"Riverdale" Halloween Includes a Girlfriends Séance, Jughead Stuck in a Coffin, and Veronica Lighting a Murderer on Fire

Halloween has come to Riverdale, and while it features some excellent costumes (Cheryl and Toni as Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, hello!), the holiday also brings a lot of fear to a town that’s already pretty haunted by past and present terrors. Turns out that VHS Betty and Jughead received last week is just 6 hours of footage of the front of their house. And all the main players in town have been getting similar tapes of their own homes. It’s weird and it’s set everyone on edge — right in time for Halloween.

But before we try to figure out why this house stalker is using a totally archaic form of technology to psychologically torture their victims, we need to cover the main plots of the evening:

It’s Time for A Séance

Let’s all take a minute to applaud Madelaine Petsch and Vanessa Morgan, because they bring it hard this episode. Each and every line delivery is chef's kiss perfection. Their plotline is also the most chilling of the evening, because after Toni finally convinces Cheryl to rebury Jason’s corpse — and they do — a creepy doll appears in the parlor. It keeps popping up, and its presence plus Nana Rose’s insistence that “[Cheryl’s] brother” is crying in the chapel, convinces Cheryl that they need to do a séance. Because this doll and the mysterious crying is obviously Jason’s ghost, upset that they buried him. Toni begrudgingly agrees to humor Cheryl. Love makes you do wild things!

Choni and Nana Rose never get to see what the Ouija board has to say, but Nana Rose reveals her own lil’ tidbit of info: Cheryl and Jason were triplets, but Cheryl absorbed the third fetus in the womb. Cheryl looks sick at hearing this, but we kinda blow right by it because then we learn that Penelope was so distraught that she reared that doll — Julian — as the third baby for a while. Toni, frustrated and creeped out, agrees that they can trade the doll for Jason’s body, but…the doll reappears the next morning. Cheryl admits that she was gaslighting her gf at first, but isn’t now. The haunting of Thistle House hath begun.

The Call Is Coming From Inside The House

Betty, who’s all alone, since Jughead is trapped in a coffin and Jellybean is playing Minecraft, and dressed as Laurie from Halloween, finds herself tortured by a prank caller pretending to be the Black Hood AKA her father. This is after she panics at seeing multiple people dressed up as the Black Hood and the Gargoyle King. Do people in Riverdale have no empathy? Those two figures killed multiple people in your town, y’all.

Anyway, a random happenstance drop-by from Charles leads to him and Betty tracing the call, which is coming from Shady Grove Treatment Center. Yeah, where Polly is currently being treated. So B calls her dear sis, confronts her, and then watches some movies with Charles, who thinks she’d be great in the “Junior FBI” training program. Well, she’s basically already a professional detective so…yeah, she would. Unfortunately, a later scene reveals that Charles has tapped the phones at Betty’s, and smiles in an unreadable way when he overhears her telling Jughead that Charles may be “the real deal.” Oh no. How many faux siblings and evil family members can one girl handle?

Pureheart the Powerful and The Shield

Monroe and Archie, upon hearing that Dodger and his crew will be roaming the streets on Halloween, throw a Halloween party at the community center — outfitted as the above superheroes thanks to V’s friend in New York, Katy Keene. Things at the party go well, until they don’t: Dodger shows up and ends up shooting a kid named Eddie in the leg. Eddie later tells Archie, who just wants to help everyone as much as possible, that in his world it’s either run with Dodger or run from him. So Archie wants to clean up the streets, and seems to get inspired looking at his discarded hero costume on Ronnie’s mirror. Archiekins, what’s going on in that pure-hearted brain of yours?

Diner of Death

Let’s pause again to applaud, this time for the character of Veronica because, while she’s always a boss, in this episode she takes down an escaped serial killer ALL BY HERSELF. When a trucker comes to Pop’s, V takes pity on him and cooks him a burger, even though they’re closed. And when a news broadcast, starring Alice Cooper, reveals that a serial killer called The Family Man whose thing was making his victims cook him a meal before murdering them has escaped from Shady Grove and killed a trucker, V snaps into action. She runs down to La Bonne Nuit, pours a cocktail, and turns off all the lights. How does pouring a cocktail help? Well, when The Family Man comes downstairs looking for her with a lighter in hand, she douses him in the booze, thus setting him on fire. Then she smashes him with a chair for good measure. Go, Veronica Luna!

Rumordale dot com:

•Jughead spends all of Halloween trapped in a coffin. Somehow he does not suffocate, nor does he try all that hard to get out of the coffin. Jug, were you not trained in martial arts by Pai Mei?

•Turns out the coffin incident was all a lil’ Stonewall Prep prank-o-rama, courtesy of Brett, Donna, and the other seminar kids. It means he “belong now.” Prep school is a strange place. And we probably haven’t even seen the half of it.

•Also, Moose is gone when Jughead gets back to his room—possibly to the Army, but no one is sure. Jughead suspects that Brett’s crew ran him outta dodge while Jug was incapacitated, AKA in a coffin.

•Kevin and Reggie spend Halloween night TP’ing Principal Honey’s office, and the man himself proves to be on quite a power trip after he catches them, bullying Kevin into saying it was all Reggie’s idea, bringing up Reggie’s dad’s abuse, forcing Reggie to spend the rest of the night cleaning, and then TRASHING REGGIE’S CAR. Who is in charge of hiring at RHS?

•Nice shout to A Nightmare on Elm Street during Betty’s long chat with her “dad”: She reminisces about tick-or-treating on Elm Street.

•Another killer flashforward at the end of this episode: Just as Jughead tells Betty that he knows she’d be the one to find him if he ever went missing for real, and she concurs, we see a teary and sickened F.P. and Betty confirming that a body underneath a sheet is indeed Jughead. And friends, we see the body, and it does really appear to be Jug. What is going to happen on spring break???

•Toni is the best girlfriend ever. Sure, she’s ready to rebury Jason, but she is also remarkably chill about his corpse sitting at the table with her and Cheryl as they carve pumpkins. Is there nothing this girl can’t do?

•This line from Betty could be Riverdale’s season 5 tagline: “I wish I could say tonight’s been particularly insane because it’s Halloween but no, this is actually fairly typical.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue