Riverdale’s season 6 finale made the show even crazier

If you watched last night Riverdale season six finale I guess you are still reeling from the Madness it just fell. If you haven’t, here’s what happened on the show that makes Gotham look like low-key, down-to-earth drama.

Trying to explain everything that happened Riverdale this season is an impossible task, but to sum it up: Hiram Lodge tried to blow up Archie with a bomb, which instead gave the main cast a variety of superpowers and allowed a dark wizard named Percival Pickens to come to town from another dimension. Also, Cheryl Blossom has become an (unrelated) witch. Archie and the gang managed to assassinate Percival before he could take over the city – both time travel and Satan were involved – but not before being able to redirect Bailey’s Comet (not a typo) to head straight for Riverdale. This is a lotand i’ve barely scratched the surface of what happened in season six, and i’m not even going to explain how the spear that pierced the side of Jesus while he was on the cross ended up in a pawn shop in Riverdale.

So that’s where “Night of the Comet” begins, with the Riverdalians trapped in town by Percival’s magic and a day left before the comet strikes. Luckily, Veronica has one hell of an idea: to use her poison powers to, uh, sort of leech Archie’s invulnerability, Betty’s ability to see evil auras, Jughead’s telepathy, and time travel ability. from Tabitha herself, then pass them on to Cheryl via a kiss. It works, as we find out when Veronica shoots Cheryl out of nowhere and the bullet doesn’t pierce her skin.

The hope is that Cheryl will be able to harness the energy of these superpowers to power her Phoenix fire magic – she has Phoenix fire magic, by the way, and dresses like Jean Gray from Famke Janssen from X-Men: The Last Stand to prove it – melt the comet before it hits, without draining it of the power it needs to keep all the dead it raised alive. It works, but it also has a very curious side effect, in that suddenly it’s 1955, and Archie and the gang are back in high school and everything seems happy and innocent and pure and Jughead is wearing his real hat comics, which looks completely bananas in real life (and can be seen above). Fundamentally, Riverdale rebooted to be a show about the real, classic Archie comics for the seventh and final season, and only Jughead remembers what the past/future was like.

This being Riverdale, I’m sure things will get dark and twisted sooner rather than later, but I’m honestly bowled over by the show’s writers’ ability to continue to top their craziness. I’d say the show started going off the rails in season two when Betty’s dad turned out to be a serial killer and Archie formed a team of masked vigilantes and then flew so far off the rails that when the superpowers were introduced the rails were completely out of sight, but this… it’s like Riverdale returned to the tracks to smash and smash them into a million pieces, each of which is shaped like a whoopee cap.

What will season seven look like? Will Mark Consuelos return as Veronica’s father, Hiram? Won’t Betty’s father have been a serial killer? Will Cheryl’s famous twin brother, Jason, be alive? Will be Riverdale even bother to return to his “normal” timeline before the series finale? We’ll have to wait until the series returns in 2023 to find out. Until then, I’ll be looking at the above photo of Jughead.

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