6.05 thoughts ⏰<3
- watching this delayed way has made this so much funnier for me bc of all the nice sweet messages in my inbox that are like, can’t wait for u to get to 5! so i’m like :) :) :) and then i turn it on and MY SON is DEAD
- lmao u bastards
- and we’re doing paradoxes. i was thinking about paradoxes in my last ep thoughts too. sincerely, my favorite part of doing these posts is when i manage to be on the right track, one step ahead of myself, but only in a way that makes me look like a complete dumbass. ty for staying tuned as i blindly grope my way into semi-relevant episode thoughts. it’s a privilege to be here.
- speaking of relevant thoughts, reggie is the closest to meta-awareness of all these characters. he notices his double in the comics right away. and he calls out the donnie darko reference that the entire episode is modeled on. only awake person, beyond even jughead
- here’s a video essay explaining the movie, if u want
- s4 already visited donnie darko, at least superficially
- this ep even gives a nod to that plot-era by recalling chipping. obviously s4 couldn’t yet match the sci fi elements like parallel universes and time travel, but in retrospect it did make kind of a point about the unstoppable track jughead found himself on against the stonies, and his feeling of inevitable doom re: his relationship with betty
- on that note, another significant time this film was referenced was during betty’s s2 serpent dance - soon afterwards they broke up with the exchange ‘how many times’/’until it sticks.’ i’m sensing a theme
- that version of the song was made specifically to play over the film’s outro montage of characters waking up in donnie’s prime universe after the reset and ‘remembering’ the next 28 days in the tangent universe as nightmares. + donnie’s dead body being recovered. it’s a lot like what this ep opens with.
- speaking of songs and scenes, jughead’s high school hallway hallucination experience was some crisp homage to the film too, but with the soundtrack borrowed from a very different film
- also on the topic of music, the creepy minimal score in the opening when jughead wakes up in the garage is the first of a few things that reminds me very much of another time travel movie: primer. admittedly this might be bc i permanently have primer on the brain at all times of my waking life. there’s a couple other things too
- the specific combination of narration (he asks her to read the comics ‘and tabitha did’) and the fade transitions between these shots, to me strongly evokes the style of primer
- the other thing is, and i do feel like boo boo the fool for not thinking about this one before now, one of the main materials the two guys talk about using to build their machine ,, is palladium. they rip it out of one of their catalytic converters to use as an efficient conductor. not quite a magic ‘science’ ingredient in a universe spawning explosion but hey.
- at this point i feel like despite never once thinking about palladium before it came up in rd now i’m seeing it everywhere.
- since this episode isn’t about accidentally building a time machine i can sense ur doubt about the relevance here. but beneath its impenetrable time travel plot, primer is really about the relationship between two best friends, aaron and abe, and how their unanticipated power over reality affects their friendship and their approaches to life. each feels like he can be a ‘savior’ of reality
- aaron becomes obsessed with perfecting reality by re-doing it until the best outcome is arrived at. life doesn’t matter to him the first time around anymore except as material to write a script. only the end result counts. meanwhile abe tries to game it to benefit himself, aaron, and aaron’s family, but carefully prepares for the worst and ultimately chooses to sacrifice his own future to go back and ‘correct’ reality to before the pandora’s box of time travel was ever opened. the ‘worst’ in this case is they and their loved ones find themselves in a paradoxical time loop beyond their comprehension, and by the end of the film u might lol realize that from the start you’ve been witnessing the resulting struggle for control of the situation. the narration of events throughout has been aaron’s part in that one-up-manship.
- a little dense, ok. but archie and jughead’s dynamic mirrors aaron and abe’s - one ultimately wants a selfish and dangerous result and the other wants (perhaps also selfishly) to conserve what he cares about, even if it means isolating himself from it forever.
- another thing about primer and also about donnie darko and, as it turns out, also about the rebuild of evangelion movies (which i finally got around to watching for this ep after only knowing the show) is this: can we know whether or not this is the first go around the time loop??
