Riverdale boss breaks down season 6 finale time jump and previews final season
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Warning: This post contains spoilers from the season 6 finale of Riverdale.
We did NOT see that coming.
After a season spent battling Percival (Chris O'Shea), our Riverdale heroes had one last hurdle to overcome in the season 6 finale: Bailey's comet, which, thanks to Percival, was heading straight for Riverdale. And with an invisible forcefield around the town, no one could escape. So, our heroes came together, combined their powers and sent a super-powered Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch) off to (hopefully) destroy the comet. No one knew if their plan would work, and in the end, it sort of did?
Riverdale survived the comet, but it's not exactly the Riverdale we know anymore. The comet reset essentially everything, taking our main characters back to high school — only this time, they're in high school in 1955.
EW spoke to showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa about the massive reset, which will take the show into its seventh and final season when it returns.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is a huge twist! Where did the idea for this time jump of sorts come from?
ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA: It came from a couple of places. At various points in the season, we had talked about what our last season could be and various people had been very nostalgic about when the kids were in high school. KJ [Apa] said to me at some point, "Man, remember when we were in high school and I was on the football team?" And Mark Pedowitz at the CW had a conversation with Jon Goldwater and said something like, "Oh remember when the kids were in high school?" We talked about it in the room and we were sort of like, gosh, could we go back and put everyone back in high school? But we've done that. They were in high school for four-plus years. It would feel like a repeat. So we were in a conundrum.
It felt like all we're going to do for season 7 is sort of a lesser version of the high school years. But in thinking about nostalgia and then coming off of our big supernatural, mythic, Steven King-like season, we knew we needed to make our last season really, really special. One thing everyone can agree on is that whenever we have our characters in their iconic comic book outfits from the 1950s, people are delighted. Cole [Sprouse] was so happy when he didn't have to wear the beanie again but he said to me, "But, man, I'll wear that crown till the day I die." So we thought: What if we go back to high school, but instead of high school in the present, we make it high school in the 1950s, which is how a lot of people think of the Archie characters.
Michael Courtney/The CW KJ Apa and Lili Reinhart on 'Riverdale'
I'm also so curious to find out what the town itself was like before Jason's (Trevor Stines) death.
Right, it felt like a great way to reset, to introduce new dynamics and new themes and of course, as always, be in dialogue with what has come before. We get to see what we're going to recreate, what we're going to reinvent. That's the exciting thing about this is it's as close to a blank canvas as you can get without it being a completely new show.
So are we resetting some love triangles? Obviously Jughead (Sprouse) knows about the past, but you all had Tabitha (Erinn Westbrook) say this season that Varchie or Barchie could be endgame, and we just got a Barchie proposal! But is all of that reset now?
The writers' room hasn't started yet, but one of the things we've talked about is that our characters, none of them are in relationships yet. So we can tell those first time stories — the first kiss, the first crush, the first heartbreak. So when we meet them, none of them are in the deep tortured relationships that we know and love with them. It's a little bit more of a blank slate. What that implies is where it goes, nobody knows yet.
I do want to touch on that Barchie proposal and how you all decided that you wanted Betty to ask Archie as the sort of conclusion to her long journey with her own darkness?
Over the last six years, whenever we tell a story that Betty's in jeopardy, any time we tried to tell a version of the story where Archie or Jughead or someone saved Betty, we couldn't do it. It never felt right for Betty to be saved by one of the guys on the show. That's not who she is. And when we were breaking the proposal story, obviously we love Archie proposing to Betty and getting down on one knee and of course that's amazing, but it didn't feel right. It felt like it had to be Betty's decision and not just a response. It felt like Betty has been wrestling with so much darkness, she had to make the choice to move toward the light. That's how we got to that. It had to be that.
What was it like to shoot the 1950s stuff?
We shot the 1950s stuff on the last day, and it just felt so right. Archie dressed in his 1950s garb looking out the window at Betty crying, comforted by her mom, her mom shooting Archie a dirty look, it was like, "Yes, this is the show! This is what we need!"
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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