as someone who only watched the first season a couple years ago (when it was known for being "good" at the time) i had to rewind the intro a couple times to make sure i heard alex correctly in recalling the events of the last season... how much crack have the writers of this show been smoking???
I haven't been keeping up with Riverdale, so the 'Cheryl made out with everyone in town and absorbed everyone's powers and nearly destroyed the earth' caught me a bit off guard
I didn't realize how far behind I was on Alex's Riverdale videos and I cannot express just how severe the shock I got was with the opening explanation of "Cheryl took all their magical powers and now they're back in the 50s"
Right? I last saw the season where Elizabeth became an FBI agent, came back to town and is traumatized by some case she couldn't solve a while back. It taking the magical route basically speaks to me that the producers wanted to keep the show going and the script writers were like "eh...whatever, I just want a paycheck" Riverdale has truly become the Hollywood equivalent of Indian soap opera 😂
@@fouulout and their faces are slightly different. For them being identical if you have looked at them enough it’s easy to tell them apart. Zach and Cody helped me out with that 😂
It goes from boring to wildly entertaining in a pretty slow progression but the limited fun moments in season 1 and 2 feel so much more special in retrospect. I'm shocked that this crazy show still manages to feel crazy and new and fun even this far off the rails though.
I binged it, all the way through half of season 5, I guess they had a midseason break in s5 when I started watching. I watched it at a time when I was not well and just wanted to distract myself. I won't deny, it is pretty bad, but I could still watch because Lili is the prettiest girl to look at and I like how the prettiest girl doesn't fall for the jock but the nerd one.. Even that went downhill from season 5 and that's when I started skipping parts or watching half heartedly just to see how things end out of curiosity. But this show opened doors for US teen shows for me, I have watched Teen Wolf and Vampire Diaries universe since then and liked them even with their imperfections, especially TVD.
That Emmett Till thing is really horrible, thats a real life murder and putting it in a show that clearly doesn’t give thought to the writing makes it seem like they are using this tragedy in a very misguided attempt to make the show seem more serious. Very upsetting
@bummie yeah I mean it's already bad enough when we get shows that glorify real murderers but this is very poor taste when you have a show about teenagers solving badly written mysteries. Just feels exploitative
I mean way back in season episode 3 Veronica made reference to actual horrific sexual assault cases, Steubenville - A rape case that occurred in Steubenville, Ohio, on the night of August 11, 2012, when a high-school girl, incapacitated by alcohol, was publicly and repeatedly sexually assaulted by classmates. Glen Ridge - A rape case that occurred in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where a mentally handicapped girl was raped with a broomstick and a baseball bat by members of the Glen Ridge High School football team in 1989.
@@denisablaskova3269 to be fair I’ve never actually watched more then one episode because it was just not my thing when it came out, and the more I hear about it the more I think this is probably one of the worst shows (that isn’t reality tv on tlc) in recent years, way up there with 13 reasons why
It does, and there’s a Twitter account that posts out of context screenshots and it makes me snort every time because riverdale has a line for almost any situation
Cole committing to the line "You have to use your chronokenesis and get us the hell out of 1955" is acting genius. Not many people could deliver that line with any seriousness.
The scene where Jughead has to explain his friends they are not in the right timeline, who they really are and that Archie and Betty needed to make out in order change the timeline was hilarious. Cole Sprouse deserves an award for making Jughead serious and crazy at the same time and delivering all those lines without laughing.
@@cristina.ganymede I have heard of it, but never watched it. I have watched other movies/tv shows about parallel universes or time travel by the way. I love that genre :)
Honestly this season just made me realize how cheated we were out of a 50's period-piece. Both KJ Apa and Lilli Reinhart are actually pretty good at playing these goofy teen character archtypes, and I think if they had just stuck with the mystery, maybe giving them different mysteries to solve each season, it would have been pretty good.
Playing to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Brothers tropes. Midnight Club showed how well these actors can be as other characters (specifically teenage versions of their parents and really evoking the actors who play the parents), and KJ Apa has demonstrated he can do emotional scenes really well when he gets the material. It’s the writing and creative decisions that have failed the actors and cheated the audience.
