(Warning: Spoilers ahead for the Riverdale finale.)
Even before its premiere in 2017, Riverdale wanted us all to understand one thing: It’s weird. It’s a weirdo. It doesn’t fit in, and it doesn’t wanna fit in.
For seven seasons, the CW drama has seized every opportunity to be as bizarre, campy, and often downright nonsensical as possible. We’ve seen musical episodes, and cults, and “Gryphons and Gargoyles.” Betty Cooper got the “serial killer gene,” and Archie Andrews got mauled by a bear—and still showed up for his SAT’s a few days later. Archie and the gang got super powers in Season 6, and this season they time traveled to the 1950s.
How do you wrap an emotionally satisfying ribbon around all that chaos? As it turns out, it wasn’t hard at all. Riverdale’s series finale is a fizzy blend of light-hearted fan service and sincere emotion. Lili Reinhart, the show’s emotional core, rightfully takes center stage as an 86-year-old Betty opens the newspaper only to find out that Jughead has died—making her the last of her friends still alive.
It would appear that after his death, Jughead has become an angel like Tabitha—the supernatural being who helped fix the multiverse. (It’s a lot to explain.) At least, he appears to elderly Betty as his younger self (Cole Sprouse) to offer her one last night with her friends. In real life, Betty is in the car on her way to Riverdale with her daughter, who agrees to drive to her hometown one last time; in her mind, however, she warps there instantaneously with Angel Jughead, suddenly young again.
Archie and company first wound up in the ’50s thanks to some glitches in the multiverse—although none of them knew that at the time. Only Jughead knew they’d traveled, but he didn’t know why. Dead siblings were suddenly alive, and serial-killer parents became philanderers instead. It turns out, the Angel Tabitha needed to clean up a collapsing multiverse.
Last week, all of the teens found out the truth and had to decide whether to restore the memories of their old lives (meaning, the ones in 2023) or to simply forget them. There was no way to return them all to their proper timeline, Tabitha revealed; they had to live out their lives from the 1950s onward. Only Betty and Jughead chose to keep all of their memories; the rest decided they wanted to remember only the happy ones. Given how much they’ve all endured, even the angel had to agree this was fair.
With all of its story arcs resolved, Riverdale could easily have ended on its penultimate episode. Its finale, then, is all about emotion—specifically, the connection between its audience and its core characters.
Reinhart’s misty-eyed performance is a wonder, as the 26-year-old actress plays a woman 60 years her senior revisiting the people she knew and loved as a teenager, in her old body. For much of the episode, she feels a little out of sync with everyone else—a little unstuck in time. There are flickers of BoJack Horseman’s dementia-focused episode “Time’s Arrow,” in which BoJack’s mother flitters through memories of her youth. But where BoJack leaned into dread, Riverdale leans into dreaminess. There’s no sadness in Reinhart’s responses to all of her friends, except perhaps when it’s time for her final goodbye. Instead, she seems overcome with gratitude. In many ways, that’s the theme of this farewell.
Before its premiere, Riverdale was advertised as a kind of Twin Peaks-y drama for Gen Z—so perhaps it should come as no surprise that its relationship with sincerity has always been a little complicated. But its stars have been undeniable from the beginning. Sprouse amplifies Jughead’s warm-hearted pretension, while KJ Apa and his unnatural red hair have imparted a likable goofiness to Archie. And as seen in films like Palm Springs and Do Revenge, Camila Mendes is, as Betty describes Veronica in this episode, simply “a force.” A performer of the highest order, she possesses more comedic timing in her eyebrows than most of us could ever hope to command in our entire bodies.
For seven seasons, these lovable weirdos—and stand-outs like Madelaine Petsch, Vanessa Morgan, and Charles Melton—have forged real, convincing bonds, both with fans and one another. Petsch, Mendes, and Reinhart even started a joint TikTok account.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Riverdale’s finale is also all about fan service. Thanks to the multiverse memory gambit, it’s now canon that Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead became a romantic “foursome.” (With all those memories of dating each other, they realized, why not just… date each other?) Archie the Poet roasts everyone in rhyme, sneaking in digs at the show’s most bizarre moments along the way. (Remember how Charles Melton was actually a Season-2 recast? And why was Toni’s jacket misspelled?)
And of course, Riverdale makes sure to tell us that in the end, pretty much everyone at Riverdale High went on to do great things: Veronica became an Oscar-winning studio mogul. Archie traveled out west to help build the US highway system, and later settled in Modesto as a writer and started a family. (Upon his death, he asked to be buried in Riverdale.) Jughead basically started Mad magazine. And after self-publishing her book Teenage Mystique, Betty went on to become an even more famous writer and founded the Ms.-esque She Says magazine.
By the time she’s got to say goodbye to Angel Jughead, Betty says she’s ready for whatever is next. This parallels her real-life ride to Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, which brings Betty to the afterlife—where she and all of her friends can drink milkshakes together forever.
Jughead might get the last word with one final, overwrought monologue, but the sand-through-a-sieve joy that Betty feels with her friends is what people will remember. For all the tongue-in-cheek comedy that this delightfully weird show loved to drop on us, the feelings were apparently real all along.
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