In this op-ed, writer Elly Belle explains the Riverdale finale ending and the poly relationship that has stirred up the internet — though is the natural endpoint for a show dedicated to queer camp. Spoilers ahead.
Well, it’s happened for the final time: Riverdale has out-Riverdale’d itself. In the last episode of the series, which aired on Aug. 23, we discover the show’s relationship endgame: a polyamorous quad romantic partnership between Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and Archie.
For those who haven’t watched the show inspired by Archie comics, in recent years it only got stranger and more campy. Its first season started out with the murder of Jason Blossom (Trevor Stines), the brother of queer witch-in-residence Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch). And its seventh season finale begins with an elderly Betty Cooper, losing her memories to Alzheimers and requesting Gaurdian Angel Jughead take her to the town of Riverdale one more time to look back on her glory days. For context, this is at the end of a season that took place almost entirely in the 1950s after everyone was sent to a parallel universe because of the apocalypse. Are you lost yet?
The last seven seasons of the show have truly been chaotic, though shouldn’t be mistaken as haphazard or unintentional. After all, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, creator and one of the main writers of Riverdale, has had a hand in some of the biggest teen series to date: Riverdale, Glee, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to name a few. He knows what he’s doing and is clearly having fun. Yet current discourse surrounding the finale has been rooted in, for example, declarations from Barchie (Betty and Archie) shippers that the couple is endgame and that queering that relationship was lazy or wrong. Some fans and onlookers have been shocked and confused with the “surprise” polyamory twist. Yet anyone feeling surprised over the reveal that the town’s teens were polyamorous has not been paying close enough attention, or has been living in a world of their own making, a Gryphons and Gargoyles fever dream.
From the beginning, Riverdale set a standard of strangeness and queerness, and it has existed in a world where heterosexuality, monogamy, linear time and any other social construct is waved away. Of course, this is nothing very new from Aguirre-Sacasa, who famously was sent a cease and desist after trying to have Archie come out as gay in the comics in 2003. Following years of waiting, he was finally able to bring his queer dreams to life with Riverdale.
While the show was by no means perfect, it’s important to note how the writers explored and pushed the limits of what queerness — living outside of the bounds of what’s considered “normal” — could look like in nuanced ways. Not only were there more than 30 queer characters over its seven seasons, but the show shattered many norms and expectations, too. For example, the writers poked big holes in the outside perception of Betty (Lili Reinhart), the girl next door with a seemingly perfect all American nuclear family — turning it into a lineage of psychopathic serial killers including Betty’s father and brother. There were, of course, egregious parts of this storyline including some ableism, sanism, and Betty’s foray into being an FBI officer (you’re too good to be a cop, Betty!). Still, instead of building a sweet and simple world, the writers took the comics’ scaffolding, rife with tension of small-town America boy-and-girl-next-door and happy family arcs, and shook it up. It basically got put through the Upside Down and turned into queer gothic cottagecore camp.
Even seemingly straight pairings, including platonic ones like Ethel Muggs (Shannon Purser) and Jughead Jones’ (Cole Sprouse) friendship, come across as queer. Neither are very “normal” and are considered outcasts, and this is what they are drawn to in each other. This is all aside from the explicitly gay relationships in the series, like this last season’s pairing of Clay Walker (Karl Walcott) and Kevin Keller (Casey Cott) — or even Cheryl and Toni Topaz (Vanessa Morgan) ending up together happily with a house, a kid, and a peaceful life, not just in one universe or timeline but many, the type of premise often unheard of for queer women onscreen, who are so often relegated to the Bury Your Gays trope.
The current discourse around the quad relationship from fans who preferred a monogamous ship isn’t really based in any real understanding of the show’s commitment to camp or queerness. Looking at the ending now, the Riverdale finale was always going to be this way.
