S05.E14: Chapter Ninety: The Night Gallery

[rmontro]

Quote

Cheryl enlists the help of Archie, Kevin, Fangs and Reggie after she learns there is palladium underneath her maple groves. Betty and Alice confront a trucker who may have been involved in Polly's disappearance.

Airdate: 25 August 2021

 

Hope I'm not stepping on any toes by starting these threads.  Where's kariyaki?

[Bort]

She keeps forgetting about this show, it’s summer, it’s not supposed to be on! (It’s fine to start the topics if I forget.)

[rmontro]

1 minute ago, kariyaki said:

She keeps forgetting about this show, it’s summer, it’s not supposed to be on! 

Oh, well helps to have a life, I guess  :)  And don't look now, fall's coming up quick.

I don't really like all the movie tie-ins they've been doing lately, reminds me too much of The Goldbergs.  But I didn't mind the Night Gallery reference so much, because it was so nostalgic for me.  

I wasn't sure if Jughead's story was taking place in the present, which would mean he's back, or if it was just a general story, and he's still off with the Highway Killer family or whatever it is.  It definitely made things sound like he was still hung up on Betty - whose main concern when she got back to Riverdale was jumping Archie's bones lol.

It was almost too bad the killer creep killed himself, because I was curious to see if Betty was going to go through with the chainsaw threat.  Looked like she was going to.  She's with the FBI, you know.

Sounds like Archie lost a whole bunch of men under his command.  I'm a little concerned they're making him sound incompetent.  I don't blame the therapist for being freaked out by him.  Mines can be dangerous, I hope they know what they're doing.  

Missed having a Veronica story, I was wondering what kind of horror theme they were going to do with her.  Guess they couldn't think of one.

[thuganomics85]

If I were K.J. Apa, I would totally ask to take the painting of Archie shirtless in a mine home and just hang it somewhere for all to see and be like "Yep, this is pretty much my life on Riverdale!"

A little weird that they apparently couldn't find anyway to have Veronica be part of the "Night Gallery", but I guess they also didn't really have the time for it since both Betty and Jughead's stories apparently needed to be worth two segments each to work out.

The more they find ways to keep Betty from going true "Dark Betty" on someone, the more frustrated I get.  Just let it happen, show!  I'm already invested in this insanity: let Betty go fully psycho and I'll still root for her!

Jughead probably made that AA group's day with his crazy-ass story.  Which is still not anywhere as crazy as half of the stuff that normally occurs on Riverdale...

So, was the whole Night Gallery really just a way for Cheryl to hook back up with a returning Minerva.  Damn, talk about going the extra mile to get laid!

Did enjoy Madchen Amick's directing.

[Lady Calypso]

I actually did enjoy this episode. I caught up last night on the episodes I didn't get to watch and I think it's been a solid batch of episodes back. This one was good, though it had some pacing issues.

2 hours ago, rmontro said:

Sounds like Archie lost a whole bunch of men under his command.  I'm a little concerned they're making him sound incompetent.  I don't blame the therapist for being freaked out by him.  Mines can be dangerous, I hope they know what they're doing.  

I mean, with how many years he was in the army, I don't know whether it shows him as being incompetent. I mean, it's war; you're basically signing up to potentially die. It's a dangerous place to be, and I do think that it was expected for him to lose some men. I'm more laughing at the fact that Archie looks like he fought in WWI.

I do blame the therapist for being freaked out enough with one incident to drop him. Lady is specialized in helping soldiers who have PTSD. You mean to tell me that she has NEVER EVER been in a therapy session with a soldier who was triggered by a PTSD episode and had tried to lash out? If she hasn't, then she must be incredibly new at her job. And Archie was unintentionally poisoned, leading to a paranoid episode and he went back to apologize. If she's willing to drop him over that, then Archie deserves a better, more competent therapist. 

