WIT: What I Thought About Riverdale Season 5

WIT: Riverdale Season 5

I finally got around to watching season 5 of Riverdale…

I have a problem.

My backlog of shows to watch is fucking huge. I’m subscribed to several streaming services, and I have multiple shows on all of them that I want to watch or have started watching but never got around to finishing. I’ve been promising my buddy Rotten Tom that I’d watch Supernatural for around seven years now. I started The Ranch, enjoyed it, but never watched past the first episode. It took me around two years to make it from the first part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure to the beginning of Stone Ocean, which I have still not finished.

I have so much to watch, and not enough time to watch it.

A while back I wrote about seasons 2 and 3 of the CW show Riverdale, a show that’s basically Degrassi but with the characters from Archie Comics. Yes, I love Archie Comics. Yes, I know Riverdale is basically a soap opera. No, I don’t give a fuck. I like the show, your opinion be damned.

The show receives a lot of criticism for how silly it can be, mostly from people who forget that the show is based off of a series of silly comics written for young adults. It’s also a teen drama, and arguably a soap opera. As anyone who’s ever watched Days of Our Lives will tell you, soap operas are fucking crazy and very often go off-the-rails (how many times did Stefano die?). Anyone watching Riverdale expecting it to take itself seriously has clearly never read any of the source material, which is an impressive feat because Archie Comics are literally in the checkout lanes at most grocery stores.

With that said, I managed to watch season 5 of Riverdale on Netflix. While I never bothered to write about season 4 (and most likely never will), I felt compelled to get up off my ass sit my ass down and write about season 5 while it was fresh in my mind.

Yeah, WIT is back.

If this is your first time here, WIT, short for What I Thought, is a segment where I review TV shows and other things with short to-the-point bits about various aspects of whatever I’m reviewing. Put simply, it’s a compilation of idle thoughts I had when I was watching the show.

 

1. The time skip.

I’m just going to get this out of the way now, since this is the biggest issue most people had with season 5.

The time skip makes zero fucking sense, and completely contradicts itself.

We’re told that season 5 takes place seven years after graduation. That’s great, except for the fact that somebody made a serious fucky-wucky.

At the beginning of season 5 (which technically was supposed to be part of season 4, but COVID cut that short so they put a bunch of season 4 episodes into the beginning of season 5), we see the gravestone for Archie’s dad, which reads that he died in summer of 2019, right before Archie’s final year of high school. The teens graduate in 2020, Archie impulsively enlists in the Army to fight in a war (more on this later), and seven years pass before Archie is assigned to run the Riverdale High ROTC (which warrants its own WIT-icism, see #2). So it should be 2027 now, right?

WRONG!
“It’s an old meme sir, but it checks out.”

 

After the time skip, Veronica is talking to her husband Chadwick (ugh), and utters the line:

“It’s 2021, Chad. Haven’t you heard? Women can have it all now.”

 

The stellar Riverdale writing team really dropped the ball on this one, and I as a viewer demand an apology. Preferably in the form of a weekend-long sex romp with Camila Mendes. Or Lili Reinhart. Or Madelaine Petsch. Or literally any of the actresses on the show, they’re all pretty hot.

 

2. Why did the Army send Archie to Riverdale?

At the beginning of the time skip, the Army sends Archie to run Riverdale High’s ROTC program. When Archie arrives at the school, Principal Weatherbee tells Archie that he’s not even sure if the school will open the following week due to defunding by mayor Hiram Lodge. In fact, the only way the school was able to open is because Toni Topaz succeeded in getting it turned into a private school and got it funded by Veronica and Cheryl.

If the school’s status was really in limbo, the Army wouldn’t have sent Archie to run the ROTC program, as they would have known that the school wasn’t opening up.

 

3. Betty is running the school’s auto shop.

Perfect choice for Betty. I also LOL’d when the one girl asked if her dad was the Black Hood, and she responded with “Yeah, and he’s the one who taught me how to work on cars”.

 

4. Jughead is the only one who actually looks seven years older.

Poor Cole Sprouse hit the wall hard af.

 

5. Riverdale really DID secede from the United States.

In one of my previous articles about Riverdale, I mentioned that it was interesting that the town of Riverdale had its own license plates. I went so far as to posit that the show took place in an alternate reality where the town of Riverdale (and maybe even some of the other nearby towns) seceded from the United States and formed their own nation-state.

I’ll be honest, I was just dicking around when I said that. I didn’t actually think that Riverdale was its own country, I just assumed that they wanted to follow in suit of the comics and hide the location of Riverdale (though the show makes it very obvious that it’s upstate New York).

I suspect the writers have read my old article, because in Season 5 when Betty captures and interrogates one of the Lonely Highway Killers, the killer begins saying that he knows his rights as an American citizen. Betty replies with this bombshell:

"You're not in the United States anymore. You're in Riverdale. Welcome."

 

Ummm…

Holy shit!

 

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

 

The show literally just confirmed that Riverdale is NOT part of the United States!

Which makes the next one all the more interesting…

 

6. The war in Uzbekistan

Part of the plotline for Season 5 involves Archie dealing with PTSD he got from a combat mission during his time at war.

