Riverdale Season 3 Premiere Plot Summary:
Archie’s (KJ Apa) murder trial draws to a close just as summer ends, and he asks his friends to give him one last normal weekend. Jughead (Cole Sprouse) mounts a rescue of the Serpents mascot. Betty (Lili Reinhart) is increasingly frustrated with her mother and sister’s reliance on the advice of Edgar, the farmer who took Polly in.
Riverdale is a fundamentally ridiculous show. This has been true from the very beginning, when a sexy teen soap opera based on Archie was announced, and it’s only grown more true over time. The delicate balance this requires, which the show has proven surprisingly deft at, is to indulge in as much absurdity and silliness as possible without making it impossible to take the emotions of its characters seriously or miring the show in pointless melodrama. Its managed this balancing act for two full seasons now, and like any good circus act, its season three premiere promises to bring both the absurdities and the emotional stakes to new heights.
After the dramatic accusation and arrest of Archie at the end of last season, we skip ahead to the end of his trial. Naturally, this has been hanging over all of his friends’ and family’s heads all summer, so he wants to have a normal weekend and get everyone’s minds off the deliberating jury. But in typical Archie fashion, he’s unable to stop obsessing over his guilt for getting himself into this situation and all the questionable decisions he made over the past year. When the jury comes back split 50-50 and the prosecution offers a new plea deal, Archie decides to take it to spare everyone a new trial and absolve himself of his guilt.
It’s a little hard to decide how to feel about this turn of the plot. On the one hand, it requires Archie to act in a colossally stupid manner, confessing to a serious crime he didn’t commit and going to juvenile detention for two years. It’s also a selfish and short-sighted decision, one he justifies by saying he doesn’t want to put everyone through another trial despite the devastation of his imprisonment being much worse.
All that, plus the fact that it comes across as contrivance for maximum drama, makes it fairly difficult to get invested. Yet the whole thing is perfectly in keeping with the tone the show has set over two seasons, and Archie is nothing if not a self-absorbed (if good-hearted) moron. So it’s not a bad move, per se; it just doesn’t quite work the way it should.
The same problem hampers Veronica’s (Camila Mendes) story, though for different reasons. Worried about Archie, she pleads with her father to stop framing him and tries to convince the jury. The final scene between her and Hiram (Mark Consuelos), when he reveals this was to punish her rather than Archie and she declares he has no daughter, is great in theory.
But they’ve simply dragged out this conflict between the two for far too long. This same “Veronica disapproves of her father’s shady practices and tries to balance her desire to be good with her familial obligations” dance has been in play since the end of Season 1. This does represent a new level of that conflict, but even then it doesn’t feel like the fundamental dynamic has changed. Things between Veronica and Hiram have been in stasis for so long that a more dramatic shakeup is needed to really pack the punch they were going for here.
Thankfully, we have Betty and Jughead to pick up the slack that Archie and Veronica leave for this episode. Betty’s story is fairly short, just a couple conversations with her mom Alice (Madchen Amick) and sister Polly (Tiera Skovbye), but it effectively sets up her mounting frustration with them as well as her own poor handling of all her life’s stress. Meanwhile Jughead gets to handle most of the utterly ridiculous things that make Riverdale so fun. A rescue mission for a dog that precipitates a gang war, Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch) getting to shoot more people with arrows, and Betty very seriously calling herself the “Serpent Queen” is the kind of silliness any episode of this show needs.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Riverdale without a truly buck wild final twist, and boy does this episode deliver. Dilton Doiley (Major Curda) shows up towards the end to rant at Jughead about someone called “The Gargoyle King.” This leads to an off-the-wall conclusion where Jughead finds cultists convulsing in front of some kind of occult altar, and Betty sees her family engaging in some kind of ritual involving babies floating over fire.
Given Betty’s subsequent seizure, maybe this was all a hallucination and we’re in for Scooby Doo level hijinks. Then again,with a new Sabrina show on the way from Riverdale‘s producers, and given Sabrina’s origins in the pages of Archie comics, maybe they genuinely intend to introduce magic this season. Either way, this last minute promise of greater absurdities builds excitement for the season despite the premiere’s missteps.
It’s often hard to hold Riverdale‘s flaws against it. The show is so much fun, with its bombastic dialogue and self-serious treatment of extremely silly situations, that you can almost always get some enjoyment out of it. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be held to a higher standard, of course. The show has proven capable of surprising narrative cohesion and it always works best when that happen. But even an episode with a fair few missteps like this one ends up being highly entertaining. It’s just impossible not to look forward to more Riverdale.
Rating: 7 out of 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vja5urRtjQg
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