind of is - and especially in this universe. He was last seen flipping his shit about milk.) Jughead comes up to the stage in a suit with a bowtie, tells Ethel she’s always been his best gal, and gives her a little peck on the cheek.

I WAS ROBBED.

I suppose 1950s and on live tv and her lipstick can’t be messed with and all that but I AM ROBBED.

Ethel deserves to fuck Jughead Jones’ brains out just the one time to get this fixation out of her system. She’s so much cooler and more talented than he is.

I am very discomfited by the way that the way Ethel is being treated by Alice is both accurate to life (if you are a child that all the adults around know you have no other adult advocate, you tend to get fucked over) and yet extremely annoying because Ethel is and always has been so interesting and so shafted all the time and this is more of the same.

Alice treats this orphan exactly like a hired servant - “I hope you did the thing?” is such a nasty way of giving a work instruction, and she’s making Ethel do all this for FREE.

The appointment that Ethel was supposed to have made is at Mary Andrews’ dress shop, which is called Perky Peach. I mean it says “Perky IN Peach” but from afar it will look like PERKY PEACH. “Shop for Ladies and their Daughters.”

While the young girls are all standing silent like mannequins in a circle, Alice and Mary chitchat “back in the day” when they competed for Miss Teen Queen. They are both wearing flower patterns (Alice, tight-ass ones, Mary, blowsy ones) but the girls are all in single colors. Red for Cheryl, purple for Veronica, Toni in emerald, Evelyn in maroon, Betty in hot pink, Midge in blue.

Mary and Alice start out pretending they don’t hate each other. Alice tells Mary that she always “gave me a run for my money” to which Mary concedes that Alices always won. They sound like they’re joking but they’re not, and Betty is the only one who picks up on the fact that these are the first shot of a battle to come. Mary says she thought being Miss Teen Queen might have been “a stepping stone to doing something important with my life, like… being the First Lady.” As in - Alice may have won this crown every single year of high school, but she has *not* done anything at all important with her life. Alice picks up on it immediately, saying that there’s “nothing more important than being a wife and mother.” This is an aggressive thing to say to a woman whose husband is dead and so she can’t be a wife to him for one, and for another, Mary owns a business and Alice doesn’t. Alice also has more than one child too. Mary pivots to say that she thinks these girls of the new generation can do “anything that they want.” Which indicates that she didn’t actually WANT to be either a wife or a mother or perhaps even a dress-maker.

Veronica, who doesn’t really fight other women, seems not to understand that the old biddies are actually fighting, so she suddenly pipes up to ask the group if they think there will ever be a female president. (FYI, Hilary Clinton was born 1947, Geraldine Ferraro was born 1935, Sara Palin and Kamala Harris in 1964).

Evelyn is (of course) immediately repulsed by the idea but see, I like how she puts it. She just says it outright: “I wouldn’t vote for a woman.” I like this better than coming up with some stupid statement about why women can’t do the job or whatever. Just own your misogyny.

Toni, of course, doesn’t really care about women but she also can’t stand it when she isn’t the one who started a social issues conversation so she brings up an entirely different topic when she says, “Or a black president for that matter?” She does tack on man or woman but then it just makes things unclear what the hell they’re talking about thereafter -The Civil Rights Act was in 1964 and women in the US could not open bank accounts on their own until l1974.

Betty is the most optimistic of everyone and *almost* correct - she says (from the context) that she thinks there can be a black woman president within her lifetime. President Obama aside, since Betty was born in 1938, she would’ve been 83 when Kamala Harris became a female, black and asian Vice President in 2021. Cheryl clearly thinks that there would have to be seismic changes in society for either scenario - a black president, a woman president, a black woman president - to be possible.

Alice doesn’t like where this conversation is going because being political is not good for ratings on her beauty pageant, so she comes bearing down on Mary to say that it’s “important to manage expectations.” It’s just for a second, but Mary sneers directly at her even as she says “Of course,” to keep up a united front of adults against the girls.

This entire time however, Ethel has been kneeling at Betty’s feet pinning Betty’s dress.

Mary said at the start of the segment “Look at all these gorgeous girls,” but she didn’t mean Ethel. Ethel was left out of both gorgeous and girls and nobody noticed except Ethel. Because she was implicitly told off by Alice for not keeping the conversation on track, Mary takes it out on Ethel by suddenly remembering to issue an instruction to the charity case: “Can you make sure you pin Betty’s dress all the way around the hem?”