Rather than just simply not say where the war was, the show actually named the location of the conflict:

Uzbekistan

 

For some strange reason, the nation-state of Riverdale is at war with Uzbekistan, a country all the way in central Asia. I’m not sure what this country did to piss off Riverdale, nor can I figure out the logistics of the apparent nation-state of Riverdale having enough military power to project force half the world away. Though this would explain why Archie and his unit were all wearing World War 2-era uniforms and engaging in highly impractical and outdated trench warfare.

What an odd choice by the writers.

 

7. Fucking kill Hiram already, guys.

Seriously, how much more shit are you going to let this jerk-off get away with before you stop doing “the right thing” and put a cap in his punk ass? He literally committed an act of terrorism in your town (after getting the town unincorporated, i.e. “removed from the map”), he’s tried to kill Archie about a billion times now, he’s fucked over every single person in Riverdale at least once. How many more chances are you going to give this guy? In a display of faggotry that’s more pathetic than Batman’s perpetual defense of the Joker, Archie actually stopped Eric from going and doing what needed to be done.

The Season 5 finale basically demonstrated why he’s too dangerous to let live. If Archie doesn’t smoke this punk-ass bitch in Season 6 I’m going to riot, albeit several months late since Netflix doesn’t get the latest season of the show until a week or two after it finishes airing on CW.

 

8. Stop treating Kevin like shit.

I gave Kevin a pass for falling for the Farm’s bullshit, since Chad Michael Murray is dreamy (no homo) and like half the town fell for that shit. I even gave him a pass for cruising during the earlier seasons, since he was young and just wanted to bust a nut. But why, after being in a long-term relationship with Fangs for seven years, did he decide to keep cruising for dudes? And why, oh why, did Kevin actually fall for Cheryl and Penelope’s bullshit Jason cult?

Since I know the Riverdale writing staff obviously reads this site based on #5, let me just say this: Stop treating Kevin like shit. Let this man be happy, and let this man find love.

 

9. Dr. Curdle Jr. is awesome.

I fucking love this character. You can totally tell the actor is basically just having fun with the role and completely going balls-deep into the trope of “creepy morgue employee”. Much better than the “quirky forensics guy/girl” trope that’s in literally every crime show. Abby from NCIS sucks, and I’m tired of pretending she doesn’t. She’s not cute, she’s not funny, her schtick is fucking retarded and so are you if you actually enjoy it.

Replace Abby with Dr. Curdle Jr. and just let him go ham egg and cheese.

Also, LOL @ Curdle Jr. being a huge fan of Josie and the Pussycats.

Speaking of spin-off characters…

 

10. Nobody gives a fuck about Katy Keene.

It felt like every five seconds Veronica was trying to name-drop “my bff Katy Keene back in New York”. Just. Fucking. STOP.

Literally nobody cares about this shitty spin-off, it’s fucking garbage. Even if I’d give Lucy Hale the best sex she’s ever had in her entire life.

 

11. Cheryl doing magic

Oh hell fucking yes, I can’t wait for the inevitable Sabrina the Teenage Witch crossover that’s surely coming. And I’ll surely be coming if we get a lesbian scene between Sabrina and- okay, I’ll stop with the sex-crazed bullshit.

Seriously, as someone who watched the original Sabrina with Melissa Joan Hart (back when Caroline Rhea was actually cool and didn’t look like a wine aunt- okay, so she always looked like a wine aunt I guess, but still, she was cool), I’ve wanted this crossover. When I saw that they had Penelope Blossom appear very briefly in an episode of the new series, I got even more exited.

I should really get around to watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I have no excuse, it’s on Netflix. Oh, and speaking of Penelope Blossom…

 

12. What the fuck was Penelope doing in the men’s prison?

During the prison break scene, I said “Is that fucking Penelope?”, then dismissed this as silly, because why would a woman be in a men’s prison? I further dismissed it when Betty’s brother Charles and Betty’s fake brother Chic (Fun Fact™: In the comics her brother is actually called “Chic”) showed up, and Chic had long hair. I just assumed it was Chic we saw.

Later, I went back and revisited the scene. No, it really was fucking Penelope:

Penelope Blossom breaks out of a men's prison.

 

Even if this was a coed prison (which exist but aren’t common), there’s no way in fucking hell Penelope would have been anywhere near the male inmates, even during an escape.

I’m not going to take the low-hanging fruit here and make the obvious comment that she was getting gangbanged by the male prisoners, nor will I make the other obvious comment about blowing holes and explosions. Nope, not gonna make those comments, nosiree…

 

13. I miss Skeet Ulrich.

I miss F.P. Jones, Skeet Ulrich is a terrific actor and I was sorry to see him go, but also glad at the same time because, let’s be honest here, this show has gone on for way too fucking long. Just like this article.

 

It looks like Season 6 is still airing, so I’m not sure when it’ll find its way to Netflix. I’m looking forward to it though, because I read recently that Season 7 will be the last season. That means two more seasons to watch and see just how much more off the fucking rails this show can get. And if Season 5 was anything to go by, Seasons 6 and 7 are going to be fucking cray-cray.

By Angry_Jerk

The CEO/Editor-in-chief of AJnet, and the current king of internet ranting. Hailing from the fine village of Northeast Philadelphia, AJ has been creating content on the internet for over 15 years. None of it has really been funny or entertaining, but he keeps trying anyway. When he’s not creating new articles for the site, he can be found hitting the weights, watching anime, or playing retro video games.