- that’s a major plot point in primer and the answer - that once the time travel starts we only see what is at least the second pass thru the loop - is one of the few things known with certainty in the film. the rebuild of eva films.... appear... to be the final run thru a time loop that the events of the series have been cycling thru, until shinji can finally rewrite reality to a conclusive solution.
- in donnie darko, donnie’s sleepwalking leads him to wake in many strange outdoor locations but in the first scene he wakes in the same spot where he later goes to conclude everything. one (of many) interpretations of the movie is that he’s trapped in a convoluted time loop and he’s tried unsuccessfully to end it before, which is why he wakes in the spot. the only way to stop the cycle is to accept he has to die in his prime universe so that the tangent universe will not form.
- the point here being that jughead starting the ep at archie’s bed with no bomb under it, catching the blast on the stairs, and then waking up as if that was a dream, could be interpreted as him already being inside the time loop - just one that hasn’t stabilized yet.
- considering it’s never answered how or why the dead narrator already had a comic book before archie killed him, or for that matter why archie killed him at all before the narrator knew anything (in fact dying was what caused him to find out,, nice one archie) this feels plausible to me.
- and on the topic of savior complexes like donnie and abe and shinji, one must remember jesus. lol jk. no but donnie darko has a bunch of homage and parallels to the last temptation of christ, so i watched that too and uhhh Couldn’t Help But Notice that maybe rivervale has been referencing it for archie all along? the heart removal being the most noticeable similarity
- the last temptation is a story supposing what if jesus was just a guy and instead of choosing to sacrifice himself for humanity, he had doubts and just like, didn’t do that. what if instead he got married and lived his life? what could go wrong? also he’s obsessed with his dad.
- another kind of commonality between these films - donnie darko, primer, the last temptation, and the rebuilds of evangelion - is the central character struggles with feeling alone and covets a happy family. that’s literally the ‘last temptation’ in the last temptation. donnie feels misunderstood by his family at the film’s start and is thrilled to meet a girl who kind of gets him - too bad she dies unless he dies to save her. in primer, abe’s motivations seem to revolve around aaron’s wife and child instead of his own relationships unless u count his extremely homo-domestic relationship with aaron. shinji.... well. u know.
- this could be applied to archie - coveting betty as his wife bc he thinks that will bring his dad back. it could also be applied to jughead - one last brush with the life he once wanted before it ends with him accepting isolation and things reset as they should be, more or less.
- on that note, marriage and kids seems to have been a central element throughout these rivervale episodes - but specifically as a negative thing. starting in 6.01 when betty points out to archie that every married couple they've ever known is divorced. then she does some sketch shit to conceive a child with him. a cursed entity tries to kill toni and fang's baby. jack demands another child from bitsy despite their loveless marriage. finn wants to marry abigail to inherit her estate after he kills her to get his serial killer rocks off. etc.
- notably jughead and tabitha's relationship and interactions have been blissfully separate from this tangle. love that for them
- veronica and reggie also seem separate, but i feel like it's not as simple for them?? reggie is still comparing himself to veronica's past relationships, especially archie. and a big tho underdeveloped part of veronica's narrative is what direction in life she'll choose, including the decision to have kids or not
- anyway. the episode.
- lmao at betty snubbing my boi curdle jr. for the wedding. that's cold. what exactly happened here??
- conversely so sweet that curdle didn't even ask jughead for money to keep the body on ice. maybe he's been extorting betty all along and she's right to not invite him. maybe he's in shock that there’s a jughead who actually managed to die
- what i really want to know is what jughead would encounter if he drove past the sign and left the town limits. does the rivervale universe include the rest of the world? jughead and ethel later seem to acknowledge that it does not when they only specify that 'billions will die' if the prime universe collapses.
- a joke is being played on me by my own past self or possibly my anons. i can't believe u guys just let me run my mouth about not liking the comics and now it all comes down to more comics lmao
- so. i confess after watching this ep i looked up the time police (the remake one) and tried to read,,, and then i remembered i tried it once already a while ago bc the art is cute at least. but the writing..... i can't. it's just. not for me.