The fact that the principal calls Cheryl out for dancing with another girl, which like Alex said, was very common, but not for dancing with a ~black girl~ tells me anything I need to know about the show's understanding of gay and black history.
Especially since in some cultures girls would basically be almost completely isolated from boys until they were adults (especially if they went to all-girls schools and colleges), so dancing with other girls was literally the only authority-approved option for them
The fact that Emmett Till’s accuser died literally today meanwhile Riverdale is using the horrors of his murder as a basically backdrop set piece is such an emotional dissonance. I know that Riverdale doesn’t seem to have any editors or anything, but still, who approved this?!
2:50… my jaw hit the floor when I saw they were incorporating this in the show.. I mean Riverdale tackling the Emmet Till Case is like if Barney the dinosaur were to talk about the Challenger Disaster.. I mean Ik the writers are high as a kite but they can’t be this dumb.. they honestly can’t think they’d be able to talk about it with the respect it deserves..
My jaw dropped when they brought in Emmett Till but then I remembered that this show also had Tabitha trying to stop the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. so I guess no tragedy is off the table for their black characters huh Addendum: It is hilarious that Veronica's weird way of speaking fits perfectly into the 1950s
@@DavidKen878 25, 26, 28 and 28 to be exact. Cole is 30, Vanessa is 31 and Casey (Kevin) is 30. KJ would have been 19 when the pilot aired, and 18 when the it was filmed, so everyone in the cast was legal and thus fewer restrictions on the risqué material. Ashleigh, who plays Josie, is ten years older than KJ, and their characters were briefly in a relationship early on. To make the Fake Grundy storyline even creepier, KJ was eighteen when he filmed intimate scenes with an actress who was mid-30’s in age. Even knowing the show would have had an intimacy coach doesn’t make it better. I suppose one positive about the 50’s setting is that the show has to be more conservative with the fanservice to be more accurate to the period.
Once the stars are released from their contracts, hopefully they'll go onto bigger and better things. They're all really talented, not that you'd ever realise it based on this show alone.
i'm not black so please correct me if i'm wrong, but i find it so.... weird that the writers gave all the black characters such a traumatic storyline. i mean, you have betty being a goody two-shoes girl next door, archie being a jock, jughead with his old hat, etc etc, and then toni and the other two black characters in the show are fighting for emmett till's rights. that's so serious and so different from the rest of the group that it's giving viewers emotional whiplash. i appreciate that they want to discuss this very real and horrific moment in history, but i don't think ANYONE expected riverdale to discuss this. and tbh, with the way they're treating it right now and the way they're representing it, i don't think riverdale can be trusted to discuss this.
Through season 6, I feel like they started to acknowledge the absurdity and leant more towards it. Idk why they decided to have more serious/complex issues in the show now
I don’t think it was right to bring in Emmett tills tragic story but based on these videos, it seems like most of the characters had very traumatic storylines if you think about it. Like bettys dad is a serial killer, Archie’s life in general is nuts, same with Veronica and Cheryl and jughead so, that’s all pretty damn traumatic. I think it’s just different because this is adding in a real life tragedy
(tldr: I agree, roberto cannot be trusted to do true life, sensitive and horrific storylines as such. And he didn’t bother to see it all the way through anyways). adding to the comment above, throughout the season the other characters also have pretty traumatic or not nice events happen to them. Betty and Veronica both get disowned by their parents, Betty is even hit by Alice whilst Veronica is again manipulated by her father into covering up his conspiring with the Russians and is told her parents are divorcing. Reggie experiences a fair bit of racism throughout most of season, Archie has lost his dad in the war and is pushed around by his uncle. Cheryl is also treated awfully by her parents when they realise she is a lesbian. Jughead’s mentor is murdered. Whilst it certainly isn’t on the same playing field as what you mentioned they gave to the black characters of the show, the rest of them aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. Not as dark as the original timeline characters, but it’s there. Plus, Roberto (who’s surprised) didn’t even commit to consistently portraying the civil rights movement throughout the seasons to even do it justice. He did the same thing with the threat of Communism and Stalin… made it a bit threat one episode then lit it simmer unimportantly in the background 😐 So once he’s ticked his box and covered it, Toni didn’t really get much more of a storyline after that. It was just about finding her feet with Cheryl. And Tabitha barely even appeared in the whole season. Clay, equally, his storyline was surrounding being Kevin’s boyfriend and working for Veronica in the movie theatre 😭 he spent too much time on the wrong things to actually give the black characters proper fleshed out storylines and backgrounds. Granted they aren’t the core 4, but with it being the last season he could’ve given them the send off they deserved.
