Infiltrating a cult turns out to be pretty tricky business on a Riverdale flush with bad choices
Riverdale is a show about teens who look like they’re in their twenties acting like they’re in their thirties and forties. That applies to their romantic and sexual lives, and this playacted maturity also regularly extends to their amateur extracurricular pursuits. This episode’s two main prongs — Jughead and Archie’s attempted crackdown on the local drug trade, and the joint effort from Betty and Cheryl Blossom to infiltrate the Farm — both require high schoolers to design and execute operations that carefully trained professionals with years of experience will spend weeks planning. And so of course things go wrong twice over, albeit in more obviously predictable ways than usual. Being stupid, headstrong, and rash never serves these characters well, but at least it usually benefits the show itself. Here, however, our ability to see the obstacles in everyone’s paths from several narrative miles away mostly just drains the episode of its suspense.
I visited Los Angeles for the first time last year, and a friend aware of my predilection for doing dumb things to get a good story out of the experience warned me not to consort with the Scientologists prowling around Hollywood Boulevard, not even as a gag. A person may enter their giant, blue church under the impression he or she has the mental fortitude to resist the so-called “processing” interview, except that that’s precisely how they getcha. I only received this wisdom secondhand as a young adult; high schoolers shooting from the hip never stood a chance.
Betty sends Cheryl Blossom into the belly of the beast to do recon on the scruffy-chinned Edgar Evernever, convinced that the girl’s protective shield of weaponized cattiness will see her through. But The Farm has chosen a particularly accommodating turf to seed their chapter. Riverdale is practically begging to fall victim to a cult, populated as it is with emotionally precarious people feeling lost in a world full of lingering memories about their many past traumas. Cheryl Blossom is, by her own frequent admission, the HBIC. Still, when she agrees to sit for intake with Evelyn and then Edgar himself, they can smell the vulnerability on her. She lost a brother, and nearly killed herself trying in vain to save him. She’s survived mental institutionalization, and a crisis of sexual identity she’s only recently come to understand. Sending Cheryl Blossom to a Manson type adept at preying on insecurity and festering psychical wounds is like throwing a T-bone steak into a dog pound.
Complete with a wiretap hidden in her “iconic” spider brooch, her stint undercover frees her up to do the whole “*hacker voice* I’m in” thing, which is fun, and over all too quickly. Moreover, Betty should have plenty of guilt to reckon with in the next episode, as she is completely and singly responsible for the dark misfortune now befalling her friend. She’s in over her head, toying with forces she can’t control, and the stakes keep getting higher. Betty being Betty, however, she will almost definitely try to handle the situation herself and get herself even deeper in trouble.
Maybe that’s why she and Jughead make such a good couple, their shared tendency to make decisions without considering their risks or possible consequences. Impatient with the length of the training program required to become a junior cop, Jughead and the Serpents appoint themselves “Riverdale’s unofficial DEA” (the political undercurrent of which I will get to in a second) and tackle Gladys’ operation on their own. Jughead’s got personal reasons for acting so recklessly — if he can only put the kibosh on Mom’s drug dealing, maybe the Jones family can be happy together — and his personal investment clouds his judgement.
Director Pamela Romanowsky stages the Serpents’ assault on the Gargoyle HQ with agility and overall brio, sidewinding through hallways with the same lurker’s touch that Gareth Evans brought to the film lending this episode its name. This scene, the centerpiece of the episode, works in isolation from its context. But once the episode moves past the action, and the viewer starts to give any thought at all to what’s going on, some troubling questions arise.