Kevin Beazley

WHYYYYY why why why why did they have to bring Archie and Veronica back together. Most bland, chemistry-devoid, toxic relationship on this show. Archie's relationship with Betty felt so much more natural. Archie and Veronica could both date outside the friend group, could they not? Can Veronica not have a spicy relationship with a new character? Someone she has actual chemistry with? Can Archie and Betty find people outside their circle? Can the writers not let Betty and Archie's exciting romance last because they're too uncreative to write Archie with anyone but Veronica? Why does everything always have to be between these four? And why does it always have to return to Archie and Veronica? Why can't they let the old boring relationships die? Shoot me. These writers suck

Anyway besides that, Jughead going crazy is a hilariously bad storyline. Kevin and Fangs' relationship has no stakes in it, because they barely get any screen time, so anything dramatic that happens between them isn't really impactful or affecting. Cheryl continues to be awful and vindictive and entitled and manipulative and she reeks of "peaked in high school and can't get over it". And she's so weird man. The party shit was so contrived and so strange and so obviously driven by some ulterior motive and everyone was just okay with it?

Really didn't enjoy this one.

Gonna do another thought dump like I did for season 3

Betty/Jughead and Archie/Veronica are awful stupid boring sucky relationships. They're super vanilla and built on really thin connections and neither couple has any chemistry and everyone is an awful partner to each other. I wish they would just break up. Constantly talking about how much they love each other and how deep their connection is and how they want to be with each other forever. They're soulmates!!!1!! You guys are in fucking high school. Give me a break.

I did not care at all about the Cheryl Jason haunting plot. Cheryl was firmly unlikable this season. Was I supposed to feel bad for her? After what she did with her brother's corpse? And her family wanted to get her psychiatric help, and they're the bad guys? Fuck you

Also didn't care about the Archie's Uncle subplot. Uncle was a shitty person

Videotapes were interesting but they never went anywhere. Their "resolution" in season 5 makes it very apparent that they kinda just forgot about the tapes and needed to wrap up the story quickly

They telegraph all their "twists"

Jughead is a gullible emotional little bitch this season. Can't decide whether he likes or hates Stonewall. Constantly falls for the preppies' bullshit. Makes it really hard to like him.

Archie never progresses as a character. Every time he's faced with an important decision that tests his character he falls back on his bullshit

They kinda forgot about the whole Hiram Lodge sickness storyline a lot. And the fact that Hermosa exists

Veronica is inconsistent and unlikable as ever. And why was she so distraught over what Archie did with Betty? She was super vindictive over Archie's kiss with Betty in season 2 - when they were broken up - and the one time she had a fight with Archie she started flirting with other guys. And she cheated on him with Reggie? Or did she? Had she broken up with Archie by then? idk my point is she gets really upset despite having been an awful and kind of unfaithful partner

The episode they did to memorialize Luke Perry was nicely done. The follow-up late in the season was another "Archie doesn't make any strides as a character" moment

Mad Dog ceased to exist halfway through the season. Just was not in the story anymore. He was one of the only likable characters

That bullshit "we need to redeem principal honey" stuff was so contrived and obvious. Like ok, he did good things, but he also did shitty things that directly impacted you. You don't need to regret what you did

Payoff of the whole Stonewall Prep mystery was extremely underwhelming. They did a good enough job making the preppies unlikable, but then all their conniving and conspiring adds up to pretty much nothing

Genuinely enjoyed Jughead faking his death, because it allowed for some new stuff to happen. We saw a new dynamic develop between Betty and Archie, we questioned the strength of the two main couples. Exciting stuff. Didn't last very long unfortunately

Nothing Lynchian about the episode "Lynchian". Just another example of the show's pretentious co-opting of other better art to try to seem smart and relevant and clever.

Edgar Evernever went from designing an elaborate cult to harvest organs to being a hypnotist and delusional astronaut? Wildly inconsistent with his portrayal in season 3.

There's old-school technology in everyone's house. It's clearly set in the 21st century, but everyone has old tvs and cassette decks and typewriters because...it looks "cute" I guess? Were the writers "born in the wrong generation" or something?

Unless I'm forgetting something, the Dodger story kinda just went nowhere. Like it was just left unresolved.

Not quite as bad as season 3, but still really bad.

Gonna write all the thoughts that are flying around in my head.

