Riverdale is on the brink of its 100th episode and in that time, the show has evolved throughout its run from a simple murder mystery to a serial killer murder spree to a mind-controlling cult story and back again. If there is one thing you can say about the show is that they take a lot of crazy risks and fans should not expect that to change anytime soon.
Recently, showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa sat down with Variety to discuss “Chapter One Hundred: The Jughead Paradox” and the future of Season 6. Aguirre-Sacasa starts by discussing the show’s landmark episode, saying:
“As soon as we realized that our fifth episode [of the Rivervale arc] would land with our 100th episode, we thought, ‘OK, maybe we’ll do something that’s a little bit more meta and a little more a celebration, as opposed to a really dark episode,’ which is what we originally thought was going to happen. We wanted to celebrate not just the show and where the show began, how far the show’s gone, but we wanted to do a love letter to Archie Comics and the source material.”
Riverdale has had its fair share of meta moments throughout the series, especially in the “Rivervale” arc, but this upcoming episode really looks to go all-in on paying homage to the comics that inspired them. The show has over 90 years of source material to pull from, with the promo and the previously released images for the episode appearing to be a classic Archie fever dream fit for Riverdale, from the nostalgic costumes to the bubbly lighting to the literal Archie Comics lining store shelves.
For those who love the darker side of the show, Aguirre-Sacasa teased, “The big horror story that we were planning to do for the fifth episode that we shifted once we realized it was our 100th episode, we are still doing that story, but it’s going to be in Riverdale,” and continued on to say, “Death is definitely coming to Riverdale, and it is definitely permanent." This is intriguing, to say the least, because Riverdale has dabbled in the horror genre multiple times in its first 100 episodes.
“Rivervale”, which has been a horror anthology told by a version of Jughead, has left fans with so many questions. The details are still foggy, but it appears from the promo for the upcoming episode that this has all been fragments of Jughead’s mind as he attempts to write his next story. It will be interesting to see if Riverdale will fully commit to a horror story outside of the context of “Rivervale” and what “permanent” death truly means after many seasons full of fake tombstones. However, with Aguirre-Sacasa recently teasing the potential return of Sabrina everything seems to be on the table for a show that avoided the supernatural at all cost in its first 5 seasons.
Whatever the case may be, the future path of Season 6 will become more clear when the 100th episode of the show premieres on December 14 at 9/8c on The CW. For all the latest Riverdale news, stick with Collider.