"Riverdale" Time Jumps 7 Years to Archie and the Gang in their 40s

 

For four years, Riverdale has had the 16- and 17-year olds of Archie comics acting like they're in their 30s.  Veronica runs a nightclub where alcohol flows freely.  Cheryl runs a maple syrup empire.  Archie owns a gym.  Jughead gets a job ghost-writing novels.  Betty investigates serial killers (more than one) with the help of her FBI Agent brother.  No way is any of this possible.  For one thing, they are too young to sign contracts.  

After four years of organized crime, drug dealing, cults, serial killers, and miscellaneous covfefe, the gang finally graduates from high school in a retrospective episode that thinks we love the show a lot more than we actually do.  In the next episode, there's a time jump of seven years.  So the gang is 24 or 25 years old, right?  Except they are acting as if they are in their mid-40s.

1. Veronica is channeling Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  She's a middle-aged dowager trapped in a faltering marriage with a middle-aged 25-year old mafioso named Chadwick (Chris Mason, left).  "What happened to us?" she asks.  Well, after 20 years....what, it's only been one year? She longs for the days of her youth, 20 years...um, one year ago, when she was the She-Wolf of Wall Street.  

2. Betty is channeling Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, an FBI agent haunted by the Trash Bag Killer, the biggest failure of her career, who escaped to kill again.  Her career?  You need four years of college plus a year of training to join the FBI, so she's only had two years to have all of these successes and failures, and live in the shadow of her past.  

She is apparently dating her boss or partner (Grayson Holt), although in one scene when he touches her, she recoils in disgust.  

3. Jughead's first book got him accolades as the new Kerouac.  But he hasn't published anything since (if he went to college first, no more than three years ago).  Now he's a middle aged failed writer at age 26, an alcoholic with bill collectors calling and an eviction notice on the door.  He brings home a fan, who then blackmails him into getting her novel published.

4. Cheryl is channeling Miss Haversham from Great Expectations: she's an elderly recluse at age 26, ruminating on the past and dismissing her friends

5. Toni, her ex-girlfriend, is now running the nightclub in the basement of Pop Tate's as a sleazy dive bar, performing for rowdy truckers.  Kevin and his boyfriend Fangs (Drew Ray Tanner) help out.  

5. Archie is a war hero, single-handedly rescuing all of his soldiers during a battle in what looks like a modern American town, including Corporal Jackson, who lost his legs.

Sommer Cabuccia has a prosthetic leg in real life, and may be gay.  At least he is posing with a Pride Flag on his Instagram site.

After a long, stellar career of less than seven years, Archie is forced to retire.  He's either injured, or too psychologically traumatized to continue.   He gets a job running the JROTC program at Riverdale High, his old alma mater.

He returns to Riverdale to find that Hiram Lodge has backslid from his earllier redemption, and has destroyed the town for the fun of it.  Everyone is  unemployed and homeless; there are no public facilities except for Pop Tate's, and no buses stop in town because it's too dangerous.  Especially stay away from the road where 3,000 women disappear every year (whoops, wouldn't you know it, a waitress with the ridiculous name Squeaky decides to hitchhike at night on that very road, and accepts a ride in a truck with a skeleton attached to its front window.)

6. And what about Pop Tate, who runs the diner?  When Archie asks about him, the gang looks at each other, all nervous and sad.  "You didn't know?  We thought that was the reason you came back"

You mean Pop Tate is dead?  No, he's retiring.  The gang just has a completely imappropriate reaction.

Well, what do you expect?  They're getting close to retirement age themselves.