‘Riverdale’s Gryphons & Gargoyles Reveal Aims to Structure Its Own Insanity

Riverdale is the most insane show on television. Describing any given episode of The CW hit is akin to recounting a fever dream: at the time, it made sense; but later it falls apart with the simplest pluck at the seams. But a major development in the fifth episode of Season 3 has attempted to apply a logic to the insanity, and depending on how its pulled off may be one of the more audacious storytelling tricks currently on TV.

Spoilers for “Chapter Forty: The Great Escape” past this point.

The latest episode was full of the sorts of plot points that make you ask “isn’t this supposed to be about kids in high school?” But that’s par for the course. Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) is in juvenile detention for a crime he didn’t commit, about to be killed by the evil warden as part of a secret underground prisoner fight club. So the whole gang rallies to break him out. Meanwhile, Jughead (Cole Sprouse) is playing a game of Gryphons & Gargoyles, the show’s Dungeons & Dragons analogue that may have led to the deaths of at least three Riverdale residents. He’s hoping he can get deep enough in the game to meet the mysterious Gargoyle King, a figure he believes holds the key to why these deaths are occurring.

It’s at the intersection of these two storylines that Riverdale introduces something bigger, and much weirder.

Jughead reaches an impasse in his narrative, a fantasy scenario featuring a “Red Paladin” trying to escape from various monsters. It’s paralleled on screen with Archie’s escape, each member of the gang getting a fantasy analogue in Jughead’s narration. As viewers, we’re meant to believe Jughead may either know the plan from Betty (Lili Reinhart), or its all just a coincidence. But when the warden loses track of Archie due to a last minute feint on Betty’s part, so does Jughead lose the Red Paladin.

And then the warden asks Betty where the Red Paladin is. There’s no way, in that moment, that Jughead and the warden could have communicated. They’ve never met as far as we know. Their only connection is, as was teased earlier in the episode, they’re both part of this cult of The Gargoyle King. Later we see the warden with a card that says “Kill The Red Paladin,” and his task unfulfilled he commits suicide. Meanwhile, Archie now safe, Jughead ends the episode finally getting to meet the Gargoyle King — or at least the stick and bone beast he thinks is the Gargoyle King (that’s an article for another time).

There are two other moments we should set up before we really dig into it. The first is that not only is the warden in on the Gryphons & Gargoyles game, but so is Joaquin (Rob Race), a character we previously thought had no connection that plot-line at all. And towards the beginning of the episode, Jughead rants about how everything they’ve done this season seems like quests in a game.

So what’s happening here, exactly? There are reasonable explanations for all of this; and frankly, I expect when the veil is lifted there will be a totally non-mystical reason for events. But by episode’s end, it’s distinctly possible that everything that’s happened on Riverdale so far has all been part of an enormous role playing game. Not just Season 3, but Seasons 1 and 2 as well.

One of the basic setups of Riverdale is that we’re in a novel Jughead has been writing ever since Jason Blossom (Trevor Stines) was murdered in the pilot. We know this because he’s often banging away at a typewriter, or narrating the beginning or end of an episode.

Jughead’s novel makes no sense.

As a TV show, with its episodic structure, Riverdale arguably works (by which I mean I’m constantly arguing with viewers over whether it works). But trying to think about what Jughead is writing down as any sort of reasonable novel is… Ridiculous. Sometimes I fantasize about the final scene of Riverdale, where he tries to get an agent to read the nonsensical, three billion page long novel he wrote about his friends. The agent turns over the last page. “What did you think?” Jughead asks. The agent pauses, as if in thought. He looks up at Jughead and says, “What the f—“ as we cut to black.

But this scenario? That Riverdale isn’t a barely coherent novel we’re experiencing in retrospect; it’s an ongoing role playing game full of side quests and an overarching, all powerful storyteller — a gamesmaster — who has been creating and manipulating events since the beginning… It makes sense. It even justifies the breakneck, sometimes confusing nature of the narrative on a weekly basis. It gives the writers a chance to comment on why and how they do what they do.

It’s also a chance to pull out a trump card comic books have used for years: the retcon. Short for retroactive continuity, it’s a trope also familiar to fans of any soap opera medium. It’s something that’s always been true, you just didn’t know it until you find it out later, and it changes past events as a result. It’s also added by writers later in the run, and wasn’t necessarily planned from the beginning.

It can be something as “simple” as a character was their own evil twin the whole time. Or more complicated, like everything from the murder of a teenager by his own father, a serial killer called The Black Hood, and the death of a Principal decades earlier all being connected by an evil role playing game.

The risk with a move like that is you can devalue previous dramatic beats. If it does turn out that Jason Blossom was murdered not because his father was a vengeful maniac, but because someone else was manipulating events, it robs that Season 1 reveal of some of its power. That moment isn’t about the damaged Blossom family; it’s about The Gargoyle King.

I’m not saying they’re definitely going that way. But we already know the game goes back decades, and there’s every chance — given what we learn about the warden this episode – that there are far more residents of The Town With Pep that are playing, and have been playing, the game than just the kids at high school.

However far Riverdale pushes this plot, they’ve already changed the structure of the show, the way the rules work. The bigger question is, what happens when they eliminate The Gargoyle King? What happens when the one building the stories the show has been telling for three seasons is gone?

Perhaps that’s a question that can only be answered in the pages of Jughead’s novel.

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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