Alice is totally shit but so is Mary, no exception. Not even waiting for any sort of response from Ethel, Mary turns to one of the ‘gorgeous’ people who still counts as a girl - Midge - to ask how the fit is on her dress.

Ethel has a choice between a) homicide and b) tears, so she starts crying. I would d

too. What a horribly pitiful thing they’ve reduced by Ethel to, the one who can kill a man with her bare hands when she has to! Betty asks her if she’s crying, to which Ethel promises to “not get any tears on” her dress which just broke my heart. Betty though is a nice person in this universe, so she does care about Ethel, but she’s not very bright, which is why she asks Ethel WHAT THE MATTER IS. What the fuck do you THINK the matter is, Betty??

This is something Riverdale the show consistently does by the way. Betty has had immense difficulties in previous seasons - her mother was and is both insane and abusive - but she’s also privileged and very blinded by that privilege. As a consequence she has a sort of stupidity when it comes to even the most obvious kinds of empathy - like the situation that Ethel is in right now, forced to work as a slave seamstress for her classmates because she is living on charity in one of their homes. Her only other option is the insane asylum. I think this is why Betty stans are completely unable to cope with any criticism about Betty in any way whatsoever - not just because they’re stans, but because the show is very adamant that Betty for all her aspirations to goodness is actually very unkind and unjust in action because she is blinded by her privilege, and being able to stan Betty Cooper requires totally tuning out this very important point about her. Her privileged blindness is inexcusable and obnoxious, and so is yours.

Ethel like all disadvantaged people who are wronged knows exactly what is happening, including the fact that if she were to try to tell Betty the truth, Betty would take offense at being called privileged, at being called blinded by that privilege, which are all true, and so she just gives up. “Nothing” is wrong, Ethel weeps, “You’re just so beautiful, Betty.”

There’s a lot in there. Why is it the oppressed and wronged always feel so protective of other people? (Don’t answer that. I know the answer. Fuck me if this didn’t get me right in the feels.).

Betty really does not understand why she’s crying. She’s trying, but she just doesn’t get it, at all. Because blinding pretty woman privilege, blinding middle class privilege, etc etc.

There isn’t time to go through any of this though because Mary announces to everyone that she’s going to have let out Midge’s dress a bit. Somehow this is taken as a huge BANG sort of realization on Alice’s part. Evelyn is very smart. She says a sentence perfectly constructed to out Midge’s pregnancy to Alice: “You better start cutting back on those desserts, otherwise that cute Serpent boyfriend of yours might decide that you’re too much woman to handle.” Though she means well, Cheryl only makes things worse by overreacting, telling Evelyn to kill herself (“Take a long walk off a short pier.”) Midge is smarter than Cheryl. She’s smarter than Midge as well.

And can I also just put in a word for us ruler shaped girls who only gain weight fore and aft -directly in the belly? I’ve always had a fat tummy but I’ve never been pregnant. When I gain weight I gain it in the FUPA first and most.

Midge needed to have more of a plan and a lie ready - like “Oh yes I’ve been gaining weight in my middle giggle giggle”???

Alice approaches Midge like a shark to demand a conversation later.

Later that evening Betty is hanging out with Ethel. Since she’s essentially a kind person in S7, she is still worried about why Ethel burst into tears at the dress shop, but appears to also be no smarter or less blinded by her privileges than she was earlier in the day.

What ensues is an INFURIATING fumble of a conversation. Ethel says that she wishes she was competing with all of them. She wants to be considered a girl, in other words, in her cultural context. Betty says - and she both seems to mean it and it is true - that Ethel is beautiful, so she should be competing if she wants to. Ethel counters that Betty’s mom said Miss Teen Riverdale is supposed to be an embodiment of the ideals of the town, which Ethel has understood she can’t be because “I’m the girl whose parents were murdered, quiet, likes comic books, draws creepy pictures.”

What she doesn’t say is made deafening by the fact that she doesn’t say it. She’s fat. Ethel is beautiful and fat. But the show absolutely refuses to address the fact that all the actresses other than Ethel for that generation are extremely slender - even the ‘expanding with pregnancy’ Midge has stick thin arms and the whole of her clavicle bones show end to end through her skin.