Regardless of that, I actually really liked Archie's plot and wish they weren't speed-running through it. I am so intrigued with Archie's PTSD and how he'll overcome it. He definitely got worse over the course of the segment, so it seems like it'll continue to go downhill. I wish it wasn't condensed into a 10 minute segment. I wish 3-4 minutes of Jughead's Rat King story was given to Archie's story instead. KJ Apa really was great in his plot and I really think, when the show actually gives him work outside of the Lodge family drama, he excels. 

Betty/Alice's arc where they're torturing the trucker? I wish it was more intriguing but it didn't lead anywhere, Betty gained no answers and she pretty much guessed at the idea of a whole family/crew of killers that she could have figured out without the trucker involved. It gave us a little more of Dark Betty, but not nearly enough. The most interesting part was seeing her flashback to TBK capturing her and that was barely a few seconds. 

Jughead's plot...I mean, we got answers on what happened to him, and the idea of him being his own demise is certainly better than him being kidnapped by aliens or murdering someone like they could have gone, but....man, the Rat King being a metaphor was ridiculous. I am 100% positive I saw Cole Sprouse himself emerge out of those scenes where he's describing the Rat King. I do not think I saw Jughead in the parts where he's talking about the Rat King.

And also, there were two different commercial breaks for Jughead's segments, which was...a lot, I'm not gonna lie, not with the Big Reveal that we were given. I just wish it was altered to not make it so comical. But hey, that's Riverdale for you.

Or, as Betty said "We're not in the United States; we're in Riverdale." 

Overall, even with the pacing issues, it WAS a solid episode. I always seem to enjoy the Segment Episodes, and I like character development...or sometimes, lackthereof. I missed Veronica (I guess they didn't want to attempt a helicopter crash scene, or they thought that Veronica/Chad's trauma wouldn't match the other three's), but it was a good episode, otherwise.

[rmontro]

21 minutes ago, Lady Calypso said:

I mean, with how many years he was in the army, I don't know whether it shows him as being incompetent. I mean, it's war; you're basically signing up to potentially die. It's a dangerous place to be, and I do think that it was expected for him to lose some men. I'm more laughing at the fact that Archie looks like he fought in WWI.

The way this show works, it seems like Archie was fighting in WWI for 20 years, even though he was only gone for seven years and is now about 25.  And how was it that the country was fighting WWI but none of the other core characters seemed to be affected by it?  Since this show seems to be a patch quilt of different times, I guess there's no draft.  The one guy (Erik, I think?) did say that Archie lost everyone under his command.  That's pretty rough.

[SourK]

It's hard to pick my favourite part. These are the two contenders:

1. When it turns out that the big, important memory Jughead had to recover was the time he fell down a hole and landed on rats.
2. When Cheryl tries to seduce someone by telling her the story of how Jughead fell down a hole and landed on rats.

4 hours ago, rmontro said:

I wasn't sure if Jughead's story was taking place in the present, which would mean he's back, or if it was just a general story, and he's still off with the Highway Killer family or whatever it is. 

What I got out of it was that nothing happened when he got picked up by the trucker, and he made it back to New York, and solved the mystery of his memories of the rat king, and then went to AA. I'm not sure if this means the trucker didn't kill him because he's not a woman (which would actually be kind of interesting), or the writers just forgot they did a cliffhanger where Jughead gets in the truck.

4 hours ago, rmontro said:

Sounds like Archie lost a whole bunch of men under his command.  I'm a little concerned they're making him sound incompetent.

By the same token... Archie losing everyone under his command sounds like it's the outcome you'd expect, right?

1 hour ago, thuganomics85 said:

Jughead probably made that AA group's day with his crazy-ass story.  Which is still not anywhere as crazy as half of the stuff that normally occurs on Riverdale...

They really didn't know what they were getting into when they let him share.

1 hour ago, Lady Calypso said:

Betty/Alice's arc where they're torturing the trucker? I wish it was more intriguing but it didn't lead anywhere, Betty gained no answers and she pretty much guessed at the idea of a whole family/crew of killers that she could have figured out without the trucker involved. It gave us a little more of Dark Betty, but not nearly enough. The most interesting part was seeing her flashback to TBK capturing her and that was barely a few seconds. 

