Archie’s mother uses the word “endgame” in this week’s episode, an assemblage of letters that’s taken on a few alternate meanings as of late. When she utters this word, Mary Andrews means it in the colloquial neologism sense, an expression of one’s belief that two characters deserve to be together in the conclusion of a fiction. She thinks Archie and Veronica would be good for one another, and because this is Riverdale, she makes it known using millennial online-speak. (On the recent finale of the also-quite-plugged-in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, there was plenty of chatter about which well-heeled suitor would be our gal Rebecca’s “endgame.”) When we hear her say it, we can’t help but think Avengers, cultural saturation ensuring that the word may never be fully scrubbed of its association with Marvel’s most recent pre-viz extravaganza. The dictionary still has a thing or two to say about all this, too, flatly defining the term to the most literal extent as “the final stage of a game such as chess or bridge, in which few pieces remain.”
We’re all really talking about the same thing, though — a wrap-up. The word “endgame” implies a decisive denouement after many months of plotting, a final delivery on all the clues and backtracking and red herrings and mysteries. The good folks over at Game of Thrones are currently struggling with this same thing, but Riverdale already has a fourth season order and doesn’t have to worry about tying a ribbon on the whole series. Even so, tonight’s hour answered some big, burning questions and reassured the viewership that a show which constantly seems to be on the brink of going haywire has indeed been following a grander blueprint. The writers know what they’re doing. We’re in good hands
The show had to eventually reach a “cards on the table” point with The Farm plotline, when the writing staff could no longer forestall revealing the totality of the group’s evil doings. We know they’ve been brainwashing, ritually drowning, pretty average cult stuff, but there has to be a point to all their manipulation. I recently spoke with director Mary Harron about her new Charlie Manson movie, and one of the things she said that stuck with me was about cult leaders never being original. They talk a big game about utopia, about launching a revolution amongst themselves, but it always comes down to the same old shit: money, sex with younger women, or indulgence of violent impulses. If they’re building a new world, it’s one in which they’re allowed to get away with anything.
Edgar Evernever, for all his seductive ideas and comforting words and inhumanly defined abs, is just another grifter trying to squeeze some cash out of the gullible. He only wants you for your precious, expensive viscera. We all knew something messed-up was going down at The Farm, but “black-market organ harvesting under the guise of New Age faith-healer nonsense” is an impressively loopy pick. He’s got a talent for identifying someone’s weakest spot, instantly honing in on Betty’s shadow-self and letting her do the rest of the mental legwork while trapped in hypnosis. Once he’s got a person destabilized and wracked with emotional pain, he transmutes that into physical pain, which can be removed with a simple, deeply invasive medical procedure. It’s a well-oiled machine of deception and highly lucrative predation. If Betty’s piece of this season could be busted out of the series and reshaped into its own movie, it’d work just fine.
This litmus test of functionality reflects more poorly on Veronica’s go of Season 3. She’s spent this year backtracking and contradicting herself, navigating an obstacle course of retcons both professional and personal. She was under her dad’s thumb, then she wasn’t, except she was, but she wasn’t, and just when it seemed like she definitely was, she turned it around once more. The revelation that her various properties had all been signed under Hiram’s names turns out to be a blessing in disguise, because now she’s got someone to pin all her illegal activities on. It’s not as if that was depicted as a particularly pressing issue for her before the reversal of fortune, but it’s an easy out. One call to the FBI (an agency willing to glance past their question of “Aren’t those crimes you committed?” to Veronica in the interest of landing a bigger fish in Hiram), one sting operation with a boxing match for its cover, and his scheme to privatize the entire town has fallen apart.
Her life and how it’s written aren’t any less messy on the romantic front. After having been shuffled off into a time-out of irrelevance, Reggie’s back and he wants to get serious. What do you know, he’s right on time for Archie to develop a serious interest in Veronica yet again, cuing up a proper love triangle. The show has painstakingly avoided this device with regard to Archie, Betty, and Veronica, but anyone who’s watched the show this long won’t be surprised that Roberto Aguire-Sacasa considers two boys fighting over a girl to be more compelling TV than two girls fighting over a boy. This could be resolved in next week’s finale, or this conflict could be the focus of Veronica’s life in season 4.