Because the show can’t let Ethel say she’s fat, Ethel doesn’t say that it’s because she’s fat that she’s not being allowed to compete in the beauty contest, and Betty, because being cosseted lessens her intelligence, simply takes Ethel at her word. But Betty not knowing that the beauty standard of the 20th century leans towards extreme thinness for women is exactly like Toni having to ask Tabitha what it’s like to be black in the rest of America.

Betty says true things about Ethel - that she’s inspiring because she’s overcome so much adversity. That Ethel has as much right as anyone else to be competing for the prize and the title.

Because the show - and Ethel and Betty - won’t address the obvious visible physical difference between the two characters, Betty’s line about Ethel having “more pep in your little finger than the rest of us do in our whole bodies combined” comes out really really cringe.

Ethel can’t stand it anymore and takes off, saying she shouldn’t have said anything.

Betty means what she’s saying, but how seriously can Ethel be expected to take this sincerity? Not very, honestly.

Meanwhile, Midge is getting the third degree from Alice, who knows she’s pregnant. Teedum.

And now we are five (plus Ethel standing in the back). Alice announces to the group that Midge is “no longer with us” and is no longer a student at Riverdale High, because she’s been carted off to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. Alice Cooper is so obsessed with depositing girls with the Sisters of Quiet Mercy, isn’t she? She’s the type of person who can’t stand the thought of having to suffer something alone - she has to inflict the same suffering on others.

She drops the hints as heavy as anvils: “When you see her in six or seven months, Midge will be right as rain.”

Veronica finally gets it. She seems to know the duration of human gestation anyway. She tries to ask if Midge is pregnant, but Alice, wearing pink gloves (she’s pink handed rather than red-handed, I guess?) makes ‘close your mouth’ motions with her hands so she can continue her lecture about how “we must treat our bodies as temples.” Alice does have a way with words. She wants the girls to “guard against defilement” and instead regroup that afternoon to have some “good clean fun” preparing for the pageant.

As she exits the room, we see that she was using Ethel as a literal clothes hanger tool to hold on to her purse.

Later, wearing what looks like a dinner napkin as a scarf, Betty, who is really very dumb this episode, just simply does not understand why Midge was sent away. I was a bit taken aback by this. Betty Cooper is supposedly a straight-A student but she just does not know at all how long pregnancy lasts (Uhhhh does Midge also not know??). Evelyn AGAIN SAYS EXACTLY WHAT I AM THINKING because she snaps, “I thought you were supposed to be smart” before explaining to Betty that “Midge has a bun in the oven.” She just keeps the truths coming! “She let a greaser paw at her like a dirty rag.” I meannn I hate Fangs so yeah, I’m even going to excuse her misogynistic language.

Why does this keep happening to me, the humble Riverdale episode recapper? In S4 I was BRET. I had to identify with BRET WESTON WALLIS and now in S7, I’m Evelyn. Thanks Show, for the realizations I did not want.

Evelyn is just laying all the truths out on the table - that Midge is pregnant, that Betty is not very smart, that everyone knows that Cheryl and Toni are a dyke pair, and that Fangs should never be allowed to breed and now he’s gonna have offspring.

She gets threatened by Toni with physical violence which is just comical. I’m a short girl myself, but dude, Toni should never threaten people with physical violence. You’re literally like 90 lbs, Toni, shut up.

Betty really is dumb.

Like, actively stupid.

Look at this face:

Betty finally FINALLY puts it together that Midge has fucked Fangs and that’s why she’s pregnant. When she seeks confirmation, Toni clearly thinks she’s stupid just as much as Evelyn does, so she’s short with Betty, “Yes, Betty.” Betty wants to know if it was once or multiple times. The femme superdykes give her identical, OMG faces because they are both the type of queer girl who didn’t realize for a long time that they were queer because they thought they were just smarter than the majority of other girls, who of course happened to be straight.

Veronica’s love for Betty is everlasting, plus she’s a virgin herself, so she is willing to meet Betty on the same grounds. “I’m guessing they were doing the deed on the reg,” she says, trying to elevate Betty’s grotesque stupidity to the level of something akin to banter.

Toni starts to try to explain the ‘situation’ to all of them like they’re all 4 years old. “Midge loves Fangs and Fangs loves Midge.” Evelyn comes in once again with the correct take: “Quite the cautionary tale if you ask me.” Cheryl is completely unable to come up with a good come back beyond a very paltry No One Asked You type of comment, because I think Cheryl also thinks fucking around with boys is stupid and for the weak and always is going to end up with a cautionary tale type situation. She dislikes Evelyn, in other words, but doesn’t disagree, and only wishes she wouldn't keep spouting truths.

