Rigged elections, crash dieting, multiple homicides — must be prom night on Riverdale!
“Prom is this weekend? We still do things like that here?”
A fair question, Veronica Lodge! With one serial killer on the loose, a second not quite as dead as we may have previously believed, and a cult spreading its influence through the town like a psychological plague, who’s got the time for such quintessential prom activities as shopping for outfits or googling how to pin a boutonnière or getting local sleazeballs to buy you and your friends grain alcohol? Riverdale’s two selves collide once again in this hour, and the good news is that the script has been written with enough awareness to get out in front of the incongruity between the teen-drama stuff and the grimmer genre stuff. In fact, “Chapter Fifty-Five” excels by suggesting that they’re one and the same, or at least by forcibly smelting them into a single irregular object.
Sweeps enters full swing with Riverdale High’s big school dance, just the sort of easy-to-promote event intended to goose ratings when nobody’s getting married or having a baby. Everything comes to a head at this most important night of any teen’s life — that is, when your life doesn’t already entail several near-death experiences. The TV medium thrives on big events such as this, where characters can be brought together and plotlines bundled into a single explosive climax. This particular prom serves two purposes, allowing frisky adolescents an occasion to smush their bodies (and feelings) together, as well as providing cover for Betty and Jughead’s sting operation to lure the Gargoyle King out of hiding. It’s the ideal balance of pulp and soap, an organic fusion of what can sometimes feel like discrete parts making up a fractured whole.
The fateful prom starts with the humblest of intentions, by which I mean as self-aggrandizement for the Christopher Columbus of taking ego trips. In an episode that primarily orients itself around Betty’s increasingly futile efforts to keep the darkness surrounding her at bay, the most compelling conflict is internal, and happening to Cheryl Blossom. She’s already decided that she will be prom royalty, thank you very much: “Vote Choni for co-monarchs because, when you think about it, no other options make sense.” She’s not wrong, the Choni Court makes sense from a narrative perspective, that’s where the best version of this story appears to be waiting.
Until the austere strictures of The Farm clash with her bone-deep narcissism, threatening to tear Cheryl Blossom in twain. Edgar, he of the needlessly toned cheese-grated abs, forbids her from pursuing the office of prom queen on the grounds that it violates The Farm’s vows of absolute equality. Cheryl Blossom was all on board when this cult assured her that she’s perfect just the way she is, but everyone else being perfect too proves a bitterer pill for her to swallow. Her contact with Jason paramount above all else, she acquiesces and drops out of the race, growing listless and disillusioned with The Farm as a result.
The other result is that she puts up no resistance when Betty and Jughead effectively usurp her as prom planners, a turn of events the couple responds to with a “that was a freebie” look of comic gold. They need to rig the election so that Betty can be voted “Gryphon Queen” and fulfill the instructions of the Satanic game they just can’t stop playing. A heretofore unknown book called The Gospel of the Gargoyle King has issued a new quest, one that turns Betty’s prom night into a waking nightmare.
The standout scene of the episode, in which Betty scrambles through the halls of her school with a newly hook-handed Black Hood in relentless pursuit, sends the tone from suspense into full-blown hellacious horror. Everywhere she turns, the camera reveals a new corpse tucked into the corner of a frame, leaving her nowhere to hide. While the cross-cut flashbacks reminding us of the last time Reinhart faced mortal peril in a bathroom don’t need to be there (Don Draper voice: that’s what the “Previously on Riverdale” is for!), they subside quickly, and a barrage of terror takes their place. This series is best at being sexy, then funny, but this passage re-asserts the production team’s ability to be truly scary as well. The dolls that hang from the ceiling of the Gargoyle King’s bus hideout don’t have to siphon eeriness from Blair Witch Project/True Detective, their power to frighten going beyond the purely elusive.
Betty’s night of violence leaves her between a rock (a death cult) and a hard place (two homicidal maniacs with a special interest in her), the same unfortunate position Archie lands himself in. In his case, both the rock and hard place are the fists of people who want to beat him up. Driven to appease his mother and stay competitive on the boxing circuit, he lines up two fights for one day: one with Veronica (who’s been acting awfully friendly as of late) and one with a scout for the Navy at the behest of a returned Mary Andrews. Archie, who evidently has a few functioning brain cells remaining, does not want to join the Navy. But he doesn’t want to disappoint his mother, so he spreads himself too thin and goes on a crash diet to drop six pounds within a few days.