After seven seasons, Archie and the gang are finally saying goodbye.
On Wednesday, August 23, Riverdale aired its series finale, and much like the seasons that came before it, this one had a surprising reveal. While the first season of the hit CW show was a teen angst-filled murder mystery, subsequent seasons introduced one bonkers plot line after another. There were serial killers, a secret society, a Dungeons & Dragons-style game that led to murder, cults, cryptids, and even superpowers.
But despite the wild directions the plotlines went in, the one thing we weren’t expecting to learn in the final episode of the show, which was loosely based on Archie comics, was that our four main characters were in a quad relationship for a year.
In the series finale, the show jumps ahead 67 years (season six ended with the gang back in the ‘50s) where we find an 86-year-old Betty (Lili Reinhart) reading the obituaries and discovering that Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse) is dead, making her the last one standing.
Betty tells her granddaughter that she wants to "go back to Riverdale one last time before it's too late," but that night Jughead appears to her in a dream and offers to return her to any day in Riverdale. Betty decides to return to her final day of high school which she missed the first time around because she had the mumps.
Betty travels back to that faithful day and learns what happened to all of her old friends. Archie (KJ Apa) moved to California to be a construction worker where he lived out his days with his wife and family. Jughead founded Jughead’s Madhouse Magazine, never married and died at 86. Veronica (Camila Mendes) moved to Los Angeles where she became a studio head and even won two Oscars. Toni (Vanessa Morgan) and Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch) stayed together, had a son, and became artists and activists. Clay (Karl Walcott) and Kevin (Casey Cott) also made it as a couple, with Clay becoming a professor at Columbia and Kevin starting an off-Broadway theater company.
Betty herself wrote a best-seller titled The Teenage Mystique, ran an advice column, and launched the successful women’s magazine She Says.
But the most interesting piece of information we learn is that Betty spent a year in a “quad” relationship with Veronica, Archie, and Jughead!
"It started innocently enough with the four of us going on double dates – me and Archie, Jughead and Veronica. And then it kind of naturally evolved from there," she tells pal Reggie Mantle (Charles Melton). "Some nights Archie would sneak into my bedroom and Veronica would go home with Jughead. Other nights, Archie would spend the night at The Pembrooke, and I'd go over to Jughead's. And sometimes, more often than you'd imagine, I would find my way to Veronica's."
Fans have shipped Betty and Veronica (dubbed Beronica) since the first season when the two locked lips during a cheerleading tryout, but nothing came of it until Betty begins to struggle with her own bisexual desires and the pair ended up kissing again earlier in season seven.
The show has given us other queer plot lines over the years (some more successful than others), but now that we know the Riverdale gang spent an entire year sharing each other’s beds, we wish the series would have shown us scenes of the two leading ladies together!
Without the relationship between Betty and Veronica actually making it on screen it feels like the creators were trying to slip it in without having to explore the relationship beyond a couple of titillating sapphic kisses and fantasy scenes.