Betty continues to be extremely idiotic - “I’m wondering how Midge could have ended up getting…” is what she says. Not even Veronica knows how to salvage this. Both dykes, Evelyn and even Ethel, who as I’ve said wants to preserve Betty in her innocent stupidity rather than have her face the hardness of the world, give her looks. I think Betty is lying when she says that she “of course” “understand[s] how it happened.” But she’s seen now that her ignorance has shaded fully over into just a lack of intelligence, so she makes something up about "wondering if they were using…” because she’s heard that a man and a woman need to ‘do’ something ‘at least once’ to have a baby but there are ways to maybe make that not happen. Betty Cooper simply does not understand the mechanics of sex.

Veronica continues to want to adore Betty, because she just does, so she supplies the word - protection! Using protection! - because she can’t in good faith adore someone who is irretrievably stupid, and she doesn’t want to admit that about Betty. I am rather surprised to hear from Cheryl that she asked about birth control to Midge, with enough specificity to receive an answer: “Midge said they were, but once it slipped.” And then even more squick- Toni asked Fangs about birth control too, and heard about his incompetence with a condom directly as well. Ew. Cheryl does make an annoyed, oh these damned hetero morons type of eyeroll face as she tells her tale, to her credit.

This makes Veronica burst out that this is why the birth control pill is necessary, that birth control needs to be in the hands of women (not on the dicks of men) because “we’re the ones who have to live with the consequences.” I wish Veronica could be more radical in her feminism -that there should BE NO consequences, but as she’s said at the start of this episode, she likes inhabiting a face and body that’s considered beautiful too much to want to topple the whole thing over.

It’s clear from Betty’s expressions that she still isn’t sure how exactly Midge got pregnant, she doesn’t at all understand what ‘protection’ means really or what ‘it’ is that could’ve have slipped nor what it slipped from, and isn’t following Veronica’s train of thought whatsoever. But the looks that even Evelyn and Ethel gave her has had a silencing effect.

It’s really kind of a violation of human rights, isn’t it, that Betty just does NOT KNOW simple basic facts.

Anyway, Veronica is going on about how boys who impregnate girls have proven their manhood but girls who get impregnated by that same boy are treated as ‘fallen’ to which Betty starts to voice a very conventional fact; "Midge’s life is just… [ruined]."

Cheryl is a leader.

Can I say that again?

CHERYL BLOSSOM IS A REAL LEADER.

She cuts Betty off at the pass: “Her life is not ruined,” she says, categorically. Cheryl Blossom is not going to LET “this”- i.e. Fangs’ incompetence with keeping a condom on his damn dick - hurt one of ‘her’ Vixens in some irretrievable way.

Toni only WISHES she could exhibit this sort of moral, almost compulsive, valor.

Anyway.

Evelyn is so very even keeled. I kind of love that about her. She hates everyone at a very chilled temperature. Even her bright red lipstick has a chilly blue undertone. Evelyn points out that Cheryl and Midge are neither of them Vixens.

Toni wonders if Fangs even knows what has happened to his baby mama, to which Evelyn again acts as oracle to say everyone will eventually know. Cheryl and Toni take off to try to find Fangs so he can learn the bad facts from sympathetic tellers.

Veronica is still worried that she’s very in love with a very dumb girl, so she checks in with Betty to ask what she’s thinking about. Betty says that she’s thinking about how one night can change everything for you. I mean. That isn’t true though, not when you’re Alice Cooper’s daughter. Ethel had two very big nights - one was when her parents were murdered, which is the same night she got sexually assaulted by Julian Blossom, and then the night she killed the Milkman, which made all the adults back off from hauling her directly to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy again. Betty by contrast got caught doing a long distance strip tease with Archie, and then flashed her panties on live television but she has had to deal with no consequences whatsoever, other than her mother continuing to be crazy. So no, it isn’t true that one night can change everything - it only is true if you don’t have the right combo pack of protections.

Betty follows up with Ethel. Ethel is thinking about Midge at the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. Betty basically Yes-ands her, by saying she cares a lot about Midge being sent to an insane asylum (she doesn’t) as lip service so she can get Ethel to agree to take Midge’s spot at the beauty pageant.

