The anticipated second season of the hit CW series Riverdale premiered last week and the series has come back with a new mystery, more parental conflicts, continuing relationship drama and shadowy figures.
Riverdale is a live action adaptation of the Archie Comics franchise and is set in the town of Riverdale centering on the life of Archibald “Archie” Andrews and his friends as they deal with their relationships and the many scandals of where they live.
The first season was met with both praise and criticism for its darker, gritty, dramatic tone in contrast to the light-hearted comics. At certain points, it was intriguing and peculiar, but overall it was merely an enjoyable first season with interesting twists and likable characters.
The first episode of the second season is off to a solid start. All the actors are showing an ability to be more comfortable in their characters and are still shown to have nice chemistry in their intimate scenes. The episode does a good job at hooking the audience within the first ten seconds, it spends a reasonable amount of time refreshing the audience to previous events, and
then manages to set up the seasonal arcs for the main characters in a way that flows well and does not feel forced.
A few negatives against the episode are how certain cast members appeared in the episode while contributing nothing in terms of dialogue, they felt ancillary. To add, a few point transitions of new scenes were random and took the viewer out of the episode for a split second, making me
think something was cut between scenes sloppily. There were a few times when humor was thrown in at awkward times, making it jarring and unnecessary.
While not entirely necessary, the episode will be a little easier to follow in certain areas if you have seen the previous season. As there are references to past events that new viewers might not quite get, but there are lines of dialogue to help keep the audience up to date, and they do not feel
too expositional.
Below are spoilers for the episode, discussing the finer points of the narrative.
Fred’s coma visions were a nice addition to the episode, making us root even more for him to survive and possibly introducing a new arc for the character to bond even more with Archie. Hopefully there are repercussions form this shooting and we see a change in Fred, rather than him just being A-OK next episode.
Then there was the chilling introduction of the illustrious Hiram Lodge. While only a short scene in the ending of the episode, I feel that the season long hype built up for this character was not wasted, we know we will be seeing more of him and so far, the performance by Mark Consuelos is intimidating. I want to see how his presence is going to shake up the season as the (most
likely) main antagonist of the season.
As for the ending to the episode, I felt that they were saving Ms. Grundy’s return to become an actual plot point. I’m all for killing her off but it was a little sudden even though it does make the man in the hood more intimidating and mysterious.
The big question of the season will be who is under the mask and what is their overall goal. My only hope is that the show will avoid the trope of dragging out the big reveal until the penultimate episode or that we will go multiple episodes without touching the plot line only to have enormous twists come out of nowhere. It probably will as this is the CW but I can hope.
