With crazy mysteries and endless romance stories based on Archie Comics, Riverdale is entertaining and also wildly ridiculous. Every season gets more and more unrealistic, and season three is the biggest rollercoaster ride yet.
Each season focuses on one specific case that Betty (Lili Reinhart) and Jughead (Cole Sprouse) solve, and in season three, the town of Riverdale is introduced to a deadly game, Gryphons and Gargoyles (G&G). Once the game is introduced, it’s up to the core four to figure out the identity of the G&G leader known as the Gargoyle King. Here’s a complete recap of Riverdale season three:
Archie
After season two ends with Hiram (Mark Consuelos) having Archie (KJ Apa) arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, season three shows Archie at the detention center, where Hiram has the warden wrapped around his finger.
In prison, Archie is forced into an illegal boxing club, where he fights while wealthy people bet on winners. Betty, Veronica (Camila Mendes) and the gang help Archie escape, and he leaves town with Jughead. After the group splits up, Archie gets mauled by a bear and barely makes it home alive.
Eventually, Veronica and Archie break up, causing him to spin out of control. Josie (Ashleigh Murray) helps pull Archie together, and the two spark a short-lived romance.
Archie boxes, hoping to pursue it professionally, and even runs his own gym with the help of Veronica. He battles Hiram in a fight, which ends in Hiram being arrested for illegally fighting Archie and being the true owner of the gym.
Veronica
Veronica’s conflicts of the season revolve around her dealing with her father and figuring out her relationships with Archie and Reggie (Charles Melton).
At the end of season two, Veronica promised she’d reopen the old speakeasy underneath Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, and in season three, she follows through on that promise by opening La Bonne Nuit.
Reggie teams up with Veronica to blow up a truck full of drugs that Hermione (Marisol Nichols) already had sold. Because there was no product, it was up to Veronica and Reggie to scrape together the money and pay back the buyer, who turns out to be Jughead’s mom, Gladys (Gina Gershon).
Hiram finds out about the blown-up drugs and equipment, which were actually his, and informs Veronica of her debt to him. Veronica spends her time making deals to shave money off her two debts, like letting Gladys perform at the speakeasy and helping Hiram land a new client.
When Hiram and Hermione decide to get a divorce, Veronica is really broken up about it and tries to convince them to work out their differences. Then, Veronica finds out that the deed to La Bonne Nuit has been under Hiram’s name the whole time, which sends her into a frenzy. After plotting with Archie for Hiram’s arrest, Veronica blindly thinks she’s won over her father.
Betty
Betty’s storyline is a little more complicated this season. Betty focuses on trying to get her mom, Alice (Madchen Amik), and sister out of The Farm, the cult where Polly (Tiera Skovbye) was sent when she got pregnant with Jason’s babies.
Betty not only investigates The Farm, but she also helps Jughead investigate G&G along with a string of suicides in the town and even has to spend time saving Jughead when he gets sucked into playing G&G.
Alice decides to sell the Cooper house and live in The Farm. Jughead and his family move into the house, and Betty investigates Edgar Evernever (Chad Michael Murray), The Farm’s leader and her mother’s new fianceé. After joining The Farm in an effort to help, Betty discovers the cult is secretly harvesting and selling organs, so she tries to save Kevin (Casey Cott), Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch) and Toni (Vanessa Morgan).
Jughead
Jughead has a heavy and emotionally unstable season, with more twists and turns than ever before for his character.
Everything seemed normal at the beginning of the season for Jughead, teaming up with Betty to investigate the suicides in Riverdale and then trying to crack the mystery that is G&G. However, once they look into G&G, Jughead gets hooked and becomes a game master.
After getting out of his G&G phase and running away with Archie, Jughead finds his mom and sister, Jellybean (Trinity Likins), and they come back to Riverdale with him.
Jughead also has to deal with being the new serpent king for the Southside Serpents, which includes facing off against a rival gang, the Ghoulies.
Cheryl
After last season, Cheryl is officially a member of the Serpents, and she’s dating Toni. The couple are kicked out of the gang, and Toni feels lost without it, so Cheryl creates a new gang of women for Toni called the Pretty Poisons. Toni is the leader of the gang, and Cheryl and Toni are happy again.
Betty asks Cheryl to help spy on The Farm to gain information, but Cheryl is brainwashed into being a devoted member. Toni decides to join The Farm so the couple can stay together. After briefly breaking up during the season, the two didn’t want anything else to keep them apart.
However, after Cheryl learns of Edgar’s true intentions of The Farm, she and Toni hatch a plan to escape, but she sacrifices herself so Toni can get away.
The big reveal
The core four all get invitations to dinner from the Gargoyle King. The dinner also includes Penelope (Nathalie Boltt), Sister Woodhouse (Beverley Breuer) and The Black Hood, who’s Betty’s dad, Hal, and the center of season two.
Penelope asks both The Black Hood and the Gargoyle King to remove their masks for dinner, and when the Gargoyle King removes his mask, it’s revealed that Chic (Hart Denton) is the Gargoyle King.
Instead of The Black Hood killing Chic like everyone thought, the Hood spared Chic’s life in order to be a pawn in Penelope’s plan. In fact, Penelope first introduced G&G when the Riverdale parents were in high school. Now, Penelope wants the core four to play one last round of G&G, where they must make it through the woods for the whole night, and if they lose, they die.
Meanwhile, Alice helps Cheryl escape from The Farm and asks her to take Juniper with her and leave Alice behind to help Polly.
The core four deal with dangerous quests, including fights with bears and poisoned chalices. Betty arguably faces the hardest challenge, where she’s forced to kill her father, but she can’t do it. Then, Penelope shows up and kills Hal in front of Betty, causing an emotional outburst.
Cheryl and Toni rally the Serpents and the Pretty Poisons to help save the core four and call the police. With Hal dead, Chic is sent to jail, but Penelope escapes. The core four then heads to The Farm to save Kevin and Betty’s family, but once there, Kevin is the only one left, and he tells them everyone has already ascended.
The season finale ends with Cheryl stealing Jason’s corpse, Hiram planting evidence to get Hermione arrested and Betty discovering her mother was working with the FBI to bring down The Farm cult. The FBI agent who informs her and Jughead of this turns out to be their brother, whom F.P. (Skeet Ulrich) and Alice had when they were in high school.
The season ends on a cliffhanger, after flashing forward to Betty, Veronica and Archie standing over a fire covered in blood, holding Jughead’s beanie. Betty explains that they’ll burn their clothes, wash off, never speak of the night again and then graduate and go their separate ways, so they don’t get caught. Then, it flashes back to the present, where the four are at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, with milkshakes and vowing to be friends forever.
It looks like Riverdale might actually have a good plan for next season, but it’s impossible to tell. Though some storylines were cleanly wrapped up, there’s still a lot left to be answered.