- SO instead i googled a little more and found this, an article which walks thru the original time police comics, which are probably at least as, if not more, relevant anyway,, if this is relevant at all. betty's spaghetti suggests it is, bc that line was pretty random otherwise. or maybe the new time police features making spaghetti too?
- ironically, i don't have time to find and read those issues, but luckily someone loved it enough to have written this nice summary.
- mostly what this puts in my mind is the great potential for more town history that featuring this particular comic series could present. ras, pls, the show can't end before we bring it back to the town origins. i already posited there was a blossom who looked like jughead. might as well borrow it all from time police and add the colonel pickens plot too. that would be fucked and hilarious
- absolutely Love that jughead and tabitha's response to the comics is like 'wow a parallel universe? that's definitely the weird part of this' instead of something like, huh there's a published series with an omniscient narrator describing our lives as if they're stories, and these comics are for sale and possibly many people now have private details of our lives.
- but i think a more egregious oversight is that they don't stop to wonder who wrote the comics. where the fuck did these come from? jughead bootstraps them into existance, fully formed
- then again, maybe there's a clue within the ep?
- sounds pretty familiar,, ,
- that came from lucifer who's technically an angel, formerly with access to heaven??? it's extremely bizarre that rivervale's heaven is populated with comics but whatever. that’s another mystery of the universe i guess
- i do wonder if the heavenly diner has issues past 100 stocked. is it outside the flow of time? doesn't seem like characters can exit to a point before they died. but could they peek ahead to later comic issues?
- the two options offered to jughead in the deal for his devil interview also closely resemble the narrator's and writer's fates by the end of this ep. 1) publish to great acclaim but never write again = the narrator, omniscient and free but unable to write the story himself. 2) infinite story inspiration but cursed to remain unpublished in obscurity = the writer, sealed away but generating stories to power a universe.
- what does it all mean
- Jason Spake
- i’m not coping with that one at all, in case ur wondering
- it would have been dramatically funnier if he just strolled past and waved without saying anything but i'm also just happy he's here and i'd love to ask him some questions if he has a minute in the midst of all that tennis, jason wait a minute come back jason pls it's important jason the farm wait
- a monumental in-episode parallel happening here is that ethel is elated/devasted that jughead, her crush, finally acknowledges her but not romantically, while jughead's first crush, jason, has literally come back from the dead and Finally spoke to him like he always wanted but it's just. not meant to be. alas
- at the school library jughead hunts for 'the philosophy of parallel universes' which is a nod to donnie darko's philosophy of time travel. we're pointedly given the name of the author:
- a qooqle tells me thomas walker is the father of one of the main characters in caos and a reverend in greendale. this lines up with donnie darko. the author in the film, roberta sparrow, was a nun until she had, presumably, an experience like donnie's after which she dedicated her life to science and wrote the book. probably an inconsequential detail but v thoughtful, i love stuff like this
- dilton's logic here is wild like,, beloved u could publish something amazing about universes self destructing but what universe will host the publication after these 2 are gone? someone should go check if he has an interdimensional ship
- it's not my jam or a thing any of my friends have done so i must ask: is it normal to have ur mother at ur bachelorette party?
- there is a waitress at the casino who keeps showing up in frame like she's supposed to be important and Every single time i have a moment where i believe that it's polly. she looks so similar :'(
- and Where Is polly? is glen back from being murdered? what about reggie's dad?
- i think it's probably absolute garbage that reggie's only storyline this episode focuses on him struggling against an anomolous version of himself for a position in his own fucking life and relationship when not that many episodes ago his story involved grief and coping with a dead parent which is more than a little relevant presently with regard to archie, who is another character reggie's self esteem suffers for comparing himself to. there was a plot with a lot of potential on the table just waiting to be picked up and instead the writers went with inviting back reggie prime and the low-hanging fruit of threesome bait. sure, it's a compact subplot that wraps up easily but it leaves some pretty serious unfinished business for rivervale reggie.
