Netflix's Riverdale is one of the most infamously chaotic shows on television. It is a baffling coalescence of genres and plot lines that seem to increase in their outrageousness as the show progress. The internet is constantly torn over whether the show is some kind of maximalist camp masterpiece or an utterly ridiculous insult to the comic book series it purports to be based on. Love it or loathe it, there's no denying Riverdale's tonal shift from a regular teen drama to what seems to be some kind of pastiche experiment operating outside the confines of logic or reason. It has given way to some of the most hilariously unbelievable storylines, whether by accident or on purpose.
In their mission to do as much as possible all the time, the Riverdale writers have had their characters fight mob wars (and real wars), survive Mothman attacks, be stalked by no less than three serial killers, commit a staggering number of federal crimes, fake their deaths, traverse parallel universes, and, most recently, develop superpowers. It would take all day to deconstruct everything that's happened on Riverdale in its six seasons, but a handful of storylines stand supreme.
Chad Michael Murray's Cult
The first of Riverdale's cults (the operative word being first) was called "The Farm." It was alluded to as early as Season 1, with young lovers Polly Cooper (Tiera Skovbye) and Jason Blossom (Trevor Stines) planning to run away upstate to live on "a farm" after discovering Polly is pregnant. Their plan never comes to fruition; Polly's parents send her to a nunnery while Jason is kidnaped by the Southside Serpents, tortured, and eventually killed by his father. The Farm is brought up again in Season 2 after Polly escapes the nunnery and finally manages to reach The Farm, where she believes she and her unborn babies will be able to live in peace.
Polly later returns to Riverdale with her twin babies, Juniper and Dagwood, when her father is revealed to have been a serial killer known as the Black Hood. She soon introduces her mother Alice (Mädchen Amick) to "her friend" from The Farm, Edgar Evernever (Chad Michael Murray, perhaps Riverdale's most inspired casting yet), who turns out to be the leader of the cult. Both Polly and her mother are indoctrinated and become 'Farmies' from this point on. Evelyn Evernever (Zoé De Grand Maison) — Edgar's wife, who is masquerading as his teenage daughter — soon enrolls at Riverdale High and begins recruiting students into The Farm, including Kevin Keller (Casey Cott) and Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch), the late Jason's twin sister.
Polly's younger sister Betty (Lili Reinhart) unravels the mystery of the Farm and, after an entire season of wild antics, discovers that Edgar is hypnotizing the Farmies into submission and harvesting their organs. After his organ harvesting scheme is uncovered, Edgar decides it's time for him and the Farmies to "ascend,"; which is to say, he plans to take off in a rocket while Evelyn drives a bus full of Farmies off a cliff. Betty and Alice, who comes to her senses in the eleventh hour, manage to defeat him.
Betty's Fake Brother Dating Betty's Real Brother
The story of the long-lost Cooper brother is as confusing as anything else on Riverdale; first, Alice reveals she had a child in high school — a son called Charles — who she gave up for adoption. Alice and Betty visit a hostel where he was last seen; a blonde man who calls himself "Chic" (Hart Denton) answers the door and claims to be Charles. He goes with Alice and Betty to back Riverdale and lives with them in the Cooper house. Betty soon grows distrustful of the strange young man, while Alice is thrilled to have her "son" back.
It is soon revealed that he is, in fact, not Alice's son; instead, he claims, he and the real Charles used to live together, but then Charles died (at first, Chic blames a drug overdose, then later claims to have killed him) and Chic decided to steal his identity. Chic works with Cheryl Blossom's mother, Penelope (Nathalie Boltt), and becomes the Gargoyle King before being sent to prison. In the following season, the real Charles (Wyatt Nash), who is, in fact, alive and works for the FBI, turns up and establishes a tentative bond with Betty.
Everything seems fine until Charles visits Chic in prison and calls him "babe"; it turns out not only are there two Charles', but they're both serial killers and lovers. Charles ends up going to prison himself, and the pair are reunited. A few episodes after Charles is incarcerated, there is a mass prison breakout, and the pair turn up at the Cooper's doorstep just in time for Juniper and Dagwood's birthday party. They demand Alice — who has recently become ordained — marry them, then try to force the family to play a game called "The Pincushion Man," which involves the nine-year-old Juniper sticking a butcher's knife in Betty's boyfriend, Glenn.
