Enginerd

Either Riverdale has a really good dermatologist, or maple syrup is a magic acne cure in sufficient doses.

I agree! Sweet Pea is a cutie! And even better, the cast has to call him Sweet Pea with straight faces, along with saying "jingle jangle" repeatedly. It's the little things that make me happy. Do the north side kids look like wax dolls, or more realistically like high school students than typical CW high school characters? I don't think most sophomore guys have heavy enough facial hair that it's going to be noticeable when they've shaved, and they mostly seem to be into the idea of shaving at that age; novelty and all. Although I guess my info on high school trends isn't exactly current. You're saying what I'm thinking about Kevin. He has more reason than most for angst over his prospects, but he seems to actually be getting relatively a lot of action for a 16 year old. How many partners does he think Ethel's had? Or Dilton? I bet there are lots of kids at Riverdale High who've never had a date or a makeout session, much less more than that. But of course in his hormonal teenage state he thinks he's greatly deprived if he isn't having all the sex.

Kevin has Moose hitting on him, plus since he never seems to have trouble finding anyone when he's cruising, it seems like there are a number of gay guys around. Someone pointed out to him that he could use Grindr to find hookups, and his excuse was that people could be fake there. So use that to find them, then video chat or meet up someplace safer to see if they are legit? How is lurking in the woods not worse as far as potential for meeting people with very questionable motives? I think it's about thrill-seeking compulsion more than lack of options, although with his awkward past, Kevin probably feels less confident in his options than he should. He and Betty have compulsive dangerous tendencies in common. Maybe eventually they can bond over that. She was very patronizing, though. What on earth is Cheryl up to? Is she just bored now that her drama isn't front and center? She'll probably track down and murder the greeneyed shooter just for stealing her house fire thunder.

The cut from Archie's intimidation video (which really works better as an ab workout, from laughing so hard) to smirking Hiram, combined with lots of my scrutinizing Hiram's face throughout the episode, is making me think that Hiram plus bright green contact lenses is the culprit. Especially with the way he's taunting and baiting Archie. But to what end? Driving down property values to buy up cheaply? How would he then drive values back up to make money? Maybe he wants to turn the whole town into a jingle jangle factory? I also can't tell whether Hermione is really on Hiram's side or if she is compliant because she is afraid of him. She seemed happy enough working as a waitress. Lighter and more carefree than she has been since the bag of money and instructions arrived. Maybe she liked having her husband out of their lives. On the other hand, maybe the whole waitress gig was an act to make the authorities think they'd gotten everything, and she knew all along she wouldn't have to keep doing it so it was just a game. Everyone in Riverdale seems to think the Southside students are losers, but I for one commend those thirty-year-Olds for not giving up on completing high school! Most people who hadn't graduated would have dropped out before they had as much facial hair as some of those "kids" in the cafeteria.

He knew in season 1 that Kevin cruised in the woods, and warned him against it even then. He probably didn't know that he was STILL doing it despite there being a killer with numerous victims roaming around. Sheriff Keller probably thought Kevin was smart enough to stay safer! Get a grip, Kevin...on yourself, in the security of your own home. I feel bad about his limited range of dating options, but Joaquin just left recently and he's hardly the first or last person to have a dry spell. I think he'll survive awhile without any hookups. Plus, he's intimated that although he's the only out gay guy at school, there are multiple in the closet in town that he knows about, other than Moose. If he's previously found them by cruising, why not arrange discreet hookups with some of the same guys in a safer setting?

I think I've only ever heard it from sort of rustic southern characters in tv shows. Maybe that's who the writers are channeling when they create Fred's dialogue, to give him a sort of salt-of-the-earth blue-collar vibe? It probably isn't meant to insinuate anything else...it was just repeated so many times that it started to sound like protesting too much to me!