I thought it was interesting that she tried repeating the same threats the trashbag killer used on her. But I also thought it was hilarious that this started with her going, "I can make him talk -- this is what I do!" and it ended with her getting no information, him killing himself when she left him unsupervised, and pretty much every tactic she tried not working at all.

I also thought it was funny and awful when Alice told Betty she had "permission" to kill the trucker.

As an aside, when did they decide for sure Polly was dead? I agree that that's most likely, but it seems like they switched from holding out hope to assuming she's gone, and I don't remember when?

[rmontro]

34 minutes ago, SourK said:

What I got out of it was that nothing happened when he got picked up by the trucker, and he made it back to New York, and solved the mystery of his memories of the rat king, and then went to AA. I'm not sure if this means the trucker didn't kill him because he's not a woman (which would actually be kind of interesting), or the writers just forgot they did a cliffhanger where Jughead gets in the truck.

Maybe it was just a regular trucker.

 

34 minutes ago, SourK said:

By the same token... Archie losing everyone under his command sounds like it's the outcome you'd expect, right?

Doesn't fit real well with Archie being the big hero who saves everyone though, does it?

 

35 minutes ago, SourK said:

I also thought it was funny and awful when Alice told Betty she had "permission" to kill the trucker.

Definitely a Riverdale moment. 

[the-grey-lady]

1 hour ago, SourK said:

It's hard to pick my favourite part. These are the two contenders:

1. When it turns out that the big, important memory Jughead had to recover was the time he fell down a hole and landed on rats.
2. When Cheryl tries to seduce someone by telling her the story of how Jughead fell down a hole and landed on rats.

I got a great giggle/snort out of this one.

[Quark]

I was rather bored by this. Other than Cheryl getting back with her girlfriend, it doesn't seem like any storyline moved forward.

[lorbeer]

I'm surprised how nobody's talking about the Sabrina/Greendale connections (or easter eggs?). The mines? The eldrich terrors? Not to mention the Minerva actress? I also thing the song sung by mama blossom on the previous episode had the same melody as one od the "night church" song from the CAOS but I would have to check up on that. 😄

 

I guess I assumed that people would be more interested in that 😄

Edited September 3, 2021 by lorbeer

[ruby24]

Are we retconning the Betty/Jughead relationship now because I don't remember it being how she pulled him out of his darkness over and over again, like he described it. What? First of all, if anyone was in vague "darkness" wasn't it her with the whole serial killer thing? Not that he ever seemed to care or even know about that (did she ever even tell him that stuff?)

Now we have multiple people telling us Jughead is a dark, depressed person who makes everyone around him suffer and he did it to Betty too. Total retcon.

If they want this to make sense (unlikely on Riverdale I know), they could tie him being an alcoholic into the fact that his DAD was an alcoholic and his grandfather and it's very likely genetic. That actually totally works and it's been shown to us for seasons, but they aren't even mentioning it. It's like they completely forgot about that.

Edited September 4, 2021 by ruby24

[tennisgurl]

Cheryl is totally the kind of person who would use a series of weird portraits to tell creepy stories about people she knows to try and seduce someone in her creepy gothic haunted house, that is such a Cheryl flex, she was made to be a sexy Crypt Keeper. I actually thought this one was pretty good, I liked the Nigh Gallery style framing device and that they used it to move a bunch of plot lines forward. Most of the plots are varying degrees of nonsense of course, but they did have a spooky anthology vibe that worked for me. 

