There is still some joy to wring out of this. The obvious one is just watching the writers just give up more than anyone has ever given up before. There’s mothman aliens! Actually they’re a clan of hillbillies that were never mentioned before. Plot resolved! Sure. Why not. Who gives a shit.

The deliberate anachronism getting stronger and stronger as the show goes on is also quite fun. In particular Citizen Lodge’s bit of portraying 1980s Riverdale as 1920s New York is really funny but also as I’ve been rewatching The Simpsons I have also realised that that show did the exact same joke in Lisa’s First Word. Even aside from that bit Citizen Lodge does stand out from other episodes of Riverdale simply because it actually has a plot rather than just the scattering of random unrelated events that usually make up an episode of Riverdale.

Interesting to compare this to Legally Blonde, a film from the same year that was much more successful, more fondly remembered, and which I found much more lacking on rewatch. Legally Blonde does have some very memorably and quotable bits, but I found Josie and the Pussycats had a lot more energy, a lot more laughs, and just a lot more fun. They are both of their time but Legally Blonde only puts me back into thinking “Oh yes, this is how Hollywood films and stereotypes were in the early 2000s,” Josie and the Pussycats puts one back into an over the top version of the music and consumer culture at the time, overlaid with absolutely obscene product placement.

It’s kind of a great encapsulation of capitalist recuperation. A genuinely fun film about the evils of consumerism and advertising, utterly plastered with completely genuine product placement that both sells and undermines its own message because Evian doesn’t care about how it’s being made fun of with the grotesque spectacle of the Evian-sponsored aquarium because you are still getting to see a giant Evian logo plastered over your screen for an entire scene. Buy a fucking Dreamcast.

I like how the technology in this show has gotten more and more anachronistic as the show goes on and it keeps inconsistently leaning into mid-century aesthetics without rhyme or reason. I enjoy how at the start of the show the idea is that Riverdale is a normal town and everyone was shocked by this sudden, horrible murder, and now, four series in, everyone thinks that Riverdale is the biggest shithole in the world where only bad things have ever happened and it’s always been like this. Having a functioning memory makes this show fairly amusing. What happened to Hiram Lodge’s vague council of evil? What, in fact, happened to any plot point that existed three episodes ago? It doesn’t matter. Riverdale night is about torturing yourself with your friends and repeatedly promising them the real bullshit is going to start soon, we swear.

There is a sense of wrongness that creeps up on you as you rewatch the third series of Riverdale, subjecting your friends to it who have never experienced it. There is the obvious things: The Dungeons & Dragons cult, the other cult, the Gargoyle King, Hiram’s evil council of vagueness, Archie fights a bear. Reality is slipping more and more in this show. But you remember that. That’s the ridiculousness that you looked forward to sharing with your friends. But reality seems to be slipping out of the show in even stranger ways. You already joked that nothing in this show matters because it will all be forgotten half an hour later to focus on some new drama, but this is genuinely becoming hard to follow. People talking about plot points that have not happened, deaths you don’t remember seeing. Characters suddenly in completely different places episode to episode without seemingly any reason. Was it always like this? You definitely don’t remeb—oh. The torrent you downloaded had all the episodes out of order. That explains a lot. You all agree that this is an improvement over watching the show normally and don’t bother fixing it.

Fondly remembering all the ridiculous shit that happens in this show and telling friends about it made it seem like a rewatch would be fun, but watching it without the novelty of each new twist it just lays bare how utterly arbitrary and inconsequential everything that happens in this show is. Nothing matters. Every dramatic twist will be completely forgotten in two episode’s time and there haven’t even been any cults yet.

Somehow I had convinced myself that the first series of this show was serious. That there was real mystery and drama. That it’s not till later in the show that everything starts going off the rails. But no, it was forever thus. Every character in this show is unhinged in their own unique way. I love Cheryl especially. She is a force of nature, utterly divorced from sense or reason.