- not to mention showcasing veronica's selfish side and her lack of interest in understanding his reaction. yikes
- anyway
- here is jughead lingering in a wistful moment of nostalgia and longing with Zero space between him and archie, who is in this same moment flipping thru his mental planner to figure out the best time to murder jughead before he can stop the world ending. ✨bffs💫 the seductive song from next scene bleeding in over top really adds a little something
- then they go rescue jason from 'the blackhood' in the whyte wyrm's basement which looks suspiciously exactly like the diner's basement bar but i can't help but think of that scene in men in black. yes, it looked like jason was being held hostage but what if actually his dad was about to surprise him with a pizza party and a little father son time? the rescue party just uhh surprised him into pulling a gun
- where does that pizza go?
- it escapes to a different universe
- i love when mr. weatherbee and miss bell attend events. archie's closest living family members couldn't make it thru the town boundaries for the wedding rehearsal dinner and betty decided she hates my boi curdle, but it's fine. the high school administrative staff are always down to fill seats and celebrate whatever.
- i accept toni discovering and being most affected by cheryl's death. but i don't love to see cheryl and toni together at the end bc in my opinion there's no walking back the racist way cheryl was written the entire span they dated. toni appeared to have come to healthy terms with this in s5 and it's my hope that's the end of it, i hate to see characters go backwards. i had a whole bit i chopped out of my thoughts for last episode, pondering whether cheryl (or abigail) and toni had ever been together in rivervale, bc it's not really acknowledged. but that's all whatever.
- why did archie kill cheryl tho? does jason's absence at all the wedding stuff despite basically being betty's brother-in-law, not to mention his lack of acknowledgement by everyone other than cheryl, indicate that he de-manifested? did cheryl realize something wasn't right and come to believe jughead after all? and was she maybe capable of effecting a change on the situation??
- there's a moment in the narration here that's very !!!
- in riverdale 'prime' i have always thought of the narrator and the writer as the same person - the storyteller, speaking/writing from a point in the future about events that are in the past from his perspective. and prime's jughead is distinct from the narrator in that he's just a character within the story, same as all the other characters. he's privileged with a definite future bc he has to survive to tell the story and his emotional insight is probably the most central to the story, but otherwise he's not omniscient or in control or anything.
- and rivervale's narrator may speak possessively about jughead the character's life from time to time ('my old pal archie' 'my ex girlfriend' 'our keys' to the apartment with tabitha) but the stories he's telling are clearly not treated as recollections of his own life. even when he doesn’t say it's from his imagination he still maintains the distance of a rod serling type host. actually ‘host’ might be a better name for him than narrator. (btw there’s one and only one twilight zone ep where the characters see rod and it’s about a writer who controls reality too)
- but this episode stands apart immediately, bc for maybe the first time ever (?) the character is narrating. at the start he says 'this really happened,' establishing he’s speaking from his own experience. and here there's this moment where the character appears to have sudden realization while at the same time the narrator voices it as 'wait a minute...' meaning the narrating character doesn’t have more information than the in-the-moment character.
- to me this is so trippy?? bc it confirms the narration is from the character's limited perspective. he isn't omniscient, he's not necessarily telling this after the fact. he can't know what's going on in other people's minds unless he can find out somehow later, but does he have time for that? does this explain why everyone else is so strange and one-dimensional in this ep?
- idk, i don't think i know how put this thought into words all the way
- same bag, same bag, bag man foils. there can only be one bag man. ilu dilton but u gotta go
- dark horse ethel Comes Through <3 i'm devastated that shannon's not a regular or more frequent guest, she's so good. she hits that tragic unreciprocated obsession love mark perfectly. ethel was def about to suggest she and jughead could kiss again. for the sake of their friendship it's probably better this way.
