Dispatches from the Riverdale Register: "Miss Teen Riverdale"
Has Ethel been the main character all along? When do the writers decide to use the real life vs. off-brand product names? Why can't we do better than this girl-power feminism? And other questions.
Welcome back, my fellow Riverdale-heads. Two weeks is two weeks too many to wait for a new Riverdale episode. Especially when there’s a confused sense of momentum.
This episode seems to set up…something regarding the larger mystery within the 1950s timeline. As for the larger time travel plot…who’s to say?
I hate to admit it, but this was a hard episode for me. Partially because it was so Alice-centric, and partially because its Feminism 101 framing was a let down. I’m all for girls sticking together and passing the Bechdel Test in my Riverdale episodes, but almost everyone was acting strictly as a mouthpiece rather than as a character. I know! It’s Riverdale, it’s done this before. But unlike the immediacy of Season 6’s pro-labor message and this season’s warning against fascist creep in school curricula, this episode is a simplistic recap of The Feminine Mystique, second-wave feminism, and the Miss America pageant. It’s not irrelevant, but it’s a touch myopic.
Speaking of The Feminine Mystique, remember Betty’s zine The Teenage Mystique? The episode opens with the ladies of Riverdale writing letters to “Girl Next Door”, Betty’s anonymous advice-giving moniker. The episode ends with Betty answering their various queries—ranging from a woman’s right to financial security to surviving a racist and homophobic society to navigating teen pregnancy—with a one-size fits all, “The Future is Female” type-answer. Riverdale’s never been this neoliberal before, yuck.
The main action centers on the Miss Riverdale Teen Queen pageant. Alice Cooper, former Miss Riverdale Teen Queen, is presiding over this year’s competition, conscripting Ethel Muggs (who is back living with the Coopers) as her assistant and trying to keep her upstart daughter Betty out of it. Betty objects to the pageant on her proto-Betty Friedan principles (and also probably just to spite Alice) but is talked into participating by Veronica, Cheryl, Toni and Midge. Everyone except Midge regurgitates talking points about pageants like Miss America that are better articulated in Margot Mifflin’s book Looking for Miss America and Lauren Collins’ review of that book in The New Yorker.
Let me focus on the good. I was excited how much of this episode was focusing on Ethel, and on developing a friendship between Betty and Ethel that I’ve been begging for ever since her parents were killed. Ethel gets an adorable dream sequence with a cute kiss from Jughead, and she kills it singing “Who Will Love Me As I Am” from the musical Side Show. I also love that the boys of Riverdale, who are conspicuously absent from the front half of the episode, are utterly jazzed to be watching the pageant and all fall in love with Ethel (Clay says, “I knew we should have made the musical about her.”).
Then there are hints that Ethel’s relationship to the Coopers might be more significant than we originally thought. Alice tells Betty that she doesn’t want Ethel to compete in Miss Riverdale Teen Queen because Ethel doesn’t fit the ideals of the pageant (code word: Ethel’s not thin enough), but privately confesses to Hal that she doesn’t want her competing because doesn’t want people to “look into our past.” My first thought: Ethel is Alice’s teen pregnancy in this universe. But that doesn’t add up, unless they decide to reveal that Ethel was secretly 25 but made to believe she was 16, which would be pretty funny. Is she the product of an affair between Mrs. Muggs and Hal? Do the Coopers know why the Muggs parents were killed? Maybe one of these questions will be answered.
We have to talk about Alice Cooper, perhaps the most frustrating parent in the history of this show. On the one hand, I love that Alice has a complex backstory that fuels her hypocritical bombast. But she is a character who has flip flopped so much in the course of the show that it’s a problem. Compare her to Penelope Blossom. Penelope has a tragic backstory, but the audience is never asked to feel sorry for and forgive the homophobic, abusive, and murderous bitch that she is. Alice hasn’t directly killed anyone, but she’s come close and her relationship with Betty remains abusive. She’ll bluster and scold till she’s blue in the face, and then she’ll cry and say she loves her children, and that’s supposed to make it all okay?
Think about it - this episode has a specific visual reference to Get Out with Alice in the Catherine Keener role, and we’re supposed to still feel for her?
She gets Midge locked up by the Sisters of Quiet Mercy! I do not forgive you, Alice!
The real winner of Miss Riverdale Teen Queen is Betty Cooper, but Alice pulls an intentional Warren Beatty at the Oscars and declares Ethel Muggs the winner. Betty decides that this makes her mom a good person deep down, which Alice denies, emphasizing that she did it to prove that she could help someone and that Betty couldn’t. I’m inclined to agree with Alice.
Stray observations
When everyone realizes Midge was locked up for being pregnant, Veronica wonders if they’ll ever invent a pill to help avoid pregnancy. It’s true that in 1955 birth control pills weren’t FDA approved and on the market, but surely someone as well-read as Veronica would know that the work to develop the pill was well underway.
I feel like Jughead was consistently narrating this season, but he’s completely absent from this one, as well as the musical episode. It was jarring.
I adore Greaser Fangs. Unfortunately, Fangs and Midge are in an episode of Cold Case and I am worried for Midge’s future!
We got our second South Pacific song this season, with Kevin the Crooner singing “Some Enchanted Evening”.
Betty, concerned when Midge is unexpectedly taken out of the pageant: “Did Midge die?”
Old time slang words of the week: Toni says, “Straight from the fridge”, which is a confirmed 50s hipster expression meaning “really cool”. Haha, I get it. Cheryl also called Evelyn a “Goon from Saskatoon”, which is possibly a reference to this Tom and Jerry cartoon.
Off-brand product name: My alma mater, Sarah Florence College
Real life product names: And yet Smith College was real. Most of the references in this episode were real—Edith Head, the Guggenheim Museum, Brenda Starr—so shout-out to that script supervisor who remembered that Sarah Lawrence was already Riverdale-ified.
There’s only five more episodes to go, kids! What the heck is gonna happen? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. See you next time - same Riverdale time, same Riverdale Substack.