Speaking of people calling their family members odd things, does anyone else think it's weird how Fred constantly calls Archie "son"? He was doing it so often this week that it was distracting. I don't know anyone IRL who addresses their kid as "son". They call them by their name, or a nickname, or nothing at all if it's clear who they are talking to and they already have their attention. It's starting to make me think maybe Archie isn't Fred's biochild, especially after the way Penelope kept touching him say saying how just like Jason he was. Is Fred trying to convince himself? The relationship histories in Riverdale are a Gordian knot. Alice is such a piece of work. Sure, lady. If Pop's closed, no one would be buying or selling drugs on your side of town. The high school kids who want to keep it up all night would be like, "no milkshake before my sexathon? Never mind then; I'll just host a Bible study and then go to bed early."

It's not because English isn't your first language; that's vague and unclear. Maybe there are roads but they are indirect, so if you're driving it doesn't seem like a quick trip to Canada (especially since border crossings are limited in number, so even if you can get close to the border on roads, you may have to go out of your way to actually cross it...legally, at least). But it's actually quite nearby? Maybe the drug runners are using the river to cross the border and transport drugs to or from Montreal because it's shorter and not watched as closely as the border at road crossings and more populated areas? Just based on the maple syrup and the weather, I imagined Riverdale to be somewhere in New England or maybe upstate New York. Possibly the northern Midwest. Did Fred drive to Chicago when he went to finalize the divorce?

Latina mother, non-Latino father? Idk, but I have a lot of acquaintances whose names don't "match" their looks or culture. Inter-cultural relationships have been a thing for a long time. I also know a number of people whose families came from Latin America who don't speak much Spanish themselves and culturally are pretty mainstream U.S., but who still use the terms of endearment their parents and grandparents used. I really hope Moose and Midge aren't dead. It would be a shame to kill them off without giving them a lot more story first. I don't get Jughead's situation. Are the so-called foster parents just grifters who want to collect the foster care checks and not be bothered with the actual kid? Someone really, REALLY needs to have a long serious chat with Archie about why Faux Grundy's "relationship" with him aka predation and rape was Not Okay. Someone who has more sense than Fred or Alice, since their solution was to send her on her way, free to prey on other young boys.

Remember Paul Sowerberry, the Lodges' lawyer? Anyone else think he might be the shooter? He has a similar look to what we saw of the eyes/eyebrows/physique. Maybe he runs a REALLY full-service practice!

Wasn't Archie driving the red truck when the high school boys all showed up to do the demolition work for Fred? I wondered whose truck it was. I assumed that Archie and most of the kids have a license but not their own cars, so they walk most of the time. That was very much the norm when I was a teen in a small town-you learned to drive and got a license, but just borrowed a car from your parents when the occasion warranted it, or they let you drive sometimes to get practice. But most of the time you walked or biked or took the bus. Who drove when they went to the Whyte Wyrm? I can't remember. And Archie and Jughead were planning a road trip, so they must be able to drive. 15/16 is still young enough that Fred shouldn't be quite so thumbs-up about his son sleeping over at his girlfriend's house, but he isn't a regular dad, he's a cool dad. *Eyeroll* But it's The CW, where precocious teens both look like and behave like 20-somethings, and often get married before they finish high school. One thing I find odd is that, aside from extremely elderly Nana Blossom, there don't seem to be any grandparents around. Most of the parents grew up in Riverdale and are about the same age. Shouldn't some of their parents still be around, hale and hearty and maybe 60ish? Jughead's mother's parents are apparently in Toledo. What about the rest of them? Did they all see how rotten Riverdale is and flee? Did they all die young of maple syrup overdoses? I think Josie, Val, and Melody could be made a lot more interesting and have more of a prominent role in the series. For musicians, they've been pretty one-note so far. Josie is controlling and hostile, Val seems to want more but is given no rein to explore that; Melody is just there. But they SHOULD be more interesting, with their ties to the mayor, and having worked at a record label (when? When they were 13? 14?), and they could be given any number of ties to other things happening in the town. If you want a diverse show, you can't just have your diversity lurking in the background and only give it a stage when the main characters are done and there are a few minutes left to kill. It has to be integral.

