Riverdale: Chapter Twenty-Five: The Wicked and the Divine
February 1, 2018 6:32 AM - Season 2, Episode 12 - Subscribe

FORGIVE ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED – As preparations for her confirmation ceremony get underway, Veronica becomes concerned that Archie, who's agreed to be Hiram's “intern,” may be learning too much about her family's secret business dealings. Jughead and FP lead the charge after an incident at Pickens Park leads to increased tensions among the Serpents. Meanwhile, Chic helps Betty deal with her inner darkness, while Archie finds himself in over his head after a high-stakes poker game with Hiram’s shady inner-circle goes awry

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posted by Bulgaroktonos (11 comments total)
 
UHHHHHHH WHAT? So Chic...killed someone? A client, associate, or boss? As always, overflowing with thoughts on this episode.

-So Chic...killed someone? Huh.

-Man what a dick Hal is. Betty's mom's far from perfect but she's an angel of reasonableness and mercy compared to him.

-Chic has a...job interview? In his bedroom? In his bathrobe? With a kid who looked like fourteen years old? Also he came downstairs drinking a bottle of milk. Does he just keep milk in his room to drink during job interviews? Nice touch: it was a glass bottle like you'd get delivered from a milkman because this is Riverdale.

-I noticed Betty was wearing the Dark Betty wig in the cam scene. The guy with whom she was talking is Chekov's internet friend, right? That's definitely going to come up again, it has to.

-When the principal fires Betty and Jughead from the paper he gives them one day to clean out their personal effects like this is a legit fucking adult newsroom and not two teenagers doing an extracurricular.

-Obviously I loved Jughead talking about hooking up with Toni: "She gave me a ... ... tattoo and we did some stuff", LOL good work Jughead, way to throw multiple ellipses into your description of a hookup.

-Betty lied to Jughead about making out with Archie which is one of those totally plausible dumb teenage things where if she'd just said it at the time it wouldn't have been a big deal but now it is because she lied, teenagers are the worst.

-I liked the parallelism between the stuff with Tallboy/FP and the Poutine guy/Hiram Lodge, with both of them claiming the head of their organization had gone soft and plotting against them.

-I liked the bit with the women in Veronica's family talking kind of blithely about how they cope with some really dark shit and knowing about the suffering that comes with their prosperity.

-The way the FBI guy said "OBVIOUSLY a gangland slaying" LOL okay dude, so easy to take you seriously. What are we supposed to make of Archie lying to him? He's getting in too deep, obviously, but what else? Trying to protect Veronica? Sympathy for Hiram because it was self defense?

-Did it seem like the monsignor who heard Veronica's confession knew PLENTY about the Lodge family?

-Poor Josie; at least Veronica signed up for this and it's hard to see them both so miserable while their mothers talk in a way that is overtly conciliatory and implicitly hostile.

-"Do you know Bittersweet Symphony from the Cruel Intentions soundtrack?" Ohhhhhhhhhhh Riverdale

POLL: Which is a worse name, "Papa Poutine" or "Jingle Jangle"? Please defend your choice.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:18 AM on February 1, 2018 [6 favorites]


-"Do you know Bittersweet Symphony from the Cruel Intentions soundtrack?" Ohhhhhhhhhhh Riverdale

As someone who once watched Cruel Intentions and then immediately hit up Napster to download that song, this episode spoke deeply to me. The same night we watched Disturbing Behavior and downloaded "Flagpole Sitta."

My money is actually on Mrs. Cooper being the one who did it, but I imagine we'll find out soon. I think she's a killer. I also thought it was pretty clear that Chic just had sex with that dude to get a minimum wage job. Then he hung out in a bathrobe and drank milk because THIS SHOW.

I did like the scene with the mob wives (I feel like last week Hiriam was a shady possible illegal businessman and now he's an underworld figure, but whatever), and I assume Veronica's confessor was used to just granting absolution without much thought to Lodges and company for doing shady stuff. I assume he's a known figure in their world.

There has to be more coming with the cam thing, obviously, yeah.

I thought the resolution of the statue/Serpent plot was decently well done. Do we think we've seen the last of Tall Boy: the adult they called a boy who managed not to be in charge of the Serpents despite being the only non-high schooler in the room half the time?

Jingle Jangle is a worse name in the sense that it is better. It has a nicer cadence and sounds more absurd. Both names are excellent though.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:35 AM on February 1, 2018


Oh, yeah, that's a really good point about Mrs. Cooper, I bet she did do it to protect the boy she never protected as a child. Stone cold Mrs. Cooper move.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:40 AM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Oh, was it weird that Jughead's punishment for literally cutting someone's tattoo off their arm in violation of Serpent law is just, like, Serpent probation? It was weird to bring that woman back for two minutes and I hope that reaches beyond this episode.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:41 AM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


One thing that I'm not sure about with this show, is that it'll occasionally have a character do something just AWFUL and then it retreats in the background "darkness" that narrator Jughead is always going on about, but it's not clear that anyone in the world of the show really grasps what happened.

We get that Betty has an inner darkness or whatever, but Dark Betty nearly killed Chuck. He was and is an awful person, but the consequences for it were all kind of divorced from what happened. I put the tattoo thing in the same boat. It's treated like Jughead maybe crossed a line instead of mutilating someone and leaving them in a ditch.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 8:02 AM on February 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


And the thing is, his dad actually said to him (recreating from memory so not accurate but close I think) "That's some dark stuff, Jughead, it's hard to come back from that", so it was called out as being a really horrible thing and then...poof! It turns out Tallboy's bad and everything is okay but no, Jughead still did a fucked up thing.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:06 AM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


How OLD are the kids in Riverdale? They don't seem nearly old enough for gambling. alcohol, or sex work.
posted by divabat at 5:15 PM on February 1, 2018


Jughead has his 16th birthday at some point, so sophomore year?
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:04 PM on February 1, 2018


Yeah I think they established they're sophomores when Archie tried out for the football team? And maybe early on when he was spending the summer working construction.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 4:34 AM on February 2, 2018


I wondered if the guy that ended up dead in the Coopers' wasn't Chic's pimp or something to that regard.

From the way the "last time on Riverdale" montage went, I think it could easily be re-edited to make it look like Hiram Lodge has become sexually attracted to Archie. (I don't think this is the case - but it's a slippery slope when you have an older man watching a teen in a unitard grappling with another teen and suddenly offering him a job to be around him ALL THE TIME.)

Ahem.

I'd be shocked if the Snake Charmer was it. With Tall Boy being exiled, I wonder if they aren't going for a Serpent Civil War at some point.
posted by Atreides at 12:41 PM on February 4, 2018


was it weird that Jughead's punishment for literally cutting someone's tattoo off their arm in violation of Serpent law is just, like, Serpent probation?

The weirder part for me is that Jughead seriously thought that cutting the tattoo off a woman’s arm would be enough to make her go away forever. I thought there was more to that, like he was giving her to the Cthulhu receivers or something.
posted by corb at 2:49 PM on December 11, 2018


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