There are two consistently likable characters in this whole show and they are Mad Dog and Reggie Mantle. Betty and Toni are tolerable. Everyone else takes turns being the shitty person of the week, with Veronica and Cheryl being especially awful. They then try super hard to be endearing and good when they're not being awful human beings.

Everyone in this show is clever and conniving and capable of spinning ridiculous lies and concealing so many things and developing insane and evil machinations, except when it comes to the Farm. When faced with the Farm everyone becomes cataclysmically stupid and gullible.

This show seems like it was written by middle schoolers who think they know what high school is like. All the teenagers get involved in ridiculous plots and they basically run everything in the town of Riverdale. There are teens owning bars, teens doing vigilante work, teens running underground boxing tournaments, it's like the whole town of Riverdale and all its infrastructure and community falls on the mercy of literal 17-year-olds. I guess they did this to try to make it "dark and gritty and realistic," to raise the stakes for these teenagers, but it just makes the show ridiculous and unbelievable. All the adults are cartoonishly evil, they're all lying constantly and they're all doing bad things for the sake of being bad. And the show takes itself so seriously, except the episodes when it tries to be light-hearted and funny, in which it ends up being cringeworthy.

Characters, plot threads/ideas, and central plot elements seem to disappear and reappear whenever they want to.

The dialogue is awful. Everyone's constantly quoting Shakespeare and making pop culture references and using alliterative strings of adjectives.

Archie talks weird. He sounds like he's trying to be a Cool Dude:tm: when he talks. "Veronikyah." Shut up. He's also always sweaty.

The fucking G&G game is so stupid and it seems to only exist when the plot runs out of things to do. The Gargoyle King reveal made me laugh. It was really stupid and disappointing.

All these characters are inconsistent, but Veronica is especially bad. She constantly flips from "I love my family I want to be involved in their crime business" to "I fucking hate my family they're criminals" and it seems to just change whenever the show needs more stupid drama.

The musical episodes are really annoying and the songs they chose for this year's episode seem to have been a bit challenging for the cast. They didn't all sound super stellar.

Everyone's already talked about the "high school football" line, but god, it was really, really bad. The delivery was worse than I could've imagined.

The episode (episodes? did it last for more than one? I can't remember) where Archie and Jughead are in the middle of nowhere talking to random people was a nice bit of reprieve. A change of scenery, set in this beautiful and haunting empty town, away from the usual bullshit melodrama and ridiculous crime plots of Riverdale. But of course that couldn't last. The writers aren't good enough to let that story end naturally and bring Archie back of his own accord, nor are they patient or creative enough to introduce a new plot element/moment without instantly injecting the "Hiram Lodge owns everyone and he's evil and everyone is his cronies and everyone lies about everything" shit. They just cannot help themselves. Ruined what was honestly the best part of the season.

These actors are all really mediocre.

There's a lot of early-2000s action movie camera angles/movements/transitions and they all look like shit.

The show constantly imitates famous movies (better pieces of filmmaking) and pastiches other genres (also better than Riverdale) and references movies and shows (all of which are better) and it's extremely pretentious and very transparently an attempt to get viewers to go "oooh it's doing like a this type of thing! This episode is so unique!" even though it's still the same bullshit wrapped up in the stylistic and narrative trappings of better filmmaking that doesn't deserve to be wasted on a show like this.

I hate this show. So much.

This episode is just 45 minutes of people doing shitty things and avoiding consequences and not learning anything. Is Cheryl taking back the Vixens supposed to be a sassy slay queen girlboss moment? Because she really doesn't deserve them back. Her place was taken by an appointed coach after she missed a billion school days/practices without informing her cheerleaders because she was busy talking to the dead corpse of her brother and thinking her house was haunted. And being made to seem like a lovable little vulnerable sweetheart because of it. And vilifying the family members who wanted to get psychiatric help for the woman who was TALKING TO A CORPSE. She can't fathom that her absence necessitated a replacement, that's so unfair to her. So she locks her replacement in a room and takes over. Most infuriating thing I've ever watched. No consequences will ever fall on Cheryl, she can just do whatever shitty thing she wants and the story will treat it as some kind of empowering moment.

Archie's uncle is the same god damn way. He gives Mad Dog the drugs, and Mad Dog takes them, and Archie is rightfully angry. But then Archie's uncle gives some bullshit speech about "Mad Dog can make his own decisions" and Archie goes oh my god he's my uncle he's family what was I thinking I miss my dad and he forgives him for selling his friend drugs that put his health at risk. Jesus Christ every time Archie is poised to take a step forward he just cries about his dad and reverts to forgiving everyone and clinging to literally everything that has his dad's name on it, no matter how bad it is for him. His uncle has been a consistently shitty person so far, and Archie's mom has told him that Frank is a shitty person, and Archie forgives literally everything he does, and the story acts like that's the right thing for him to do.

