Riverdale’s ending explains everything you need to know about the series

What is the purpose of the RiverdaleReturn to the 1950s For the same reasons Riverdale does anything: because it can, and because it’s the only show audacious enough to do it. In interviews, the cast has credited this choice to showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s desire to end things in the most “wholesome, Archie Comics way possible.” But the truth — and how it got to its big, twisty, and complicated ending — is much more complex, and much more interesting. After all, this is Archie Comics. RiverdaleThere is nothing as straight forward as you might think.

[Ed. note: This post discusses the plot of Riverdale in full, meaning it spoils a lot along the way, including the end of the show.]

It’s hard to give a rundown of every single thing that happened on Riverdale. It began as Twin Peaks lite, with the gang trying to solve the murder of Jason Blossom and uncovering the seedy underbelly of the “Town with Pep!” By season 2, Jughead and Betty were hunting serial killers while Archie and Veronica were dabbling in her father’s mob business. The Satanic Panic was Season 3. In season 4, the kids celebrated senior year with Betty finding out she had the “serial killer gene” and a secret brother, Veronica waging war against her father (through her various business interests), Jughead getting pretend-murdered to reveal some other killers in a Secret HistoryArchie escaping from prison. The COVID-19 Pandemic interrupted season 5, which began with Archie and Betty’s kissing. It was the end of the core four as they went their separate ways to college. They return to Riverdale and find Hiram lodge has turned it into a for-profit jail. So, each cast member steps in to help teach. By season 6 there’s an alternate universe of “Rivervale,” and everyone has superpowers and is fighting a sorcerer who made a deal with the devil, which is how they ended up in the 1950s AU (as fallout from them pooling their powers and stopping a comet from hitting the Earth).

Shane Harvey/The CW

Kailey Schwerman/The CW

Colin Bentley/The CW

Kailey Schwerman/The CW

Clockwise from the top left, we have: Veronica performing one of the show’s many musical numbers, Betty right before they did a MidsommarAU in which they sacrificed Archie. Cheryl plays her ancestor, Toni becomes La Llorona, Cheryl is a gay love story vignette.

Somewhere in all of that is everything you’ve ever heard about RiverdaleArchie explains the highs, lows, and epic journey of high-school football. He also fights bears twice. Betty springs multiple people from an organ-harvesting cult led by Chad Michael Murray — who wears an Evel Knievel costume while he tries to escape on his rocket. During the show, Cheryl swaps bodies with an evil spirit and her grandmother. Sabrina crossover. Veronica refers to herself as the “She Wolf of Wall Street” 800 times. Jughead is “weird,” he’s “a weirdo.”

You can also read about it here RiverdaleThere is always something more to life than the bizarre and bombastic moments on Twitter. While people on Twitter may occasionally spread rumors about what they are doing, there is always more to the story. RiverdaleThe show was not bothered at all by the reputation it had. In the true spirit of Archie Comics it just went about being what it wanted to be at that moment.

Throughout the show, you could feel the little course-corrects each season as it went along — the return of the Masked Hood when it seemed like the midseason reveal maybe didn’t pass muster, characters becoming more prominent or breaking up because the real-life actors behind them did. As the series progressed, you could always see little threads that were left over from previous seasons. RiverdaleThe story did not need to follow a strict logic to make sense. As with most soaps Riverdale could do what it wanted, and fans would follow it anywhere, so long as it wasn’t boring. To be fair, by the later years there were absolutely boring moments — but, then, the show would find a new curveball to revitalize the town’s pep.

The CW

The CW

The CW

The willingness to disrupt the status quo is evident in this. Riverdale’s last season ended up back in the 1950s: It’s a ballsy swing, a return to the “basic” Archie Comics that people were familiar with and that the show, like the comic before it, bucked at almost every turn. It also let it do something that became its hobby, which was to become a little bit of a slapstick comedy. Afterschool SpecialThe act of expressing a particular message. In season 7, it was kids who threw off puritanical racism and sexism of the 1950s. You can track some of it back to Black actors calling out the show in 2020 because they were being used in a one-dimensional way. And even further to the episode in which Cheryl went to see Love, Simon — cross-promotion for executive producer Greg Berlanti — and comes out.)

It was the final season that best displayed the tonal dancing the show had always done. It served as a good reminder of the importance of tone. Riverdale‘The X-Files’ was able to make any references or baroque words work. As Aguirre-Sacasa put it himself around the premiere of the show: “I don’t mind mixing tones, and I don’t mind mixing drama with comedy, and I don’t mind mixing earnestness with sarcasm or undercutting, sardonic humor,” adding, “I love all the things [Riverdale] is. It’s like the kitchen sink.”

And so, in season 7, Archie is walking around town calling things “the ginchiest” in the same episode where Toni Topaz says (with a totally straight face): “Wowza! You completely captured the longing of being in a queer, interracial relationship in the 1950s.” That line might seem ridiculous on its face, but then you remember that they got magicked back(?) into this timeline, and maybe some version of them knows they’re really from a different time. Maybe, as with the numerous film and pop-culture references that are made without thinking, RiverdaleJust wanted to let us know that it was aware, did you know?

Ultimately, the show’s ending points to a sort of awareness about what it could be for people, if they’d give it a chance. Jughead gets reawakened to the truth of their ’50s existence because his girlfriend Tabitha (who found out she was the town’s guardian angel and chronokinetic in season 6) shows up in the penultimate episode and plays him what we know to be the RiverdaleTo jog the memories of a pilot. Tabitha says she’s righted the multiverse mess that got them all here, but unfortunately that means no one can jump ahead in time, leaving everybody stranded in this 1950s reality. Jughead shows the rest of the gang the show — on a “color television?!” as he exclaims — and they are all forced to confront the darkness of their path, and the timey-wimey predicament of their present (and future). They are literally woken up by the power of television.

The final episode is when Betty, now 86, gets to discuss the fates of all the characters with Jughead. Both their conversations and the graduation buzz in the air set the scene for typical emotions of a TV ending. Everyone committed to their timeline of the 1950s, and (mostly), got long and happy life in return. A parade of sincere emotion. Even still, Archie reads a poem that recounts everyone’s most bizarre moments, a knowing wink to audiences who have followed them through the strangest of times. It’s a bit more aware than the show typically is, but then again, this is just another way of grounding the characters. This being said, it’s a bit more aware than the show usually is. Riverdale, the finale has one last bomb to drop: Jughead, Veronica, Betty, and Archie were in a “quad” relationship with each other throughout senior year of high school (and we’re told a very emotionally and physically satisfying one at that).

It’s the perfect kiss off for these characters — again, a wild hair turn and bit of fan service all at once. In the end, they didn’t all get together. But Ghost Jughead leaves them in Pop’s diner, where Betty has entered after she’s passed away in the real world. This version is Riverdale, where they’re “forever juniors” and “forever 17,” is the literal heaven in the universe of the show. And it’s the perfect encapsulation for a show so devoted to evoking and emulating pop culture, feeling completely in line with other important finales like it. This town, its problems, its milkshakes — they’re the same as church in LostOr the Just Desserts Prison in Seinfeld. They’re a teen show that ran lengthy, wild seasons and the likes of which we’ll never see again. They’re the kitchen sink, and the sweet hereafter. They’re RiverdaleThrough and through.