Riverdale Does 'The Hills Have Eyes'
Season 5 of Riverdale involves a five-year-time jump, during which time the "town with pep" spirals out of control and becomes a cesspool of crime and depravity. One of the town's significant troubles is a series of unexplained killings of young women, many of whom "work the highway" — including Polly Cooper, Betty's older sister. After a violent confrontation, Betty captures one of the attackers, but he bites his tongue off before she can get any answers from him. A DNA test, however, reveals a key clue: the man is somehow related to Betty.
Betty is both a Cooper and a distant relative of the Blossom family, so she and Jughead pay Rose Blossom (Barbara Wallace) a visit and question her about the family tree. She reveals her late husband was a serial adulterer and fathered at least a dozen bastard children raised by a couple in the woods. These illegitimate Blossoms eventually became an inbred family of serial killers who live in a junkyard along the Lonely Highway. They also created a myth of an extraterrestrial "Mothman" living in the woods to scare away prying eyes. The Archie gang storms the junkyard, but it's too late to rescue Polly, who is dead in the trunk of a wrecked sedan.
Weekend at Jason's
During Cheryl Blossom's tenure as a cult member, The Farm digs up her twin brother Jason's body to use it as a prop in their attempts to brainwash her. When Cheryl eventually breaks free and escapes the Farm, she cannot part with Jason again and decides to take his decomposing corpse with her. She hides him in a chapel in the basement of her family's mansion, Thistlehouse, where she tells him about her day as if he were alive and regularly reads him the newspaper.
Cheryl's girlfriend Toni (Vanessa Morgan) eventually stumbles upon Cheryl maintaining Jason's corpse and forces Cheryl to bury him. This doesn't last long; Toni later agrees to dig him up again when Cheryl convinces her they can either keep Jason's body in the chapel or be haunted by a doll possessed by the spirit of Cheryl and Jason's triplet brother Julian, who died in utero. After a few more weeks of combing Jason's hair and pushing him around the house in a wheelchair to scare unwanted relatives out of town, Cheryl is finally convinced to see him off. She and her friends give him a Viking's funeral on Sweetwater River, and her brief phase as a borderline incestuous necromantic is never mentioned again.
The Sisters of Unethical Drug Experimentation
One of Riverdale's enduring institutions is a nunnery called The Sisters of Quiet Mercy. First introduced in Season 1, when the pregnant Polly Cooper is sent there to discreetly give birth, the location proves more vital and sinister in later seasons. In Season 3, specifically, Alice Cooper has her other daughter, Betty, admitted to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy "for her own safety," fearing the serial killer proclivities Betty is believed to have inherited from her father. While institutionalized, Betty uncovers a diabolical scheme in motion at the nunnery, involving a deal between the crooked mobster Hiram Lodge (Mark Consuelos) and the nuns in charge.
Betty discovers that Hiram Lodge pays the Sisters of Quiet Mercy to forcibly administer illicit drugs to the girls in their care as a form of human experimentation. This falls into Hiram's wider plot to get the entire town of Riverdale hooked on the drugs he manufactures, infamously called "Fizzle Rocks" and "Jingle Jangle." The partnership between the Sisters and Hiram is beneficial both ways. In addition to monetary gain, having their patients under the influence of hallucinogenics makes it easy for the Sisters to scare the girls into submission.
Dark Betty
Pretty and blonde, with her pink sweaters and high ponytail, Betty Cooper is established right at the beginning of Riverdale to be a quintessential example of the "girl next door" archetype. But, of course, this is Riverdale, a show whose whole ethos is founded on pastiche and parody. Their way of subverting the "girl next door" trope is for Betty to have a sinister alter ego, who she labels "Dark Betty." Dark Betty wears a black bobbed wig. black lingerie, and performs all manner of scandalous acts the perfect Betty Cooper would never dream of committing.
One of the first scenes involving Dark Betty happens at a dive bar called the White Wyrm, frequented by Riverdale's resident outlaw gang, the Southside Serpents. Betty, at the time a high schooler hoping to be initiated into the Serpents, performs a striptease. At the same time, her friends Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) and Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes) sing a cover of Gary Jules' "Mad World." Dark Betty also tortures a guy and becomes a cam girl. Dark Betty was eventually retired from the show at actress Lili Reinhart's request, as she felt it was weird and inappropriate.
