F*ck It, I’m Starting Riverdale: A Year-Long Live Tweet

This piece contains spoilers for Riverdale… obviously. 

On March 12, 2020, my second day in quarantine, I tweeted: Fuck it I’m starting Glee. Over the next two months, I watched six seasons of that delightful and horrifying show as I struggled through those early days of Covid.

Well, it’s time I start another long-running teen show. But a lot has changed since March 2020. For one, Twitter is pretty much dead. That’s why I’m going to try something new as I make my way through Greg Berlanti’s spin on the Archie comics. I’m going to be posting thoughts, jokes, and screenshots in this article. My very own Riverdale-specific Twitter.

Something else has changed since March 2020: I have a full time job and an IRL social life. That’s why I’m giving myself until the end of 2024. That feels like a reasonable amount of time to make it through seven seasons and 137 episodes.

I started with season one but now I’m just updating this piece whenever I watch. Hop into the jalopy! It’s gonna be a fun ride!

---

Okay so everything I know about Riverdale I gleaned from Riverdale superfan and Autostraddle managing editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya plus a brief love of the Archie comics as a child.

1. Archie is a redhead, Jughead has a hat, Betty is blonde, and Veronica is brunette.
2. I think Archie and Jughead can never decide whether they’re more into Betty or Veronica.
3. Archie drives a jalopy.
4. Betty is bisexual. (But also maybe every character is bisexual?)
5. Josie and the Pussycats
6. Charles Melton doesn’t show up until season two.
7. The show has multiple timelines maybe in a multiverse sort of way?
8. At some point, there is magic and various fantasy elements.
9. At some point, Archie goes to prison.
10. During the final season, Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica form a polycule.

And with that… let’s start episode 1.

---

I just shouted MILLENNIAL?? Definitely assumed this was going to take place in the 50’s.

Every year in my shitty suburb, I waited for a hot new person to show up and it never happened. Imagine CAMILA MENDES walks into your little diner. I get it Arch.

Oh okay Camila Mendes is going to be a problem for me. (The good kind.) Now I understand why you all liked that terrible Netflix movie with her.

I AM HOOKED !

This observation is going to be for like six people but Cole Sprous’ narrator voice has the exact same cadence as the narrator of Magnolia.

POOR BETTY !! A boy with an acoustic guitar is so dangerous for a girl that age.

Are Betty and Cheryl gonna kiss?

No okay not today.

I am loving this Betty/Jughead investigative journalism angle.

Cheryl might be my favorite character so far.

Wow Riverdale doing a Me Too storyline before Weinstein. Good for them even if it does involve something called a “Sticky Maple.”

The Josie and the Pussycats facing racism in Riverdale storyline at the start of the episode just a tad undermined by the deeply uncomfortable racial politics of the revenge plot storyline at the end !!

I’m sorry but Jughead would not call Tarantino “the godfather of indie cinema.” I don’t think he’s supposed to be cool, but he’s cooler than THAT.

Well… choices are certainly being made with this Ms. Grundy storyline.

Polly is suicidal? That’s the big secret? In my hometown, that was called being a teenager!

If I was Hermione Lodge, I’d be so annoyed that my daughter is seemingly around every corner when I’m just trying to hookup/make shady money deals.

I’m trying not to comment upon every film reference (or every exciting guest star) but this next episode is called “In a Lonely Place” and I do need to say that Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is one of the best movies of all time.

Everyone is being so chill about Polly going from missing to having a baby shower.

Veronica has such Emma Woodhouse/Cher Horowitz energy.

Now THAT is how you do an episode of television.

Do we think it was always the plan for Cheryl’s dad to have a creepy red wig collection or was that in response to people online asking why he was wearing such a bad wig?

Unfortunately, I understand Archie because as a youth I also fell in love with every girl except the one who fell in love with me.

Betty and Cheryl are related?? I’m so glad they didn’t make out!

WAIT

Oh no… Polly. Oh God.

Why didn’t Betty’s dad say that was why Polly and Jason couldn’t date?? He knew, right??

Accurate representation of the legal system that the mayor and sheriff are busy worrying about smalltime drug dealers after discovering the kingpin killed his own son and then himself.

Not to sound surprised, but this episode is actually really sharp about moral panics around crime and how our society reacts to violence??

And now the show is taking on the broken foster system? Who knew Riverdale was political!

I need these girls to stop calling their actually fathers daddy.

Sorry but Betty going full righteous journalist is making her very hot to me.

Wow okay I don’t know how it took me so long to realize this but Riverdale premiered in 2017 which makes it a total Trump era show. I’ll wait until I watch more seasons to say anything declarative but Glee was the quintessential Obama era teen show premiering in 2009 and it makes total sense Riverdale would be the quintessential Trump era teen show premiering in 2017.

---

Cheryl’s monologue to her mom… this episode really walking that line between violent and horny.

Not the return of Ms. Grundy !

NOT THE DEATH OF MS. GRUNDY !!!

The repeated trauma faced by Archie and the kids of Riverdale is meant to represent the trauma of today’s youth amidst political violence and mass shootings. In this essay I will…

Is the Josie and the Pussycats cover of “Milkshake” on Spotify?

It is!

Riverdale is turning into Zodiac, meanwhile Archie thinks he’s in The Avengers and Veronica thinks she’s in Gilmore Girls.

Betty is anti-cruising so actually NOT ally.