Just to review some of the most ridiculous and campy things that have happened in the show: Jughead fakes his death and turns it into a murder mystery conspiracy. Archie is mauled by a bear and has to brawl with himself in a dream and also diffuse a bomb in a parallel universe. Cheryl inhabits the body of a relative and then exorcizes her. Cheryl and Toni bake a man into a pie in a scene right out of Sweeney Todd. The town of Riverdale is infested with cults, including one led by Chad Michael Murray that harvests organs. Fangs and Toni end up happily married as a bisexual power couple in one timeline and get into a custody battle with Kevin to claim their baby as their own. And this is all only what happens in a handful of episodes out of 137. It was brilliantly and beautifully deranged.
The writers packed a lot in, but not without care and precision. And through it all, nothing in the cinematic universe ever suggested that monogamy, heterosexual relationships, or anything “normal” was the standard. The motto of Riverdale might as well be no one is straight, everything is weird always, and everyone is traumatized. Through all the bizarre things, is it really that hard to believe that polyamory was part of it?
“By the end, I think that they were having fun subverting expectations because I never would've expected us to end up in a town where time travel was real. The point of the show feels like it wanted to be fun and spectacular and completely out of pocket,” Gabrielle Alexa Noel, a queer polyamorous woman and a fan of the show, tells Teen Vogue. “It feels like high art that they finally took all the, ‘choose polyamory you cowards!’ Tweets seriously.”
Heterosexual tropes were teased and torn apart. And the inherent sexual and emotional tension within the dynamic of the core four as well as the other main characters was leveraged to push how we think about intimacy. It made fun of itself and referenced fan discourse multiple times, including Veronica’s infamous line, “It’s not queerbaiting, it’s saving the world.” Assumptions rooted in monogamous, compulsory heterosexuality about which relationships matter most or will last were toyed with constantly.
While Archie and Betty’s connection might be unique in some ways because they have such a storied connection dating back to childhood, it never discounted Betty and Veronica’s connection, and at times romance, just because of their shorter history. In every universe and version of the show, Betty and Veronica have a deep relationship even alongside Betty and Archie’s, or Veronica and Archie’s, or Veronica and Jughead’s. None of them ever canceled each other out or replaced each other.
Likewise, Archie’s romantic and sexual relationships with Veronica and Betty don’t ultimately take away from or come before his relationship with Jughead — where they help each other through homelessness, the horrors of parallel universes, family deaths and abandonments and more. If you look closely, Riverdale has always been about relationship anarchy, non-monogamy, and all of the many forms of intimacy it’s possible to experience and build on. So it actually isn’t a shock, nor is it tired writing, to name explicitly that Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead exist as a quad at one point. It was always them, even if only platonically at points. What the finale shows is that they were all soulmates in their own unique ways. Why perpetuate love triangles when everyone can have it all?
And while some have suggested it's homophobic or insensitive not to show Archie and Jughead together physically, the rest of the show was so sexually charged that I’d ask us to question what it’s actually saying about intimacy and how love expands and what it looks like beyond the physical or sexual. There's much more to the intimacy of Archie and Jughead's relationship than sex or kissing — let alone the intimate nature of pretty much every relationship in the series.
Riverdale was always about subversion. Simple or even strictly monogamous relationships wouldn’t match up with its fundamental guiding perspective. It shows that personal relationships are not straightforward. You cannot label everything. Sometimes you experiment with one friend while you’re in love with another, and sometimes, you’re in love with multiple people at once. And it’s okay if the relationships don’t last forever. It might not matter so much who someone “ends” up with. That’s not the point. The love still matters. As Gaurdian Angel Jughead tells Betty in the finale, “You say hello. You walk alongside someone for a while and then you say goodbye. That’s the arc of a life, isn’t it? Every minute counts.”
Considering even half of the above, it’s easy to see the writers were never going for a stereotypical ending. This is not Boy Meets World, folks. In fact, the show turns on the concept of an endgame entirely, proposing that love, sexuality, and intimacy is fluid and there are too many versions of self and desires to explore. It asks us to look at the intense feelings we have for people who are “just” friends, for those who know our deepest or even darkest secrets or versions of self. We all contain multitudes — sometimes even too dynamic to be contained in just one universe or relationship.
And as a very smart person on Twitter said, the last episode left us with the wisdom, “Riverdale series finale mantra: You are polyamorous in the NOW. You are dead in the FUTURE. You are gay FOREVER.”
