Dispatches from the Riverdale Register: "The Crucible"
I have given you my soul; leave me my love for Riverdale
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to make this personal. One simply does not start a weekly column about the last season of a 1-hour drama on The CW if it’s not a little personal.
I started watching Riverdale, like most people, on Netflix in 2017. It was summer in Berkeley, California, where the weather outside is mostly tolerable - the low 70s - but the old Berkeley apartments, sans air conditioning, trap the heat inside and escalate the internal temperature closer to the low 80s. My new roommate’s cat had broken the window screen in my room so many times that now there was no screen. I didn’t fancy a bunch of bugs flying around my room, so I would sit with my fan full blast on my face, contemplating what to watch on Netflix.
I was 25, and had just gone through many mid-twenties crises. My boyfriend had dumped me, which meant I very quickly needed to move out of our tiny studio apartment. I had gone through a grueling interview process for what seemed like a dream job, only to be ghosted. My greatest recent achievement was managing logistics for my field’s national conference - which I did for free, like a millennial theatre kid cliche, for the clout/experience.
As I laid in my new bed, in between bouts of crying, I would lose myself in Riverdale. It was exciting, and addicting, and somewhere between junk food and a good steak. I couldn’t wait to see where the show would take me next.
It is 2023, and I am now 31. For most people, investment in Riverdale died off after Season 1. For others, they jumped ship when the original couples broke up and a post-2020 time skip ensued. I had hoped and assumed that those sticking around through Season 7 were mostly people like me - true believers. People who consider Riverdale to be the most entertaining television show on the planet, and also find its exploration of the American Dream, a post-modern, metatextual media landscape, and the cyclical nature of narratives, ripe for discussion.
Alas, there is a loud contingent of the fanbase who have understandably stuck with the show due to the sunk cost fallacy despite their clear and vocal animosity towards the show’s writers, producers and creatives. I had the misfortune of getting into a wee fight on the Riverdale subreddit this week, where I was exposed to some truly unhinged takes. Instead though, I want to focus on the civil comments I received in rebuttal to my analysis of the current season:
Commenter #1: That's a lovely analysis, and I mean that genuinely. But I think you're giving the writers far too much credit. Roberto said one of the other writers came to him on the penultimate day of shooting s6 with the 50s idea. There was no planning on forethought here.
Commenter #2: 100%, but even you just stating cold facts here has more nuance than anything that's been "explored" on the show this season.
What I find interesting about these rebuttals is this insistence that my personal analysis of what the show is giving me - an examination of why the 1950s is a big origin point for American darkness, skewering post-WWII Americana myths, the lie of the Nuclear Family - is meaningless because Riverdale isn’t subtle1, or isn’t plotted out seasons in advance.2 These fans aren’t wrong for not liking Riverdale because of its writing style, but I’m also not wrong for deriving meaning from Riverdale because of its writing style.
Anyway, that’s why I made this Tumblr post.
All that preamble for an episode I didn’t even necessarily love. I still liked it, to be clear! But there are some…choices, to discuss. One last thing about un-subtle Riverdale before I move on from the haters: I’ve said before that, unplanned or not, Season 7’s focus on moral panics is vital at a time when we are living through contemporary moral panics. This episode takes its time to—yes, un-subtley—show why witch hunts are bad and book burning is bad. Forgive me if I don’t think that’s a bad thing, as morally bankrupt federal, state and local governments try to legislate away Critical Race Theory and the existence of trans people.
The Red Menace (aka, communism) has come to Riverdale. Ironically, the red-headed Blossoms are here to sniff it out. I shouldn’t have praised Ms. Thornton and her new bond with Archie so much last episode, because just like Mr. Raybury was taken away from Jughead, so too is Ms. Thornton. Although not by the Milkman, so maybe we’ll see her again. Ms. Thornton is fired from Riverdale High because she is suspected of being a communist. She never fully denies this, so I like to think she’s a cool socialist. She moves to Greendale, but not before giving Archie a copy of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible.3
You know who else has come to Riverdale? Television’s own Hiram Lodge! He claims he just wants to hang out with Veronica and her school chums. Conveniently, Ms. Thornton was in the middle of teaching dramatic monologues from plays, so Hiram can slot right in as a guest teacher. This version of Hiram immediately endeared himself to me by utterly ripping apart Julian Blossom’s performance.
There’s a few things going on with Hiram here. First, he’s basically playing Desi Arnaz. In real life, Arnaz was descended from Cuban nobility, and his family fled Cuba during the revolution that brought Fulgencio Batista to power. Once in America, Arnaz became a true believer in the American Dream. He was a Republican and vehemently opposed to Fidel Castro (despite Castro overthrowing Batista). Hiram, on the other hand, seems to have no political loyalties. He is suspected of being a communist because he visited Cuba and was pictured with communist revolutionary Vidal Maestro (which…even I have my limits, Riverdale). But really, he was just there being a philanderer (a trait he shares with Arnaz).
