The recent discovery that money is pretty much fake has set the Internet ablaze with talk of stonks, non-fungible tokens, and big Gamestop shorts. I’ve lost track of the timeline distancing real-life happenings from the shockwaves they send out in the universe of Riverdale, so it’s possible that the explosive proliferation of cryptocurrencies has only coincidentally synced up with this week’s plot involving VeronicaBucks. Even if not, the writers must have picked up on something in the air, the harebrained economic gamesmanship anointing some as new multi-millionaires while leaving other ambitious capitalists in destitution. This week, Veronica bets big on forward-thinking economic jiggery-pokery and loses, albeit through no fault of her own. In keeping with the neo-con streak espoused in last week’s paean to privatization, money-disruption provides a seeming route forward for Riverdale that nonetheless concludes at a dead end.
That’s the most substantial thread in an otherwise airy episode, busying itself with half-baked subplots clearly on their way somewhere that fail to take pleasure in the path there. The activities at the school have been for the most part abandoned, and everyone’s off in their respective corners doing their own thing. With the marked exception of Cheryl Blossom, making herself useful in a juicy beef with ex-squeeze Toni Topaz, everyone’s business feels like just that — work, to be completed so we can move on to the next thing. At least Veronica destroys the fiscal foundation of a fragile township along the way, like a sexy reckless Greek moneylender.
She’s still locked in conflict with Hiram, continuing his effort to choke out Riverdale and make room for the community-scaled laundering operation that is SoDale. Her big plan to jolt the area economy back into action hinges on the creation of a region-specific cryptocurrency called RiverDollars emblazoned with Veronica’s smiling face. What could go wrong? A dozen different things, though what actually happens is more direct, when her perfidious students go behind her back to mint $10,000 more than they agreed on and amp up inflation in the process. (“You triggered an economy collapse — Fs for everyone!”) Her logic, as ever, has canyon-sized flaws, but she still earns more for points in her execution, which is more than can be said for most people this hour.
Archie, for one, should be having a much better time with the founding of the volunteer fire department (one of the most ripely homoerotic milieus thus explored by this show!) than he is. He’s brought in one of his old Army buddies and Veronica’s called in a friend of a friend of a friend to provide Riverdale’s finest young men with firefighting instruction, and yet there’s no antic Village People energy to be found in their new enterprise. The preview for next week’s installment promises some shirtlessness/red suspender combos, which isn’t nothing, and more to the point, is more than than the nothing of this episode’s arc. Like so many past arcs, it does little more than place Archie in front of a row of strapping recruits to give them a stern, masculine pep talk.
Jughead also seems to have a fraction of a plotline to himself this week, having a close encounter of the third kind that only presages events for coming weeks. He’s still investigating the flying saucer activity that a retired Pop Tate recounts from back in his muttonchop days, and while the promise of future anal probings may now be on the table, this episode gives us little more to work with than a bathing golden light and a spotlight cast directly downward. Jughead makes mention of an “alien autopsy,” a subtle reference to an infamous and faked found-footage film of an E.T. dissection, which also inspires hope for episodes to come. But after an anticipatory episode last week, another one this week has started to feel like a mid-season lull.
With Betty barely a presence in this episode, the bulk of the best material goes to your pal and mine Cheryl Blossom, come back to Riverdale High to forcibly reclaim her crown as queen of a school she no longer attends. Despite the air of desperation that accompanies a show restaging its first viral moment, despite the largely recycled choreography, it works due to the bizarre new context. Think of this moment from the dance team’s perspective: their pregnant guidance counselor coach faces a sudden challenge from some random woman who doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the present school faculty, plus there’s a difficult-to-place sapphic charge between them. This has nothing to do the River Vixens and everything to do with the coolly simmering resentment between them. The subtext couldn’t be clearer, to the point that there’s hardly any text to cover it.