You know what? I think I understand now why Betty has nothing to say about Ethel being beautiful and fat and how her fatness might be a problem for a beauty pageant. She’s too stupid to know the facts of heterosexual reproductive intercourse - so by extension she’s too stupid to know that fat girls are given a much harder time in life, a harder time than girls with bad skin, girls with glasses, girls who are too skinny, girls with bad teeth. All she sees is that Ethel is beautiful (factual) and deserving (also true) and so in a true genuine way, thinks she should compete if she wants to. Rather than Ethel being judged ineligible by reason a biography marred by violence and her body type by her mother, Betty genuinely thought Ethel didn’t want to be in the beauty pageant (because she herself didn’t) and genuinely also thought Ethel didn’t mind playing scullery maid to Alice Cooper and her own classroom peers. There’s clueless and then there’s criminal levels of clueless. Betty is fast approaching the latter.

Ethel in any case does not need to be asked more than once. She is so very conscientious though. She is immediately worried that Alice will be left high and dry without an assistant. Betty says she has a plan for that.

Meanwhile, Fangs has been told. He is hollering about how he’s going to “go out there to that convent.” Toni stops him from developing this scheme any further. Cheryl also chimes in, saying two kidnappings does not a solution make. Both these girls are betting that Midge’s parents don’t know that Fangs is the father. Cheryl says something weird - “We need to keep it that way so that you’re not arrested.” Why would Fangs get arrested? Are there anti miscegenation laws in Riverdale? Will they accuse him of raping Midge? What?

I also wonder about Toni playing the Friar Lawrence role to this pair. Her advice has thus far been singularly bad, hasn’t it? She knows how to rig up a home pregnancy test using frogs but doesn’t know any abortionists or even advise Midge on trying to find one. She ASSUMES that Midge’s parents will simply not accept the whole truth, and so steers Fangs and Midge into trying to get their ‘romance’ accepted first before dropping the pregnancy bomb, but that just isn’t how conservative families work. If Fangs and Midge had gone to the parents to say, do you want Midge to have a bastard child or do you want the baby born in matrimony, Midge’s mother wouldv’e gotten her an abortion whether Midge wanted one or not OR allowed them to marry. Here again, if Fangs let’s say showed up in all his biker glory and just burst into the Sisters of Quiet Mercy, wouldn’t that have been materially better for them both? Toni has done no research about this. She hasn’t asked Ethel anything. Ethel got out - why not ask HOW she made that decision stick?

I think Toni has a lot of unexamined hidden motives here -she simply does not want Fangs to have a happy romance with Midge in any direction. She’s very pleased, actually that Midge has been sent away.

When Fangs wants to know what he should do, Toni smirks and giggles as she tells him to write a hit song that becomes a gold record so that he becomes “undeniable to Midge’s parents.”

Yeah so what conservative racist parents (as per Toni’s assumptions about them) would want their child impregnated out of wedlock by not just a guy who is of color but a rock’n’roller of color?

This is insidiously evil of Toni.

Cheryl, of course, never liked Midge being with Fangs to begin with. But she’s moved by his plight, so she actually comes up with useful solutions. She’ll arrange a phone call between Midge and Fangs, and she wants Fangs to remain calm.

Meanwhile, I assume Betty and Ethel have made good use of the insider information that Ethel has access to from her days of slave labor as Alice’s assistant and have gotten Ethel a really gorgeous pageant dress. Ethel really does have “perfect poise” as Betty says. She can do spins in a ball gown with a book balanced on her head. That’s a neat trick.

Alice is very startled to hear that Ethel will be replacing Midge but lies in a white way (“That’s WONDERFUL” she screams) before insisting that she must have an assistant.

Turns out Betty has roped Long Duk Dong - no sorry, Dilton Doiley, into the role of the assistant. I hope she gave his extra huge Asian cock a blowjob.

Sorry. Sorry. I hate S7 Dilton and I hate this actor and I hate what they’re making him do.

Alice asks to speak to Betty in the hallway. She is enraged. Alice yells at Betty about trying to undermine her. Betty says she doesn’t understand what the problem is. I think she genuinely is stupid enough this season for this to be actually true. Alice tries to explain: “Ethel does not represent the ideals of Miss Riverdale Teen Queen.” Betty snaps back, “Why? She’s not pregnant!”

