'Riverdale' midseason finale recap: Unhappy holidays
Warning: This recap of the “Chapter Twenty-Two: Silent Night, Deadly Night” episode of Riverdale contains spoilers.
If not in necessarily real life, the holidays are a great time for TV characters to learn important lessons about, I don’t know, miracles and the human spirit and junk like that. Even the most hardened cynic can’t resist the cozy imagery and heightened emotions that arise from the most grounded of shows — think the teapot episode of The Office or the time when Angela Chase hung out with a literal angel with body odor on My So-Called Life. But here’s the other thing about holiday episodes… they’re often the midseason finales of serialized shows, so they might often include a game-changing moment or cliffhanger, like when Klaus drowned the mayor during its Christmas-in-March festival (don’t ask) on The Vampire Diaries.
Unfortunately, except for some decidedly Christmassy imagery, Riverdale didn’t do much with the occasion except offer an extremely, obviously questionable “resolution” to the Black Hood plot line. There wasn’t even a Christmas musical number (except Josie singing in the background for three seconds)! And no shirtless Archie in a Santa hat? What gives! Relative to Riverdale‘s recent hot streak, Chapter Twenty-Two: Silent Night, Deadly Night felt like a twinkle-light letdown. Oh well. Still fun though. Let’s talk about it!
We began at a Christmas tree lot, which had been set up in the parking lot of the town’s only diner. Friends, Christmas had come to Riverdale!
I love that the owner of this red car was like, “F*** it, I’m parking here anyway.” So the purveyor of this Christmas tree lot was none other than Archie’s dad, Luke Perry (as himself). He was picking up a few extra coins during the holidays, which was necessary since he’d gone and run up an $86,000 tab at the hospital. That’ll teach him to get in that ambulance when he probably should’ve just stayed home and staple-gunned his bullet wound.
Anyway, nobody was feeling very festive this year, especially not the teens, who were all recovering from last week’s Breakup Fiesta and/or were having nightmares about masked killers murdering their families under the Christmas tree!
Personally, I enjoyed this creepy image, especially when the Black Hood crept over the couch toward the camera in Riverdale’s most overt homage to Twin Peaks since it cast Shelly the waitress as a mom. Betty did NOT enjoy this image, however.
Another element to this nightmare was that Polly had returned home. Which was worse? Hard to know.
The next day, the gang convened in its members-only (?) student lounge where they exchanged Secret Santa gifts. Again, another disappointment as this should have been an amazing montage of wacky gifts they’d gotten for each other — Hotter Reggie gifting Josie a basket of Jingle Jangle or whatever. Instead, Archie gave Betty a children’s book of The Swiss Family Robinson because they used to listen to it on audiotape as kids. Wild and sexy, right? Forget bedroom window nudity, THIS was the romantic intrigue we’d been craving. Also, Moose was out of the hospital despite having most of the blood in his body sprayed all over his dashboard a few months ago. Welcome back, Moose!
I gotta hand it to Riverdale, this was one TV town where the War on Christmas was absolutely decided in Santa’s favor. There were actual Christmas trees in the high school hallways! Like in this scene when Betty and Archie noticed that the creepy janitor (with a past!) had been replaced by an even creepier janitor, and all I could think about was how well-decorated the 8-foot Christmas tree behind them was. Also, just as an aside, my mom and I watched a lot of Hallmark Channel over Thanksgiving and the thing that made me laugh was how literally every shot of every scene had twinkle lights in the background, even if it meant they were stapled to the wall behind a character’s head in a cafe. Riverdale was basically doing the same thing here, just sort of inserting Christmas stuff in the background as often as possible. Not mad, never mad.
Like, OK. The Southside Serpents converted their sleazy dive bar into a Christmas wrapping station, which seems very in line with how gentle and adorable this biker gang is. Yes, they run drugs and murder and punch each other in the face for LOLs, but they also deliver Nerf guns to burn wards so it’s all very heartwarming! That being said, Jughead’s heart was very unwarmed at the moment, mostly because he was still supersteamed about Penny Peabody tricking him into being her errand boy. So what did he intend to do about it? Stay tuned, folks.