The second interesting thing with the Hiram plot line is that it’s an interesting twist on Hiram and Veronica’s dynamic in the old timeline. Once again, Hiram needs Veronica to stand with him, even if it means lying to the FBI. But this time, it’s for a good reason! Overall, I really liked this version of Hiram. He straddles the line between super charming and a pathetic cad.
Meanwhile, revolution is brewing as censorship threatens Pep Comics and The Blue and Gold. Jughead and Ethel start selling bootleg copies of their comic books from Pop’s when newsstands refuse to carry them. Betty basically starts a zine, The Teenage Mystique, when Principal Featherhead shuts down the school paper. Unfortunately, Jughead and Ethel are caught in a sting operation, but Betty’s P.O. box that she set up for The Teenage Mystique is filled to the brim with mail from readers.
Elsewhere, the Blossoms reveal that they’re after more than just communists - they are also after homosexuals. This is an important reference to the Lavender Scare, which was a subset of the overall Second Red Scare. LGBTQ people who worked in government service were seen as security risks, either because they were susceptible to blackmail, or because their “deviant” sexuality made them sympathetic to “deviant” politics. This led to the mass firing of many gay and lesbian government employees.
The Blossoms want Cheryl to out the other queer students at Riverdale High, while offering to “protect” her from whatever’s going to happen to the other students. She refuses, but wavers when her parents threaten to take her beloved River Vixens away from her. To help Cheryl keep the Vixens, Toni, Kevin and Clay decide that the four of them should beard for each other. However, when it becomes clear that the pressure won’t let up, Cheryl refuses to name names and gives up control of the Vixens, while still maintaining the cover of dating Kevin. I appreciated how this storyline shows that not everyone can afford to march in the streets to oppose a witch hunt - some populations are more vulnerable than others.
Before we get into Stray Observations….ugh, we have to talk about the Ms. Grundy of it all. Here’s what I wrote in my notebook:
NOOO! NOT MS. GRUNDY!
That downplays the all-caps level of upset I felt when I saw this ghost from Season 1, this predator, this most lamentable of all plot lines. Every other villain who has re-appeared in this timeline—bizarro Warden Norton and Francis Dupont, Clifford and Penelope, Bret, Evelyn—has remained fundamentally villainous. Hal and Hiram are the current exceptions, but there’s still time for Hal to suck and Hiram is the one who feels genuinely like he’d be different in a different timeline.
I want Grundy to be treated the same way the other villains are being treated, but it’s possible she just might be “good” this time. At first, I was intrigued by this—similar to the Hiram/Veronica twist, they’re setting up a good reason for Archie and Grundy to have secret lessons this time (to avoid the witch hunt; Ms. Thornton’s lessons with Archie were seen as “indoctrination”)—but the more I thought about it the more it doesn’t sit right with me.
Stray observations
The FBI agent trailing Hiram is none other than Betty’s old FBI beau, Glen.
Hiram’s mistress’ name being Kelly was cute.
Much has been made of the meta-commentary on Oh Mija’s fictional seven seasons (“We’re such big fans of your program.” “Especially the first season. It kind of went downhill after that.”), but I will have you know that I Love Lucy did run for six seasons.
I’m not usually a nitpicker, but I’m stuck on this very weird detail: why weren’t Alice and Hal in this episode? We get these shots showing that Betty had her bedroom phone and typewriter confiscated, but no scene where Betty confronts Alice and Hal about it, which is so unlike her.
Reggie is also absent this episode, which is odd.
KJ Apa is auditioning for the next revival of The Crucible, it seems!
Old time slang words of the week: The return of bird-dogging; dealio; and my personal favorite, dipsy-doodle, which as slang means an unexpected change of course (like a zig zag or a sudden duck), but also references comic book Jughead, who refers to his drawings as “Dipsy Doodles”.
Off-brand product names: Hiram brought Veronica a glamerge egg! And of course, he met Vidal Maestro, maybe the worst off-brand product name this show has ever given me.
Real life product names: What’s so weird is that Joseph McCarthy gets to keep his name. Maybe this is Riverdale’s way of avoiding condemning or condoning the real Castro and the real Cuban revolution, whereas we can all freely take a dump on McCarthy. In addition, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is referenced.
See you all next time, Riverdale friends! And remember, send your Riverdale positivity my way.
Honestly, a lot of the “unsubtle” parts of Season 7 are far more nuanced than Season 1, Episode 3’s PSA about slut shaming. Just saying!
Pantsing, aka, “writing by the seat of your pants”, is in fact a legitimate way to write something. Read more here.
For everyone who thinks I am a Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa simp, I have so many negative opinions about his answer play to The Crucible, Abigail/1702. But I’m saving that story for another day.