Alice says that Ethel has “an unsavory history.” Betty is again struggling to catch up, asking if this is about Ethel’s parents being murdered or if there’s “something else.” It occurs to me that maybe only a handful of adults other than Jughead and his editor, that is, Sheriff Keller, the principal, his husband, the head nun at the Sisters, Alice and maybe also Mary know that Ethel managed to avenge her parents and kill a man in self defense.

Alice doesn’t actually say if it’s the parents being killed or something else, to which Betty comes to some sort of conclusion that makes her put on a a horrified face to say “Woah, you are awful.”

Uh. What is this, by the way? It’s entirely not clear. Does Alice in fact blame Ethel for her parents being killed? Like, are we doing an Oscar Wilde thing here? ( “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”??) I’m still inclined to think that this is about Ethel being fat, but Alice and Betty both think fatness is unspeakable on the level of leprosy so they can’t even say it to each other. I say this because Alice says, “I am not gonna let you turn this competition into one of your crusades!”

Crusades for what? Advocacy of murder attempt survivors? Surely not.

Alice is very clear about her priorities. She wants “to protect the office of Miss Riverdale Teen Queen” first and foremost, because it seems to have been the only competition and externally validating thing she ever went out for and won. Ethel’s well being is a secondary priority, and again the wording is so weird. She wants to protect Ethel from “the scrutiny that Miss Teen Queen demands.”

Scrutiny like somehow a tabloid somewhere is going to take an avid interest in a small town electing a teen beauty queen to say OMG TWO PEOPLE WERE MURDERED THIS ONE TIME IN THIS TOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE? Or scrutiny like, if you include a fat girl in a beauty contest everyone will mock her and the contest because that’s how fatphobia works?

Betty, who has been steadfast in calling Ethel beautiful, makes me lose faith in her. She says it plainly to Alice. For Betty, participation in this entire competition is purely pecuniary. To her it’s quite simple - Ethel is an orphan and she needs the money. But this carries no weight to Alice, because she can’t stand the only competition she’s ever won to be reduced to a mere charity. Alice screams at her that she must be the one to get Ethel to withdraw from the pageant. Betty stamps her foot in frustration.

Then she goes exactly to the Dyke Triumvirate for advice, down in the Dark Room. Veronica, for whom this is really just a lark to assuage her everlasting boredom and loneliness in Riverdale, Alice’s decision to not allow Ethel into the competition doesn’t make sense.

Betty finally fully (well as much as Betty can be fully honest about anything which isn’t much) admits that she knows the issue is Ethel’s non-ideal body type (“Ethel doesn’t represent the ideal blah-blah-blah”). After saying a bunch of things she may or may not have meant about Ethel’s looks, Betty really doesn’t want to be the one to admit to (a) cooking up this whole plan to sabotage her mother (because it’s plain now that this was the intention) and (b) telling Ethel she can’t participate. She tries to get the other three on board by talking about Ethel as a charity case. - “Imagine what winning would do for her.” She’s saying this to one girl with hereditary wealth, a daughter of major Hollywood players who owns her own apartment and her own movie theater (somehow, without also having access to a bank account) and Toni, about whom nothing is known but who doesn’t at all seem lacking for resources.

I don’t know how Ethel would feel if she knew this conversation happened other than humiliated. These four skinny girls held a round table ABOUT her without her, silently agreed among themselves that she doesn’t represent the ideal, but decided that she deserved their charity and graceful self abnegation for the scholarship money (which assumes that she’d choose the competition money and not the Hollywood screen test or the car by the way, which nobody has asked Ethel about).

Cheryl because she has the most leadership chops comes up with the best solution - all the thin, telegenic participants will withdraw if Ethel doesn’t get to participate. Without competitors, there can be no competition. Furthermore, all four of them seem unduly certain that Ethel doesn’t actually represent any sort of threat to their own bid for the title.

When Betty says she will confront Alice about all this again, Veronica stops her. Veronica knows Betty is not just kind of dumb, and that Alice Cooper might not be. She assumes that Hal Cooper is just as stupid as Betty, for one, and for another, Veronica Lodge is an expert at patricide (actual and metaphorical across all universes). She suggests threatening Hal Cooper, and volunteers herself as “a more seasoned negotiator.”