The whole dark room toni dance sequence was SO uncomfortable along with Betty's dream like i don't need to see every single character kissing every other character for no reason 💀
@@romeofernandez8608 In one MBAV episode, Ethan and Benny cross-dress. Benny says his name is "Betty" and Ethan says his name is "Veronica". Career foreshadowing?
@@romeofernandez8608 Considering Riverdale is getting an actual series finale and MBAV didn't (and it ticks any MBAV fan off to no end), I'd say she actually improved. It sucks that, until she drew attention to it, that she was the lowest-paid regular because she's black. But since she made that stir, I'd assume, she's doing better than ever financially. I do wish she was able to get better roles aside from B-rated TV shows
The scene from Glass Onion where Kate Hudson exclaimed:"it's so stupid it's genius!" & Daniel Craig yelled:"no! It's just stupid!" came to my mind during this video. 😵 Also a show having an end of season cliffhanger/tease that got lazily resolved at next season's premiere is nothing new.
Giving Cheryl's room THREE Shego posters is the funniest thing you have ever done on this channel! I fully had to pause until I stopped laughing. Loving Shego is definitely a wlw thing!! :D
the most interesting thing about this season to me is how unironically great KJ Apa is at playing a 50s character. like everyone else is pretty hit or miss but somehow he is perfectly matching the inflections and absolute dumbassery of those characters
@@theunbearablejuan This is gonna sound weird but I've often been very impressed with the acting on Riverdale, actually. The material is silly, but the actors really do give it all they've got. I continue to be especially impressed with how Betty's actress can just apparently cry on command and make it look like her heart is literally breaking apart over whatever dumb thing they're making the character cry over. That's gotta be so hard on such a silly show.
Apa generally does better as Archie when he can lean into the hamminess and awkwardness of the character and plot, instead of being the super serious Adonis god, the show really wanted him to be.
Its so weird how when I was in school, everyone just kept talking about Riverdale and how much they loved it, and then suddenly it just went quiet. Not a single word was said about Riverdale again after season 2 or season 1.
how the hell did they fuck up this badly💀riverdale lost its spark years ago. i can't believe this show went from a teen drama to a murder mystery to a cult story to a musical to witchcraft to time travel
As a black person, the "head in hands" feeling that I got when the show mentioned Emmett Till is almost indescribable What. Please. Never. Why. No. Stop.
As a POC, the amount of involuntary shrieks that left my body when that was mentioned…Yes, they should’ve addressed that being zapped back to the 1950s was gonna be genuinely dangerous for the Black characters (however sparse and terribly written they were) but SPRINKLING IN BLACK TRAUMA JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT IS NOT HOW YOU DO IT, YOU ASSHOLES.
@@gracekim25 you should definitely learn about Emmett Till. You'll understand why this was unbelievably out of their reach for representing him respectfully. It's like last season when the "stop MLK from being assassinated" plot. Completely unnecessary and disrespectful
the seven seasons of Riverdale seems like a cosmic horror entity, I'm glad I can experience the show through your channel because I doubt I would survive watching it myself.
Thank you Alex for sacrificing your sanity for us. Also this cast is now really too old to be high schoolers. Archie looks like he has a kid that goes to highschool.
I agree. A simple “Who Done It?” murder mystery was probably the only decent plot in the entire series. It just spiraled into chaos as things kept going.