Archie Getting Mauled By a Bear
At the start of the show's third season, Archie Andrews decides he needs to skip town. He is not only on the run from the law after being caught with a stash of drugs, but he has to escape the tyranny of his arch-nemesis Hiram Lodge, his ex-girlfriend's dad, who has been trying to kill him for most of the show despite Archie still being in high school at this point.
Archie goes to Canada and lives in the wilderness for an indeterminate period until one day, while out on a walk, he is mauled by a bear. This event happens out of nowhere, and Archie barely survives the encounter but is also fine by the next episode. He later has a shirtless confrontation with Reggie Mantle (Charles Melton), during which he shows off a trio of scratches so minor it appears to have been created by a cat or perhaps a raccoon. When Reggie asks what happened to him, Archie gruffly replies, "I was attacked by a bear."
Saving Private Andrews
A few episodes into Season 5 of Riverdale, we learn that not only has there been a five-year time jump, but during that time, Archie Andrews has joined the army and been shipped off to fight in a war. Typical for Riverdale, it's unclear what year or time period this season or even the entire show is supposed to be set in: everything looks somehow modern and vaguely mid-century all at once. Although, while in high school, Archie used a smartphone and wore a letterman jacket, his war flashbacks appear to be taking place in the trenches during World War One.
After a mission gone wrong that sees most of his platoon die, Archie is discharged and sent back to Riverdale as a war hero. He is tasked with relaunching the defunct ROTC program at Riverdale High. He is referred to as 'Private Andrews' by the other characters for a while and struggles with PTSD and night terrors. Eventually, like much of what happens in Riverdale, his career as a war hero vanishes into the abandoned plotline void.
The Cult of Jason Blossom
A few seasons after the rise and fall of The Farm, the organ-harvesting cult run by Chad Michael Murray, Riverdale decides to reopen the cult can of worms with Penelope Blossom (Nathalie Boltt) starting a religion worshipping her late son Jason. Penelope's small congregation of white-clad worshippers proves as little more than a scheme for her to exploit them for money; until Cheryl, always prime to sabotage the mother she so loathes, decides to hijack the operation.
Cheryl decides that to convince the worshippers to defect to her leadership; she will perform three miracles and qualify for sainthood. First, she turns water into maple syrup. Then she manifests the pain of the entire congregation, causing her to bleed from two wounds on her hands that suspiciously look like the stigmata of Jesus Christ. Her last miracle plays out in what endures as one of Riverdale's most infamously ridiculous scenes: Cheryl reaches into a glass tank full of bees without being stung, lifts two fistfuls of honeycomb into the air, and wields them as she confronts her mother, saying "be gone from my temple, or I will smite thee, for I am Cheryl Blossom, queen of the bees!"
Do Not Talk About The Prison Fight Club
No Riverdale character has suffered more than Archie Andrews. Long before being shipped off to fight in an anachronistic war or slaughtered by the entire town in a ritualistic human sacrifice, he spent most of his time trying to survive the fiery hatred of Hiram Lodge and their feud, which underpins almost every season of Riverdale. The show’s second season features one of Hiram's most diabolical schemes in their war when he has Archie framed for murder and sent to prison. While incarcerated, Archie lectures his fellow inmates on the epic highs and lows of high school football, tries to stage a mass prison breakout, and is shivved and branded with a hot poker. However, all of these pale compared to the most profligate suffering he endures when he is forced — after presumably weeks of psychological torment in solitary confinement — to participate in an underground fight club run out of an empty pool somewhere in the prison grounds.
The fight club seems to function mainly for the guards' entertainment; winners are determined when one inmate manages to knock their opponent unconscious. Outsiders also occasionally visit the prison to watch the fights for sport — such as Archie’s girlfriend, Veronica. She manages to sneak into the prison as a "spectator" with only a blonde wig as her disguise, which may be the most unbelievable part of the storyline. Archie soon becomes the most prized fighter in the underground juvenile detention center fight club, claiming it takes great restraint to stop himself from killing his opponents because he’s just too good at fighting. Okay, Archie, whatever you say.