This episode bears the title “Fire In The Sky,” a clear allusion to what Alan Moore called “celestial lanterns” in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, glimpsed tonight by Jughead. But there’s no fire in the sky this week, no element of wonder achieved by the sparse lighting cues and musical accompaniments that fill out Jughead’s subplot. Not much flash there, nor in Veronica’s boneheaded monetary maneuvering, nor in Betty’s limp investigations of an undistinguished killer. Cheryl Blossom’s still got some of the old heat, selling the hell out of “your cruelty is beyond words.” But it’s a forgettable chapter of a show that subsists on chatter-worthy scandal and indelible set pieces. This isn’t even at the calamitous pitch that makes the worst episodes of this series easy to confuse for its best. It’s a nothing-much way to spend an hour, the one unforgivable offense for a show that can get away with anything most of the time.
Stray observations:
- If the Riverdale marketing team has any sense, $1000 wads of VeronicaBucks will soon be available for purchase through the official CW store. Imagine the applications: shoot them out of a paper-gun in a rap video, drunkenly try to use them to pay for chicken at an all-night fast food place, zazz up your Monopoly set — get creative.
- The haunting piano-tinkling that accompanies Jughead’s run-in with the extraterrestrial craft comes from Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are,” a gorgeous and sparse doo-wop ballad that fits perfectly into this show’s persisting fetish for midcentury ephemera.
- I really enjoy how today’s elderly Penelope pronounces “Mothman” like it’s a Jewish last name, as if her guide to name-sounds comes from Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law.
- Cheryl Blossom is out of the house and back on her quote game: “As Elton John likes to say, ‘The bitch is back in town’!”
- Kevin has watched Backdraft “over and over.” And who could blame him?
29 Comments
This Riverdale was…whatever. Meanwhile, I honestly think this might have been my favorite episode of Nancy Drew yet. It was extremely funny, there were 1-2 good jump scares, and it had enough ties to the earlier plots to keep things going. Loved how it ended with no supernatural activity at all as the main mystery, which was a nice change of pace. Was truly impressed with it from start to finish. Loved the cliffhanger at the end, too.
George should get rid of Odette but keep her French accent.
Bess said sheer rights.
I sort of want George to keep Odette as her ghost friend and they will have sexy mirror conversations. “Au chaunte”
The new focus on cases of the week is really working for ND. I’m liking it a lot.
Oh absolutely. I’d guess that within the next 2-3 episodes we’ll get the last, “big” plot for the season, but I’m liking the smaller weekly plots too.
I require more information about the fox lady painting in Thornhill.
I liked this episode for the gonzo mothman subplot, which I’m sure they’ll ruin soon enough. Nana Rose Blossom kept a mothman cadaver preserved in a barrel of maple syrup for decades! (Barbara Wallace would be a perfect comics accurate Agatha Harkness.) Naturally Jughead lost the maple mothman mummy after Nana Rose lent it to him.
I hope they tie the mothman into the cult that Betty’s mom joined/infiltrated/whatever. Weren’t they building a rocket ship?
I feel like everything that is happening with the Cheryl-Toni conflict is basically Toni’s plan to re-engage Cheryl with the school & the town & ultimately with their super-fire-hot connection, which, it is a good point, is probably somewhat confusing to the current Vixens unless Toni has secretly clued them in… which I think is also likely
Having whole classes of students in as willing participants on high-school administrators’ plots to seduce / restore the groove of an ex-girlfriend is very on-brand for Riverdale. Hopefully it can remember what its brand is long enough to make this true.
No mention of the random Katy Keene cross over? (The second such, by my calculations and both aired, and filmed, after KK’s cancelation). I mean, I guess, why not? But…
Is this a self portrait of Cheryl’s fursona?
I watch and enjoy this show unironically and just sort of let the ridiculousness wash over me, but a Riverdale furry subplot would be a bridge too far.
I think you mean “downright restrained” compared to the tickle porn plot.
While I definitely enjoyed Nana Rose delivering unto Jughead that mothman cadaver she’s been hoarding in a maple barrel, when this ended I thought, “Well, there’s always the next one.”I’m perfectly fine with setup episodes, especially if it leads me to Archie shirtless and in suspenders, but this one felt really disinterested in itself. Even the cheer-off. It also took a really long time for anyone to come to the conclusion explicitly that there might be a serial killer abducting young women. It’s Riverdale. The population is basically 10% serial killer. Who knows, but that seems like that would have been my first thought if I were Betty. Or Alice. Or Sheriff Keller.