I wonder if Veronica's mispronunciation of "bon mot" is supposed to be a clue that she isn't quite the sophisticate she pretends to be. Or, rather, that much of the sophistication she has is something she's acquired through deliberate study to try to put a nicer polish on her family's obviously shady wealth, and not the life she's naturally led before moving to Riverdale. Or maybe it's just a sign that she's young and much of her attempt at maturity and wisdom is just from stuff she's read rather than lived. I thought the shooter's eyes and build looked like Hal Cooper. Not sorry to see Miss Grundy gone. Although, since that was an alias, maybe The Real Miss Grundy whose identity she stole will turn up at some point?

Now I'm wondering if the show will work in any hurricane/post-hurricane storylines, since they're set in Miami. Rafael's and Petra's hotel is right on the beach! Maybe it gets severely damaged and the boring kids' club is no more? And they restore it into something new and dazzling? But on a less frivolous note, JtV is good at addressing societal issues. It would be nice if they could work in some storylines about how, for example, the poor are usually harmed much more by disasters than the affluent, and climate change, and governments that don't want to put enough resources into reducing risks *before* disaster strikes, etc. Not to mention the ongoing drama and coping of people who are displaced and need someplace new to stay for weeks or months or longer.

I really like this show. I'm kind of a sucker for anything 1920s, but this is beautifully filmed and I find the main characters compelling. At first I found the music a little perplexing, since it seems like a great opportunity for jazz, but I do like a lot of the music they use. I loved Yon Gonzalez (Francisco) in Gran Hotel and El Internado. He has a very different demeanor here; more prim and pinched in his expressions and tense in his body language. Whatever; he's still hot, although he'd be hotter if he weren't smoking all the time. It's interesting to me how they aren't making him either a hero or villain. He and Lidia/Alba are both complicated characters, empathetic but also up to some nefarious things. Did we not get much of their backstory, or did I just miss it? They looked SO YOUNG when they first went to Madrid. Where did they come from? What was the situation in their hometown? Does either or both of them still have family out there somewhere, or were they both orphaned? They looked a bit poor, but not like we were supposed to think they were starving or habitually homeless in the flashbacks. They looked like they were doing okay and excited for their new adventure. But they also looked like teens, not yet adults. And in the current events, they both seem to still have a lot of fundamental decency, despite the hardness they've acquired over the intervening years. And yet, Francisco was all too willing to cheat on his wife (yet he was still quite kind to his wife and concerned about her, not callous, although she can't be easy to deal with) and he's blackmailing people. Alba has obviously been forced into a more criminal life than she wanted, and has had to learn to be scheming and put up barriers and lie, but she can also be a good friend. She seemed so happy at the very beginning when she and her friend thought they were going to get away to Argentina and start a new life. And then to be grieving, AND have that dream snatched away, AND be arrested and forced into more crime, all at the same time...well, she must be very strong to be coping as well as she is. And then to find herself once again with her long-lost love and yet feel she needs to keep her distance! How immensely frustrating. At least she has cutie Carlos to soothe her nerves...but even that can't be an uncomplicated romance; there always has to be scheming and dishonesty. I'm looking forward to the next part.

There were a lot of kids of very wealthy people in the public high school I attended. It was a posh resort community, so there were lots of rich people, but also the full spectrum including a number of barely-getting-by people who did all the grunt work of running a posh area. But there was only one tiny private high school in the area, which was very limited in its offerings, so most kids opted for the public school if they wanted a more broad and typical high school experience, even if they were wealthy. Otherwise their options would have been boarding school or a very long commute. The public schools were good and well-funded from local property taxes on all that very expensive real estate, so it wasn't like a lot of public schools that are underfunded and lacking resources. I imagine Neptune High would be the same way.

