‘The Body Double’ Plot Summary:
Betty (Lili Reinhart) and Veronica (Camila Mendes) work together to get revenge on a guy spreading rumors about Veronica. Archie (KJ Apa) gets to work with Josie (Ashleigh Murray) and the Pussycats on some songs, but faces some resistance from his dad. Jughead (Cole Sprouse) investigates Jason’s murder.
As a melodramatic teen soap opera, Riverdale is trying to walk a pretty tricky tonal tightrope. On the one hand, you want to make sure that you don’t indulge in the melodrama so much that it loses its campiness and becomes too self-serious. On the other hand, you need to take your characters’ feelings and desires seriously or else your audience won’t have any reason to care about them. It’s easy, even understandable, to err on one side or the other, but it can really hurt an episode when it happens. Riverdale was pretty good about avoiding this problem in its first two episodes, but it unfortunately stumbles a bit now that it’s on its third.
Specifically, Archie’s story in this episode loses some of the winking self-awareness the show has exhibited before. Archie’s desire to become a musician instead of focusing on football has always been fairly cliché, but previously the show found success by embracing and embodying cliché.
Unfortunately, Archie is isolated from the rest of the main cast, and without anyone else to play off of the show struggles to alleviate the melodrama of his conflict. After all, the whole thing essentially comes down to Archie being angry at his dad for not understanding what music means to him, and that’s pretty much the most basic teen soap conflict imaginable. We’re not yet in any danger of Archie becoming the kind of obliviously self-involved hero that plagues this type of show, but it was still a pretty weak link in the episode.
Jughead, and by extension, the investigation into Jason’s murder, also got a bit of short shrift this week. After being the main focus of the story up until now, the murder drifts into the background this episode, with only Jughead still focusing his attention on it. The resulting scenes are pretty entertaining: Jughead continues his Brick-esque high school neo-noir schtick, shaking down witnesses and spitting out one-liners at every opportunity. But they’re also pretty few and far between, and like Archie, it feels very isolated from the rest of the cast. Jughead has had little development of any of his relationships with the other characters so far, aside from Archie, so this relegation to his own C story is a little disappointing.
But if there are missteps and disappointments in those parts of the episode, it must be said that Betty and Veronica’s plot is fantastic. In your typical “ripped from the headlines” kind of story, Veronica recruits Betty to get revenge on the head of the football team for spreading rumors after they went on one date. It’s not particularly subtle (they even namedrop a few other infamous school sports teams), but it really doesn’t need to be. It’s mostly just a good excuse for Veronica to whip up some righteous indignation and for Betty to do a little well-deserved grandstanding about misogyny.
It’s not just fluff though, as the discovery that her sister Polly was subject to the same kind of abuse by Jason pushes Betty to go a little too far with their plan, to the point that it worries Veronica. The show has been hinting that there’s some long repressed rage behind Betty’s meek exterior, and this is the first time that we really get to see it. Between that and the start of Cheryl’s (Madelaine Petsch) inevitable redemption arc when she discovers her brother Jason’s complicity in the football team’s abuse, there’s plenty of great stuff here for the show to explore moving forward.
Ultimately, the episode’s problems seem to stem from how it divides up the main gang. With all of them going off in their own direction and none of their plots having much to do with any of the others, the episode starts to feel overstuffed and there’s not quite enough time to give them all the space they need. Betty and Veronica, who are quickly emerging as the heart and soul of the show, are more than capable of holding up a storyline themselves, but Archie seems to struggle with it.
Still, the requisite episode-ending cliffhanger, testimony tying Miss Grundy (Sarah Habel) to the scene of Jason’s disappearance, promises to bring everyone back together as the investigation now threatens to reveal her and Archie’s relationship. And despite the mistakes, this was still a really solid hour of television. All signs point to this being a small bump on the road for a fun, intriguing show.
RATING: 7 OUT OF 10
P.S. Hi, everybody! I’ll be your new weekly Riverdale reviewer now that Marisa has been sent back to the Arrow mines. Despite my criticisms here, I’ve really been enjoying the show and I look forward to seeing where it all goes with you. Feel free to tweet, email, or comment if you want to talk about what a perfect, ridiculous villain Betty’s mom is shaping up to be (or anything else about the show).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OVmdSprT6c