Also, those Vixens are definitely confused. I’m re-watching and Cheryl casually yells something about how the porcelain doll possessed by her deceased brother moves faster than them.
For Sabrina fans, the actor who played Earl in this episode also played the eldritch terror The Uninvited. And of course, there’s Agatha.
“This episode bears the title “Fire In The Sky,” a clear allusion to what Alan Moore called “celestial lanterns” in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen”If it’s about UFOs and alien abductions I’m gonna go ahead and say it’s a reference to this:https://film.avclub.com/the-climax-of-fire-in-the-sky-is-still-one-of-the-scari-1842403820
Nah, definitely a shoutout to lo-fi pioneers Half Japanese.
It’s ok, the headline of this piece also makes absolutely no sense. There was no crypto currency involved, and I don’t believe that Veronica lost anything at all. The plan just failed.
Veronica did seem to lose money, since she had to buy back all the “riverbucks” in circulation. But she doesn’t care about money and this show is all weightless make-believe, so it barely registered.
Or apparently to me, didn’t register at all.
The writer is trying to be a little too artsy with the writing and wandered off into confusing. I believe that the sentence is intended to be parsed as “fire in the sky” refers to UFOs (which is why the film about alien abduction has that title) and Alan Moore called UFOs “celestial lanterns”, therefore I’ll staple those two thoughts together.
Okay, sure, most of the episode was unfocused and all over the place. But Charles — no mention of the scene in which Archie talks Jackson down from gunning for Hiram, and then the two vets pledge to help keep each other sane? That was unironic gold, powerfully acted. And the first time this series has moved me since Luke Perry passed on.
Things Riverdale producers know nothing about:(Well, everything, but …)Military. Period. Full stop. That’s a WW1/2 gun. Why is it in a series set in 2021 (which means, btw, that the previous 4 seasons were set in 2011-14???)What military lets people who have -left- military service take their weapon with them?I mean…so much of this show is utter nonsense, but this was just ….seriously, folks.Then there’s the whole, “Private property. Can’t do nothing about it being a crime scene!” part which … didn’t include at least the hint of going to a judge and being rejected (to reconfirm that Hiram owns everything)Also: Where the hell is this town? NE US (close enough to drive to NY) with maple forests and swamps, near a lot of other little towns but -also- right next to a military base (which apparently doesn’t bring money in to town?) and also next to a highway big enough to have truckers use it, but small enough to be a ‘lonely highway’?*sigh*And I thought GOTHAM made no sense.
Archie’s army buddy was the most boring minor character on a show that lives and dies on its colorful minor characters (I’m really missing Edgar Evernever right now). Hopefully he’ll turn out to be the Trash Bag Killer, I guess?The only other good outcome I can think of is if they keep doubling down on vague allusions to this unnamed “war” they keep mentioning, and it keeps getting weirder and weirder. E.g.:“What were we even fighting for over there? What did it all mean?”“So many brave young men and women died face down in the fish guts, and people here act like there wasn’t even a war at all!”“Go ahead, drink your maple syrup and eat your bananas, without even a thought to all the marines who died to make the beachhead landing against the banana company’s mercenary army!”
“Don’t give up Archie! We didn’t wade our way through fifty miles of acid-quicksand and scale the walls of Sevastopol wearing nothing but scuba suits jerry-rigged out of loose condoms just to have it all end like this!”
I don’t think Archie’s army buddy could be the TBK – wasn’t Betty’s pit-imprisonment at the same time he and Archie were fighting the Mothmen on Ceti-Alpha 5, or whatever war they were in?My VeronicaBucks are on Betty’s creepy boss/boyfriend as TBK.
In any logical universe, you are correct. So…Veronica’s creepy boyfriend being a not-so-fantasy Patrick Bateman would work. That is a good idea.
“The haunting piano-tinkling that accompanies Jughead’s run-in with the extraterrestrial craft comes from Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are,” a gorgeous and sparse doo-wop ballad that fits perfectly into this show’s persisting fetish for midcentury ephemera.”In what universe is Chances Are a doo-wop song?
The Veronica Bucks reminded me of Sunny and Mac and Dennis’ scheme to move around Paddy dollars.