To me, it seems like the overlapping of time periods is a key element of the setting of Riverdale. It's been described as not being set in a particular year or time, but it also seems like all these different decades sort of exist simultaneously on top of the contemporary timeline. You have Betty and her family, who seem very 1950s Americana. Fred has sort of a 90s emo grunge thing going. The Lodges seem all about 80s glamour and excess, although Veronica also dwells in a prim midcentury vibe. Jughead seems more in the now. Archie seems kind of 80s to me for some reason, as did Miss Grundy, especially with her heart sunglasses. Old cars, but new computers and phones. Classic diner. High school girls with names like Betty and Ethel. The Blossoms seem to belong to an even older period, maybe 1900s or 1910s, with their posh white summer clothes and gloomy estate and twisted ideas of many kinds. Likewise, it's starting to seem like the seasons are also coexisting. Furs can be worn when it looks like summer, skimpy clothes when there's snow, maple trees can be tapped in the autumn, a girl can spend a minute in a lake under ice and be transported back across the snowy woods to town yet not freeze to death. The year or season simply does not matter. Normally it would seem like sloppy continuity or sacrificing reality for plot, but when it's all the time everywhere, it does seem more like a deliberate and interesting style choice.

Now I want a full series of philosophy lessons in rap format, delivered by Daveed Diggs at his actual skill level. It was entertaining, but I still feel cheated!

Remember when Jane had a second close friend at work besides Lina? And then there was that dude who worked at the restaurant also. I can't even remember her name now. But since Lina isn't available all the time anymore, they should give Jane another good friend. I like her and Raf as friends, but can't there be someone else she could have these friend-type conversations with? Bring that other one back! Did that friendship fall apart when the layoffs happened? I don't remember. Or if that actress isn't available and they don't want to spend story time on developing a new friendship, she could have an old friend from school who is now back in town and make it known that they already know each other so they could just jump right into doing friend things. I was a bit agog at the Telenovela Blessing (can't imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that at my workplace!) but of course it ended up being funny.

Shocking twist: the woman in the sketch will be Alba! There's something rather odd about needing your mommy's encouragement to go have sex with some fling. Or is it just a fling? Maybe Fabian is right about his skillz, and once you pop, you can't stop. At least they didn't use hand sanitizer as lube. I full-body cringed when Xo-as-Samantha mentioned that. I've never seen SATC. Is that something Samantha actually said or something made up as the sort of thing she would say? Sounds like a great way to get a yeast infection! Kill off all your good bacteria! Yeesh. I'm glad Rogelio and Xo are doing the big wedding they clearly want. The courthouse thing was well-intentioned, but dim and pointless. A wedding might remind Jane of Michael? Um, he was her husband; I'm sure anything and everything reminds her of him and she hasn't forgotten him at all! Why would being reminded of him be a bad thing? She likes to remember him! And as mentioned above, things like having sex and seeing police officers seem more likely triggers. No reason other people shouldn't have Rogelio-style weddings. The question is, does the show actually have the budget for a no-holds-barred Rogelio-style wedding? Although maybe Rogelio has to be on a limited budget due to the settlement over his reality show with Darcy.

GEE; I CAN'T IMAGINE HOW. Even in this iteration she's getting people killed and causing myriad other problems right and left. But it's one thing for Dean Fogg not to feel it's his place or desire to go out into the world and police what other witches are doing, and another not to warn his students of what is coming FOR THEM and try to prepare them. I'd like to hear about what they've tried in the other loops and how it went wrong.

I hope they get back to Fillory quickly in the next season. I want Fen to become more a part of the main group. They should include her more! She's smart, she's nice, she seems resourceful, she certainly knows more about Fillory than the rest of them. She also seems like she'd be up for a quest at any time, but to recover her baby, she's certainly the most motivated. Plus it would be nice for her and Eliot to become more of a solid team, and for Margo to have to learn to coexist with her. I also want Margo to have more of a story. We don't know much about her life before Brakebills. Or Penny's, for that matter. There's lots of ground to explore there. I've also been wondering why, if Dean Fogg and Jane had been through this time loop 39 times before, they were more or less sitting back and waiting for these inexperienced hotheaded magical newbies to figure out how to save multiple worlds from The Beast. Why not clue them in from the beginning and try to help them out and give them a head start with what had been learned in previous loops? I know we need it to happen that way for the story, but I also like for things to make sense. Like Dean Fogg could have eventually told Quentin or discussed with Jane that they had tried to take the expedient approach in other loops and it had made things worse for whatever reasons.