Really frustrating episode to watch. Fuck all these characters I hate them.

This season's premise makes two deeply flawed assumptions:

1. That we'd give a shit about this new main character who came out of nowhere and who has not earned our interest or trust and who appears to have inserted herself into everyone else's business for no reason other than to meddle
2. That we'd care about the death of a rapist and that we'd want to see said rapist's attempts to redeem himself in the months before his death

This season looks ugly. The colour palette has become super boring and the camera is constantly doing stupid things. The editing is awful and the show is really bad at keeping flashbacks and present clear and separate. It was bad at it before, but it's become worse. One of the central 'mysteries' of this season is "what happened to Tyler?" which is a question the audience already knows the answer to, so all the drama that comes out of it is boring and frustrating and unnecessary. They try to address some themes of sexual assault, but they don't have anything profound or nuanced to say about it, or really anything to say about it beyond the basic platitudes of "my story" and "down with the patriarchy".

This season is just a mess

2/10

It's so far from perfect in so many little ways, and yet it's still one of the most perfect experiences, one of the most perfect inspirations, I've ever watched. It's got some problems with its editing, especially that horrendous take before the abrupt cut to commercial, the 60s hammy acting and campy dialogue are hammy and campy, but god damn everything about this premise and this setting was done flawlessly. The emptiness was felt. It was massive. The focus on open spaces, tall rooms, empty seats/stations, long shadows, it was all perfectly directed. It all felt liminal, almost ominous, expressionistic, especially toward the end with the oblique angles. The placement of the main character in so many containers that threaten to lock themselves was perfect selection of shooting space. The theatre with the enormous dark curtains and endless empty chairs engulfing everything in frame but the subject and the tiny doorway behind him, like he's standing in the void, stuck on the precipice of his reality. The theatre is a perfect location for all its symbolism, and the watchful camera angles of the projection room scene cut to reveal nothing, making the feeling of being watched that much more ephemeral. The mirror breaks, even though the mirror was reality a second ago, and our reality is revealed to be a mere image that can be shattered by force. The ending is absolute bullshit, all the mystery and psychological nightmarishness revealed to have come from nothing interesting, but it's also absolutely perfect, because the whole dream-like, surreal experience is just a product of the mind's unease, in both the character and the audience. The character is terrified by what he sees that isn't there, and the audience is unnerved by what's missing from what we're shown. The unrest lives in the mind, creating experiences, reality-bending experiences, out of actual nothing.

This has so many problems but it's also a picturesque encapsulation of what I love in art and what I want to do with my own writing and filmmaking. It helps that "alone on empty earth" is one of my favourite tropes. It's a fascinating but often misused premise that's actually done justice here by all the sweeping movements and angles that overwhelm with emptiness, all the shooting in liminal spaces through observant and almost human camera angles, all the rich visual symbolism, the surrealist and expressionist approach that skews the sense of reality. It's art that is experienced rather than watched. There's a million different readings that can come from almost every shot and every detail here, but they all invariably point to the fragile line between mind and reality.

This is what I want to make. 10/10

It's pretty good. Most of the time they make the suburbia seem at once fake and familiar, though occasionally it becomes completely real, loses its uncanny air, and I'm not sure if I like that. Doesn't help that the first half happens too fast - lots of busy images, because things need to be shown in the limited runtime, so it makes the setting feel a bit too regular, too populated, and it doesn't give the main character's off-putting interactions room or time to breathe, they just get caught up in the congestion, normal pieces of normal activity. He just appears to be wandering around in a setting that we are shown is normal, when we ourselves should be as thrown off as he is by the strangeness of it. The second half and all its angles and claustrophobic frames are very transparently trying to play up the psychological edge, the desperation, of it all, but I think it gives way to some cool and trippy things. The point of it all is driven home through a clumsy monologue, but the message is something I needed to hear at this point in my life, even if it is a platitude you could find on one of those crappy inspirational quote websites. If I revisited this my score wouldn't be as high, but I'm coming off a love affair with "Where Is Everybody?" so the images of strange and fake suburbia really fascinate me, and the payoff hits harder right now than it normally would.