- that did remind me tho of how the s3 g&g plot actually has a precedent for jughead authoring reality - when he writes the 'red paladin rescue campaign' that the squad saving archie unwittingly follows. was he actually able to do this all along? that's fucked up
- speaking of saving people, jughead's usual inclination to save as many people as he can is on full display this ep. i mentioned the possibility that this isn't the first go-round in the time loop
- one reason i get that vibe is the specific discrepencies in people's lives here. jason's alive. the black hood never happened. hiram never arrived - in fact, he died on the night veronica recently described (to us) as the night he ruined her self esteem. these are changes, which i assume means someone had to do the changing. i think jughead, tho he can't remember it, has been thru this loop once already and tried to rewrite everything. unfortunately now this universe is destabilizing and the collision with the prime universe is undoing the work as un-edited reality bleeds back in.
- at least, that's how i'm reading it.
- jughead and archie's fight has Such s1 vibes. not only bc this is the most these two have interacted in a very long time, but also like,, the collar grab and tense feeling resembles the 'a kid is dead' argument, the choreography starts out feeling similar to the vending machine fight with reggie, then the table smash reminds of the jughead and chuck fight in 1.10. fun
- fred as archie's villain orgin story, inspired. adult archie's solution to his ambivalence is just to do whatever he thinks his dad will praise him for, but with his same worst judgement possible as always, inevitably leading to murder <3
- if there's any logic here about characters reviving or not, my guess is that it matters where the character physically died - whether it was within town limits or not. fred died out of town. but everyone else, ben button, dilton, clifford, hal, and jason died locally. the narrator died right on the border. is that why polly isn't back? is part of the lonely highway too far away? but tabitha's friend squeaky appeared before. hm.
- also, what's so special about witches like abigail if everyone is unrestricted by death in rivervale?
- terrible missed opportunity to do like that really overwrought snl frou frou sketch and have veronica revive at the last minute and come kill archie in revenge. in no universe has he ever treated her right smh
- going back to comics, jughead and betty kissing feels like an oblique nod to the end of jughead the hunger. veronica goes to kiss jughead when the world is blowing up or whatever but then betty snags him instead. i know bughead fandom has passed those panels around a lot, which is how i've seen them. admittedly i didn't get very far into vampironica so i don't know for sure,,, , but that end seemed bad to me bc from what i read, within that canon he and veronica were actually tight while betty was actively trying to kill him?? ? ?
- who built that bomb: ethel?? where The Fuck did they get that much c4 on short notice lmao. like, ethel what have u been up to
- the song playing while these two kiss, 'you don't need me the way that i need u.' the clarification keeps getting more and more painfully explicit. is that chunk of fandom still being embarrassing? that's rhetorical lol, i don't need to know anything about that
- she suddenly cares what's happening to him? this is Not Betty in exactly the same way it's Not Archie talking about the 'threshold of revelation' and probability percentages. jughead's already written this. it's manipulated, a one-sided projection by jughead that's maybe finally giving him the closure that's been haunting him for years. it only took him controlling a whole parallel universe to get there
- viewing it this way of course raises horrifying questions. like, what's the nature of free will in rivervale? is there consent in that kiss? does anything anyone does here actually matter if it's all prescripted? fatalism creeps me out
- finally put my finger on what it is that makes narrator jughead look so uncanny: extreme undereye concealer. makes sense - a metaphysical being cannot be sleep deprived
- btw! his arrival in this ep to an interactive level is called metalepsis, here’s a vid that explains about this concept. at least, i think he qualifies? is he still a narrator if he’s not narrating? hm.
- what he is, is a hero of this universe bc i didn't want that on my screen at all whew. i realize part of this is solely a personal response that i've arrived at for many reasons, but still,, credit to the writers for getting these characters’ dynamic to this intensely uncomfortable point where all i want is for her to get away from him.
- betty is super funny this ep bc she has a uniformly bewildered response to everything
- this is what i mean when i say one-note overacting btw. but this would be a much heavier ep without this kind of levity
- her one moment that i thought stood out really well was the face she makes when he snaps and says this is how it has to be. super reminiscent of the s4 (s5?) scene that's the morning after she confesses to him and he asks if they can talk later. betty's expression for when she's told 'no' by jughead.
- time loop time loop time loop i love it here
- is it a loop like,, , like the writer generates the narrator who becomes the character who becomes the writer? i feel like that would explain why shit started breaking when jughead got close to the dead narrator and then later it was fine when the two were together at the table with betty. their loop will destabilize if any of them dies.
- :') jughead writing the absolute best life he could want for himself: dinner buffet with friends and a reason to leave early to be alone with tabitha
- thank u, hugging jabitha, for my life
- wow it's just like in farscape. jk not at all, but there did end up being two of the same guy and only one of his girlfriend. someone's got to lose. luckily in this case no one is being blasted into the vacuum of space. yet? this kind of story always gets worse before it gets better tho so this feels like it's not over.
- this is just to say shannon is gorgeous and i hope they bring her back for more. also they're really onto something with those glasses huh
- does this mean there are two typewriters in rivervale now or is the jughead character who was previously the narrator now finally free of it?
- on that note,, from the tvtropes page on, i think, ‘writing reality’:
- hm
- here's the actual paradox, i think: that phone call didn't happen in the original reality and now it does. smh jughead sometimes u have to accept how things go and just let people get blown up
- it's Literally major curda's voice on the phone but i'm also having flashbacks to when they photoshopped hal's eyes bright green. some of my trust damaged by this show has been healed but not all
- there's an echo in rivervale - not literally - of jughead being affected by a loud sound. foreshadowing. that ending tho 😰 is there going to be an actual consequential injury here?? or was that just for tv drama :/
- ty, this is super interesting!!!
- so i watched the series thru (at a comically high playback speed to save time. life hack: don't do this lol) and i see what u mean! especially in the similarity between the ends.
- but straightaway one difference there is that fakir has to come up with a story that works with and not against the agency and will of the other characters - and their hard-earned agency is a central theme of the whole series. conversely, jughead automatically assumes complete control and furthermore, he's not coming up with a new story - he's just copying it from the comic the narrator retrieved from the diner. if rd is following after donnie darko's model, then the characters' free will here is treated very differently.
- plus we're missing any indication that the characters in rivervale originated within the comic books or are controlled by them. but this has got me thinking about how jughead came to possess this power. could it be a family trait like fakir's??
- but i'm fascinated by the way princess tutu overlaps with nge??? especially the rebuild films. i see some stark similarities between rue's relationship with her father vs shinji and gendo. plus mytho and rei and their null interior experiences caused by their wronged connection to their souls. also the souls-cores-heart shards stuff. the evangelion show and films end with reality being rewritten too.
- and now this has me thinking about in the mouth of madness, an hp lovecraft-inspired film revolving around an author rewriting reality - powered by belief, maybe therefore in the same vein as in princess tutu. and in the last rebuild of eva film, shinji is empowered to alter reality with a, uhhh, metaphysical spear that's the embodiment of humanity's collective defiant willpower. that is to say, these stories all seem to suggest there’s something in human consciousness that can be unlocked to transcend reality and become god
- but within in the mouth of madness, characters become more and more aware that their reality is a fiction and not only are they powerless against it, they don't even exist outside of it, which drives them to insanity and into gory cthulic transformations. that would probably be a very funny way to end the whole show
- little soon for that tho
- oh! and one last thing i watched for this ep was our town, six yrs after the show first mentioned it.
- there's two points about it that i find kind of relevant to rivervale. one is the narrator (the stage manager) who does a lot - he tells the story to the audience, directs which events are shown, and sometimes slips into different small roles to interact with the characters. at the end, he interacts with one as himself.
- that's the second thing - the last act is 'death' and the dead characters discuss how the mysteries of life, if not the whole universe, have been revealed to them. they could 'go back' and relive their lives, but their changed perspective makes it too painful bc the living don't yet know what the dead do.
- not to say there's a specific parallel happening here, but i think the similarity of elements is neat to think about