Fen is great. She should become a more regular part of the crew. It would be fun if someone took her to Earth sometime.

I've been rewatching the whole series, and as much as I like Quentin and Alice together and don't want them split again, Eliot and Quentin really do have a great bond and chemistry on many levels. Just last night I watched the episode where they've just been crowned and they're in the bare room with the hooks and marks on the wall where swords were once hanging (symbolism?) just talking, then Eliot asks Quentin to hug him and he does, then he cheekily suggests an ass squeeze would make him feel better...it's a lovely scene where you really see how close they've become and how comfortable they are together and how much they genuinely like each other. And even if Quentin is not particularly sexually interested in Eliot/men in general, he was definitely more upset about having hurt Alice than about having been with Eliot. And in a later episode where Quentin is leaving Fillory, Eliot clutches him to his bosom (I could say hugs, but it's definitely a clutching-to-the-bosom vibe) and strokes his hair and threatens him if he doesn't come back, and Quentin patiently tolerates this with a look on his face like "okay, you weirdo...but I'll miss you, too"...I think they have the most functional and sweet relationship of any of the romances and friendships on the show. I don't know...I just don't see ANY of that affection or attraction between Eliot and the King of Loria. Not even much physical attraction, though Hale does seem to be trying. They're more like moderately friendly business associates.

Since Jane wasn't looking for an actual relationship, just a fling, why is she now dating Fabian? Especially if she was thinking he wasn't smart? Maybe this will all turn out great, but if you're just looking for a roll in the hay, do NOT go for your dad's coworker! Pick someone you won't have to see again when you're done with them! And if you decide to actually date someone, then maybe don't be like "well actually all I really wanted was the sex." Although I also think if you don't see it going anywhere or you don't have compatible ideas about what your relationship should include, then you should break it off, regardless of how much you didn't like it when you were dumped in the past or what previous boundaries you've had that have now changed. You're not obligated to stick with someone just because you've been on a date or three. And I slightly suspect Alba mostly doesn't want Jane to dump Fabian so that she'll be in a relationship and NOT having sex. But whatever. I think she should move on because I don't find Fabian attractive. He is good-looking, but does not appeal to me. Maybe because they've been trying so hard to show us that he's SO HOT but mostly it's a lot of shirtlessness and shirtless abs just aren't really that special. He does seem nice, so maybe he'll turn out to be more three-dimensional and interesting. He just doesn't seem like a great choice for a romantic interest. I had been wondering all this time where Lina was! I hate it when shows forget that people have friends. The Mindy Project got much less interesting when the friends and neighbors more or less disappeared.

I enjoyed the episode, but it was definitely not the most exciting. Nothing really happened. It was suggested that things were going to happen--Jane hooking up with Fabian, Rose getting caught, Jane finding out that her whole book deal is something Rafael or Rogelio paid or coerced Dudebro Publisher to do (because that whole big PR team for a romance novel from an unknown, previously unpublished author? Plus that Dudebro Publisher is SO INTO IT? Sure...), Luisa and Rose splitting up, Rafael's PI getting caught bugging the place, showdown with Anezka--but none of that actually DID happen, at least not in this episode. But at least Jane has lots of Twitter followers now! Although you'd think being the daughter of a telenovela star would be enough to sell at least a few books and get on some of the lower-tier talk shows and put a few blurbs in magazines. The main drama, to me, is that the police used Petra to snare Anezka and threw her in jail. So do they have evidence or suspicions that Anezka is the one who killed her husband? Why? Was he blackmailing her, too? Did he have enough money that it was worth it to her to kill him to take it? Something else? I did laugh when Fabian said that without Rogelio, the show would just be Fab's fab abs, and the narrator said "I'd binge it."