Right away, the girls go to “bend” Hal’s ear. Veronica immediately says that Ethel must be allowed to participate in the pageant. Hal says he’s already been yelled at by Alice about the Ethel issue, so that’s all already decided. Veronica knows a lot about TV so she starts dropping references that make Hal Cooper very vulnerable - “ad spending” “money brought in by live television” “sold all your commercial spots” and “cash those checks.” Having softened him up, they threaten to have all the participants pull out. They also want the swimsuit promenade cut. Hal says, grossly, that the swimsuit segment is a judge favorite event. Veronica incongruously points out that it’s the swimsuit competition that is “Plainly sexist.” My dear pretty little hypocrite - THE ENTIRE THING is sexist. WHY even bring up sexism? Do any male competitions exists that look anything like this pretending to be scholarship competitions? NO THEY DON’T.

Veronica, I love you, but fucking stuff it. Don’t bring up critiques about sexism if you’re going to participate at all. You’re disqualified from feminist discourse.

Hal and Alice have a big blow out fight right before the competition about Ethel. Hal says that since the judges like thin girls (he doesn’t say this but this is what he means) there is no way that Ethel will win the contest (because she is fat) because all it comes down to in the end is does the girl conform to the conventional standards of beauty, which in living memory has NEVER been not skinny and Ethel is fat (he doesn’t say this either but this is what he means). Alice is simply freaking out.

They are screaming the name ETHEL but Ethel pretends not to hear, and asks Betty if they are fighting about her (because they are screaming ETHEL MUGGS at each other). Betty does what Betty does and lies.

With 13 minutes of this episode to go, we are finally at the Miss Riverdale Teen Queen Pageant. The audience that we see for this is 100% all the boys who have ever had a speaking part this season. Not a single girl who is not in the pageant is shown watching this. They just weren’t selected so they disappear from existence. This pageant is entirely for male eyes only. Any talk about these sort of events being anything other than pornographic entertainment for the era when actual pornography was not readily available for private viewing is completely disagreed with by Riverdale the show.

Julian says he is mad they cut the swimsuit bit. Jughead makes fun of him, asking why he wants to “see your sister prancing around like a bathing beauty.” Archie totally looks like he has taken something, he looks so manic, and when Jughead calls Julian pervy about the desire for the swimsuit competition, guffaws. Jughead also laughs a lot as his own joke. Julian is annoyed, telling Jughead to drop dead. Is this - is this the first time they’ve actually said anything to each other? I can’t recall.

The judges for this event are Cheryl’s father, the high school principal and the high school child psychologist. This is very gross. The thing is being emceed by Betty’s father. Kevin is singing in the most oleaginous way over the girls silently parading around modeling their gowns. Jughead whistles at Veronica’s turn on the catwalk. Fangs wants Toni to win (why?).

Alice is in some sort of culty fugue as this event goes on. There’s an in studio audience cheering.

Veronica’s trick was tightrope walking. WHAT? WHY COULDNT’ WE SEE THIS? Reggie thinks this was awesome (“Who knew she was an acrobat!”).

Ethel closes the evening with a big song. I found it immensely cheesy though wow, Ethel is graceful and can sing really well, who knew?

Oh and Betty delivered the Gettysburg Address, apparently, which Jughead found “stirring.” Uh OK. Now THAT is really pervy.

Julian wants it just to not be Cheryl (we aren’t told what her talent was) that wins

Clay says they should’ve made the musical about Ethel instead of Archie.

Then they announce the winner. I realized at this point that I misunderstood what the prize was - you get ALL of the above. A car AND a screentest AND a scholarship. It wasn’t Or. It’s AND. For all her money having ways, neither of Cheryl nor Veronica have a car of their own so I see now why they want to be in this competition still. Everything else I said still stands though!

There’s a drum roll. Julian is intensely begging it to not be Cheryl (Why doesn’t Julian want Cheryl to have a car? Selfish dipshit.). Fangs is not thinking about the locked up knocked up Midge at all, focusing all his nervous attention on Toni, just like she wanted. Clay, despite thinking Ethel should win, does not expect her to, so he braces for impact with a wince.