Bless KJ for giving this plot his absolute all, he is selling the crap out of this story. It feels so bizarre watching Archie talking about trenches and no mans land in his modern clothes in this modern office, as WWI is apparently happening somewhere in the Riverdale universe but nobody ever talks about it except Archie, but damn it if KJ isnt still getting me on board. Then to make everything worse, he gets a job mining for Cheryl and gets poisoned which gives him even worse hallucinations, and now his therapist doesent want to see him and apparently thinks he should be locked up, which doesent really seem like something a good therapist would do. If she works with veterans suffering from PTSD, this cannot be the first time someone might have lashed out during a flashback or episode, and Archie was being poisoned on top of everything. If she really feels like she cant be around him, she could at least give him a referral. I did laugh when Cheryl listed out all of Archie's many jobs as reason why he can now lead a mining crew, I guess she isnt wrong. I laughed even harder at Reggie throwing a charming smile and wink at Nana Rose. 

I cant even really blame Archie for being suspicious, I am pretty sure most therapists don't just pull bottles of pills out and hand them to patients, that does seem pretty sketchy. Giving him hallucinogens as part of an evil government conspiracy to experiment on veterans or as part of a new Hiram plot do totally sound like things that would happen on this show. 

Betty gets a very Betty style plot, where she can stare all dead eyed at some asshole and say ridiculous lines like "killers of women have no rights" with a straight face. Pretty sure everyone has rights Betty, regardless of if the people they murdered had boobs or not, can you blame the FBI for not being sure if she would be a good agent? Laws and rules that everyone else has to follow are more like loose guidelines for Betty when she puts on her bonkers hat. It is funny to me that Betty went into this interrogation all hot like "this is what I do" and all she got was a dead body and some vague comment about a "hunting family" and I could have told Betty that there were multiple killers on the lonely highway, this is Riverdale. You cant throw a stick without hitting a few serial killers. I am still not even sure this guy did kill Polly or that Polly is even dead, I still haven't seen a body so I remain unconvinced. I do think its interesting that Betty copied the same speech the serial killer gave her about chainsawing her body to bits, I kind of wanted to see if she would actually do it. Or if Alice would. 

Did the show forget that Jughead seemingly got into the truck with a possible killer last time we saw him? Or was that just a fake out and it was just a normal trucker who gave him an uneventful ride to New York, or the killer was only looking for women? Or is all this a flashback? I have to say, the terrible thing that Jughead was blocking out being rats was, while pretty gross, not really as huge of a thing as I expected. This is Riverdale, I was expecting something a lot more dramatic, but it did take place in New York, which according to Katy Keene, is pretty much just a normal big city, and not the hellmouth netherworld that is Riverdale, so I guess we should have assumed his blackout was semi mundane. His Rat King story was pretty wild though, I can only imagine what everyone at AA was thinking as he was going on about his descent into madness, who the hell wants to follow that? 

Weird that there was no Veronica story, they probably could have shortened Jughead's story, which dragged a bit, but I guess they struggled to find something suitably gothic for her. Come on writers, you have to put in some effort here, give her a story where she has to find a buyer for her super fancy jewelry who may or may not have been a ghost or something. 

[rmontro]

4 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

Bless KJ for giving this plot his absolute all, he is selling the crap out of this story. It feels so bizarre watching Archie talking about trenches and no mans land in his modern clothes in this modern office, as WWI is apparently happening somewhere in the Riverdale universe but nobody ever talks about it except Archie, but damn it if KJ isnt still getting me on board.

I didn't like Archie for the first several years of this series, but it seems like they've finally started writing him better.  I would laugh if his whole WWI experience was all in his head, but I don't think that's the case.  As for the therapist, if she really feels that Archie is a threat to himself or others, she is probably obligated to get him locked up.  But it didn't come to that.

What is Reggie doing working in a mine?  Doesn't he have to sell cars with his dad?

I vote Polly is still alive, by the way.

[Affogato]

On 9/4/2021 at 8:17 PM, rmontro said:

 

What is Reggie doing working in a mine?  Doesn't he have to sell cars with his dad?

I vote Polly is still alive, by the way.

I think it is the palladium thing, the need to get the American dream metal for his own family.

Everyone has given up on her and her survival seems unlikely, so of course Polly will be alive, living in the mines,  and probably convinced she is the Rat Queen, or Mothgirl. Also she will be a cannibal and have a baby that glows in the dark.