Veronica looks like a cougar mom, Archie looks like a post-steroids jock, and Jughead looks like a "Back to the Future" reprisal. Took one for the team, Alex! You may rest now 🎉❤!
I have been reading Archie comics for like 35 years and I have loved the new edgier versions of it like Afterlife with Archie, the Mark Wade Archie-verse and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I was really excited for Riverdale. Just like when I found out, as a child, that there was an Archie cartoon! Pure joy! But my god. I watched the first season of Riverdale and could not get passed the 1st episode of Season 2. Watching these re-caps is my only exposure now and I am shocked every time at the choices made. They managed to take a comic empire that is literally all over the place and take it to 11 in the weirdest ways.
I'm sorry, last time I was here Veronica's dad was a mafia boss and there was a board game that made you see goats. Now I'm hearing about *looks at notes on hand* meteors and time travel? Sure is... an idea, I guess.
Thank you for sharing Riverdale's very insightful and tasteful interpretation of Emmett Till. It did not at all make me want to gouge my eyes out and destroy my eardrums when they even sort of mentioned it.
5 seasons of fun. Then 10 seasons of “I’m attached to this and there’s a good episode here and there but boy is this a poorly written slog”. And then you finish it and you never watch it again.
11:27 okay quick NERD INTERMISSION: Aphrodite is not the daughter of Zeus, she's technically his aunt. Before Kronos dethroned his father, he castrated Ouranos and threw his "cherries" into the ocean, and for years to come, Aphrodite emerged from the ocean, fully grown, making the painting we know as the birth of Venus, if she's supposed to be smart, ACTUALLY make her smart
The first episode of riverdale s new season was weirdly good. Obviously Veronica was over the top but she’s calmed down since then I also really liked how they handled some very sensitive issues
@@deliacozo8542 Yeah, Emmett Till was a real child who was brutally murdered by racists who were acquitted. His funeral was notably open casket (Till's body was severely disfigured by the murder and disposal of his body) because his mother thought it was important that the world see what had been done to him.
I remember watching the first season and thinking Riverdale could be my new favorite show a few years ago... How did "Lets solve this murder" turn into "serial killer, magic, time travel, ANGELS"?
14:18 "We did not raise you this way, Ethel!" "Do you have any idea what it's like to be a teenage girl and look like this?" Oops, sorry, wrong Shannon Purser movie.
This show has gotta be the world's greatest con ever. The writers must have thought hey let's see if a network would pay us for making the most illogical show ever. Riverdale don't try to be a social commentary show
If Jughead wanted to show his friends that he knows about the future, why didn't he just tell Kevin and Cheryl secretly about how he knows where their attraction lies. He had sex with Betty, he would at least remember some kind of birthmark or scar.
For me, knowing that the show is ending, it feels nostalgic to see them all being "innocent" in a sense, even if it may seem unnecessary I like that they can have a break, can't wait for it all to go off-rails though 😅
I stopped watching the show years ago, and not only jump the shark. The shark went to space . Still enjoy watching Alex’s video so so going to miss them
The very concept of Riverdale is wild. "Oh, let's take this slice-of-life wacky newspaper comic and make it dark and edgy!" like what if they made Calvin and Hobbes a horror series about a mentally disturbed schizophrenic child and his imaginary tiger hallucination who goads him into committing unspeakable crimes
Snoopy has rabies, that's why he has hallucinations about fighting in WW1 and writing novels. Beetle Bailey is a Soviet spy seeking to undermine the US Army. B.C. doesn't take place in the past, but in a post apocalyptic world bombed back into the Stone Age. Where's my development deal at Netflix?
The girls dancing together thing: when obese, middle-aged Henry VIII married 19 year old Catherine Howard one night he went to bed early and there was still dancing and fun going on and she didn't want to go but he would be jealous and crazy if another guy spent the night dancing with his new wife, so his previous ex Anne of Cleves volunteered to be her dance partner for the rest of the night and the two of them apparently had a good time. No one had a problem. It's only a notable event because it was an example of what a nice person Anne of Cleves was, and how much Catherine Howard liked to party.