The Coopers open the envelope with the winner’s name in it. Alice takes it from Hal, who look happy, and announces that it’s Ethel Muggs. Hal looks unhappy. The judges glare at each other. The boys in the diner lose their shits, screaming and hollering. Ethel is overjoyed. Betty looks overjoyed. The only one with a very honest, human reaction is Evelyn Evernever once again - she is upset and finds this whole thing incomprehensible. She also refused to do that deeply insulting thing of making the girls who are standing in a row begging with their tits for scholarship money hold hands with each other as the one winner among them is announced. I stan Evelyn Evernever for this. When she competes against other women she competes wholesale. I find this much more honorable. Why the fuck do the girls have to hold hands?

The next morning, Fangs runs into the diner to get a call from Midge. These two not very bright people being guided by Toni Topaz with ulterior (possibly unexamined) motives are very miserable. Midge’s despair at the end of the call is entirely Toni’s fault. Because all she has is this one phone call, Midge has to pretend she’s fine. Fangs should’ve driven into the convent on his bike.

That same morning, Betty walks into her mother’s kitchen. They have the scariest conversation I’ve ever seen between mother and a daughter on television. I’m not sure that this moment of complicated terror borne out of two women who represent the absolute most insane sides of white culture (I’m not white by the way, just in case that wasn’t clear) is worth the cost of having to sit through this horrible episode (because it truly was horrible) but this is what happens.

Betty launches the first attack. Is Alice exhibiting ‘sour grapes’ because Betty lost and Ethel won? Alice counters by showing Betty that she was in fact the winner. Betty has a hard time (Because as I’ve said for the umpteenth time, she is really stupid for this episode) wrapping her mind around what she’s lost. Alice says that all the men were deeply unhappy but live television’s demand that they put on a ‘flawless’ show forbade any of them from contradicting her.

As I’ve said, winning this contest multiple times is the only accomplishment Alice Cooper has had in her life, and Betty, by pushing a fat orphan to compete in a beauty contest, tries to besmirch exactly the things Alice values about her winnings by turning into a charity. It stamped her as beautiful and rewarded her apparently painful conformity with standard hetero culture. So in turn, Alice took Betty’s win away from her and gave it to Ethel.

If the winner had been any of the other girls, it’s strongly implied, she wouldn’t have done it. She even says it herself - “Maybe I just didn’t want you to win.” Alice tries to have a total victory - for all of Betty’s “grandstanding, Ethel would still have lost,” and moreover, it’s Alice, not Betty, that changed Ethel’s life for the better. And she also got to take something away from Betty that Betty really wanted - a way to go to college, without having to ask Alice for permission. I cut your achilles tendon and popped all your balloons, basically.

Then Betty does the most white woman thing of all time and tells her mother that she will think well of her. She stabs her mother in the face with the words “I love you.” Instead of expressing a natural human feeling - I am angry with you - which white women are not allowed by their culture to feel, Betty says “I know you are a good person” but in the most stony-faced, glassy-eyed way possible.

I think the victory belongs with Betty though. Sure, Alice materially hurt her daughter, and did that thing of cursing her daughter to “live the life I lived." But in retaliation, her daughter announced that she thinks she’s a piece of shit and she hates her, using the Opposites Day language of white womanhood. Moreover, it was Alice’s dream to a) keep Miss Teen Queen a validation of womanly perfection and b) to have some sort of legacy in the world which for her boiled down to being a Miss Teen Queen who raised a second generation of Miss Teen Queen. By hurting Betty, Alice hurt herself, because Alice cares about this competition and Betty does not want to give her mother any sort of legacy.

White anglo culture takes insidious passive aggression to a HIGH ART level and these people scare the shit out of me.

Secure in her victory, Betty goes to write an answer to all her girls who wrote into her newsletter. “There is a hope for a better tomorrow. In fact, we girls are that hope.”

This is completely unearned. Betty just engaged in a final battle of mortal combat of the soul with her mother, and has come out with like severed limbs and severe blood loss, though she won because she took away the one happy achievement her mother ever had in her life. She made Alice kill her own one shining earned-it-myself achievement. This event that Alice told the world on national TV is something more special to her that Christmas itself has been permanently tarnished for her, because in a desperate bid to survive this hate-filled battle with her daughter, Alice stabbed herself in the heart. There is absolutely nothing hopeful here. Betty is lying as per usual.

#be forewarned: i say a lot of very broad out of pocket things in here because it's the only way i could get this written #i disliked this episode so much i almost gave up doing any more write ups #i procrastinated for three weeks and i am not a procrastinator #anti betty cooper #riverdale s7 #riverdale 7.15 #miss teen riverdale #riverdale opinion #riverdale recap

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