This week it was Archie and Betty’s turn to team up and investigate stuff, so they attempted to go visit the janitor from last week at his home in the foggiest and creepiest part of town. But he wasn’t there! He was missing. Where did he go? Had the Black Hood abducted him? According to the “present” Betty received at her home later that night, the answer was probably.
Because yikes!
Betty did not love receiving a severed finger in a box, and a later phone call confirmed it had belonged to the janitor. The Black Hood was not messing around!
Even though Archie and Veronica were technically broken up, he let slip that his father had a huge medical bill, and of course, Veronica took care of it. To be fair, she initially asked her parents for permission to pay for Luke Perry’s bill and they said no, but then she found out they’d bought Pop’s Diner in secret and that was all the permission she needed to secretly charge $86,000 to her mother’s black “American Excess” card. I love when characters solve all their problems by being rich, I find it very relatable!
Later, Jughead had a very brilliant idea for how to rid himself of the Penny Peabody problem. He simply had his friends kidnap her and drive her across a bridge and then slice off her gang-affiliation tattoo with a switchblade! That’ll do it.
Seeing as Jughead’s father Skeet Ulrich (as himself) had constantly warned him that Penny was dangerous (without ever explaining why), this was maybe not a great way to get rid of her, and I have a feeling she will be back to mess things up for Jughead after she applies some disinfectant to her arm wound. Look, I like Jughead and especially the actor who plays him, but is he the biggest dunce on the show this season? Let’s not even get into how terrible his “novel” is going to be, what kind of decision making was this? It’s both vicious and stupid. Anyway, good luck with that, guys.
We then got another basket full of revelations about the Riverdale Reaper incident from decades earlier. According to Cheryl’s amazingly crotchety grandmother, apparently the surviving member of the murdered family (who went on to become the creepy janitor) had fingered the wrong killer, and a local vigilante mob that included Betty’s grandfather had buried the guy alive in a public park! So now perhaps the Black Hood was seeking vengeance for this “original sin” of bearing false witness? Perhaps!
Then Betty and Archie kissed on the mouth, no big deal. Seriously, it was such a no-big-deal that they continued their investigation and then made no reference to the kiss ever again. Sometimes two people just have to casually kiss and get it over with! Friend stuff.
At this point the Black Hood lured them into digging up an empty casket where the innocent man had been buried alive, then he jumped out and forced Archie to lie down inside! Fortunately, Betty had the wherewithal to hit the Black Hood with a shovel, and pretty soon the two teens were chasing him across town on foot!
Within moments, Archie had grabbed the Black Hood’s gun and had him at gunpoint! That’s when another gunshot rang out of the blue… Sheriff Keller had arrived and murdered the Black Hood on sight!
And under that black hood? The creepy janitor. And his finger was missing! Now, obviously none of this adds up, and even more obviously, one of the oldest tricks in the serial killer book is to enlist a victim to pose as the killer (see: Se7en, and every Saw movie basically). Look, maaaaybe Sheriff Keller is not the Black Hood, but this episode did not convince me of this! These guys know what I’m talking about:
Considering they’d allegedly brought down the killer who had been terrorizing the town (and who’d shot Archie’s dad), they sure didn’t feel superjazzed about it! Fortunately, the episode didn’t end there. We got a montage of the kids exchanging Christmas gifts that made it feel like they were all basically getting back together. Especially when Archie gave Veronica a locket with their pictures in it and she had no choice but to show up to his house and mouth attack him under some mistletoe.
Aw, cute. (But who was taking photos of them from the bushes? Maybe we will find out in January.)
And yeah, perhaps Betty’s decision to throw all of her Black Hood dossier information into the fire was premature. Because, again, come on. There’s no way the Black Hood plot line is resolved. That feels very obvious to me, and as a result, this episode was harmed by the lie. That is the problem with actively misdirecting the audience; it robs us of emotional closure and in retrospect, this episode will seem especially useless. Christmas episodes should not be useless!
All that being said, Riverdale remains a gift. A beautifully wrapped gift with a nice bow and maybe a glittery pine cone. I like it a lot and can’t wait for January, how about you? OK, great, see you then!
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on the CW.
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