[Affogato]

On 9/4/2021 at 3:30 PM, tennisgurl said:

Cheryl is totally the kind of person who would use a series of weird portraits to tell creepy stories about people she knows to try and seduce someone in her creepy gothic haunted house, that is such a Cheryl flex, she was made to be a sexy Crypt Keeper. I actually thought this one was pretty good, I liked the Nigh Gallery style framing device and that they used it to move a bunch of plot lines forward. Most of the plots are varying degrees of nonsense of course, but they did have a spooky anthology vibe that worked for me. 

 

Did the show forget that Jughead seemingly got into the truck with a possible killer last time we saw him? Or was that just a fake out and it was just a normal trucker who gave him an uneventful ride to New York, or the killer was only looking for women? Or is all this a flashback? I have to say, the terrible thing that Jughead was blocking out being rats was, while pretty gross, not really as huge of a thing as I expected. This is Riverdale, I was expecting something a lot more dramatic, but it did take place in New York, which according to Katy Keene, is pretty much just a normal big city, and not the hellmouth netherworld that is Riverdale, so I guess we should have assumed his blackout was semi mundane. His Rat King story was pretty wild though, I can only imagine what everyone at AA was thinking as he was going on about his descent into madness, who the hell wants to follow that? 

Weird that there was no Veronica story, they probably could have shortened Jughead's story, which dragged a bit, but I guess they struggled to find something suitably gothic for her. Come on writers, you have to put in some effort here, give her a story where she has to find a buyer for her super fancy jewelry who may or may not have been a ghost or something. 

I also liked the 'night gallery' conceit. i am, however, extremely tired of Cheryl, which offsets any positive responses. I allow that she is pretty, charismatic and has good enunciation, but somehow she is not doing anything for me.

Everyone is very self centered in Riverdale, but people were looking for Jughead. I can't imagine he is currently attending AA in Riverdale, telling the story of the ratking, living somewhere, and somehow no one knows he is around. I vote flashback or he has just arrived back from the second trip to ratlair and stumbled immediately into the church basement meeting.

Veronica could have been pawning a haunted necklace. I wonder if the next episode is Veronica going around picking up the pieces.

[SourK]

On 9/4/2021 at 3:30 PM, tennisgurl said:

I cant even really blame Archie for being suspicious, I am pretty sure most therapists don't just pull bottles of pills out and hand them to patients, that does seem pretty sketchy. Giving him hallucinogens as part of an evil government conspiracy to experiment on veterans or as part of a new Hiram plot do totally sound like things that would happen on this show.

I forgot about that in wake of the Rat King, but you're right -- that bothered me, too. Going to a psychiatrist (which is different from a therapist, but whatever) is a lot like going to a medical doctor. They diagnose you and write a prescription, and then you get the prescription filled. They don't just take a bottle of pills out of their desk and give it to you.

 

[Dobian]

On 9/2/2021 at 5:37 PM, rmontro said:

Sounds like Archie lost a whole bunch of men under his command.  I'm a little concerned they're making him sound incompetent.  I don't blame the therapist for being freaked out by him.  Mines can be dangerous, I hope they know what they're doing.  

Where exactly was Archie fighting anyway, along the Maginot Line in World War 2?  It didn’t look like any foxhole in Iraq or Afghanistan lol.

Edited September 21, 2021 by Dobian

[LadyChaos]

They only two things I got out of Jug's story is how:

In the greatest moment of success in his entire life...not one of the people he cared about most in the world showed for him, and how he woke up after missing for 3 days and he said...no one had even noticed or cared that he had been missing. 

It reminds of the one year later moment in the graduation episode about how he was the only that showed up. And it kind of breaks my heart.

As far as the Rat King....he was in and out of consciousness and likely still tripping balls....so...I can believe that he thought if he opened his mouth to scream, they would get inside him...

Edited August 16, 2022 by LadyChaos