What I love most about Riverdale is that it simultaneously surprises and completely makes sense at the same time. Like, of course the Blossoms live in a campy gothic mansion that Cheryl wanders around like Christina Ricci’s Casper understudy. Of course the town was built on dirty money from the Blossoms’ maple syrup crime syndicate. Of course Cheryl’s insane mother would share her daughter’s incestuous hand gestures and possibly also resent her for sharing the intimate relationship she never had with her chiseled alabaster son. (The latter is still conjecture but I’m leaning more towards incest than not here.)
Episode 5 of Riverdale wants you to think it’s mainly about Archie, whom we find in a depressed post-Grundy state. Rather than sulk privately, he overachieves publicly, throwing himself into everything in order to try and not focus on anything, but this burrito has too many ingredients and threatens to burst unless Archie can remove one ingredient (football, dating, friendship, hair dye, etc.) and salvage the integrity of the metaphorical tortilla. BUT! Archie’s is shockingly not the most pressing story line this week; rather, it’s all about the ridiculous Blossom family and their implosive internal tearing at the thousand-thread-count seams.
The Blossoms’ mansion, named Thornhill (because of course), plays host to a memorial for Jason, who still has not been buried after However………………….