Stunt Queens: The History and Cultural Significance of the “Queerleader” in Film and Television

Gays, let’s rally! I’m here, queer, and ready to dive real deep into a very important dyke media legacy: queer cheerleaders on screen.

I made a list of all the pom-pommed lesbian and bisexual moments from film and television I could think of off the top of my head, which it was already very long! I then researched further and uncovered even more. The Queerleader has long been an image used to both subvert and reinforce notions of girlhood and femininity. As with many tropes and stocktypes when it comes to queer images and stories in film and TV, the Queerleader is complicated: sometimes a powerful image of femme lesbianism and other times intentionally portrayed as disruptive and dangerous, a threat to not only men but the women in close proximity to her.

Before we get into the timeline, let’s start with the roots of the Queerleader’s legacy.

What makes the sport and spectacle of cheerleading a realm so rife with lesbian and bisexual activity? Well, I think the answer is as simple — and as complex when you really drill into it! — as the answer to why settings/contexts such as all-girl’s schools, convents, and sororities are also frequent playgrounds for queerness and sexual exploration. These are, conventionally, highly feminized spaces considered to be largely free of men. And that’s where things also get complicated, because such spaces are often fetishized by straight cis men for that exact reason. It is a place where they are forbidden, and therefore it’s a place where they cast their voyeuristic gaze, peering as if through a peephole. You might not be surprised that when researching this specific topic, I also encountered a lot of cheerleader-themed lesbian porn.

But I think it’d be overly simplistic — prudish, even — to suggest the Queerleader and the homoeroticization of these other “feminine” spaces exist solely for the male gaze. It’d be a stretch to suggest straight men invented the Queerleader, even if the earliest examples of these filmic depictions were indeed constructed by men. While those might compose the majority of our pre-1999 examples, I think that has more to do with who had the means and power to make movies. There are lots of early- to mid-twentieth century examples of women writing lesbian narratives set in some of the aforementioned women’s spaces, including 1917’s Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane, set at an all-girls school. Radclyffe Hall drew from her friend Toupie Lowther’s experiences in a French World War I women’s unit for her famous novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Prolific lesbian pulp novelist Ann Bannon realized her own sexuality while in a sorority in college and then went on to write Odd Girl Out (1957) about two sorority sisters in a relationship.

Sure, these are examples from literature, but in the early- and mid- 20th century, literature was a more accessible artform than film/television for women and queer people, especially because pen names allowed them to write somewhat anonymously and ambiguously. But on the cinematic side of things, Dorothy Arzner arguably invented the all-girls school film with The Wild Party in 1929, and while the movie features pre-Code compulsory heterosexuality, its lesbian erotics are impossible to miss.

So, cheerleading does seem to fit into this concept of “women’s spaces,” which make for ideal settings for lesbian narratives — especially in decades when homosexuality was widely criminalized and stigmatized — by allowing women to be in close proximity to each other. These are worlds in which women touching and being physically close can be seen as normal and even expected and not strictly forbidden or policed.

But when it comes to the Queerleader, I do think the reoccurrence of this image goes beyond cheerleading being a largely women-dominated sphere. At the risk of starting to sound like an academic paper (or perhaps that line has already been crossed lol), I argue that the cheerleader is an ideal symbol to inject with or project upon queerness due to the dichotomies cheerleaders have long culturally represented. In Go! Fight! Win!: Cheerleading in American Culture, Mary Ellen Hanson digs into these contradictions embodied by cheerleaders:

The cheerleader is an icon, an instantly recognized symbol of youthful prestige, wholesome attractiveness, peer leadership, and popularity. Equally recognized is the cheerleader as a symbol of mindless enthusiasm, shallow boosterism, objectified sexuality, and promiscuous availability. (Hanson, 2)

Indeed, cheerleaders are largely considered the most popular girls at school while simultaneously dismissed as vapid, empty-headed dolls. They’re portrayed as Good Girls who cheer on the boys but they’re also portrayed as scantily clad seductresses. Their femininity is a weapon and a beacon.

I’ll never forget the time a friend rudely dismissed another woman I barely knew and, when I asked why she’d done so, she simply said “she was a cheerleader in high school.” This ex-friend was parroting very common (and boring!) assumptions about cheerleaders that have been around for forever. She sounded not unlike this snide 1974 Esquire article about ex-cheerleaders, but it was 2014. (That Esquire article replicates additional persistent cultural expectations of cheerleaders, including that they be white, blonde, and have an ass in a manner that could read as tongue-in-cheek but is most certainly not.)

Do these dichotomies and paradoxes not sound familiar? Are they not evocative of the ways lesbians are also culturally regarded and portrayed throughout history? Simultaneously sexless and hypersexual. Queering the cheerleader becomes a way to both challenge and reify these dual narratives. Homophobic iterations of the Queerleader see her as a predator and an affront to the feminine ideal cheerleaders are meant to symbolize. But positive and queer-created iterations of the same character ultimately capitalize and play on the same assumptions and cultural symbols. The most successful and compelling ones just do so in a way that confronts those ideas rather than merely replicating them.

When I started writing this piece several months ago, I mostly meant for it to be, well, horny. Horny, funny, and detailed — my sweet spot! Now this final iteration has, like, lite citation work???? But listen I, not unlike a Queerleader, can be many things at once. Please let me live my best erotic-meets-scholarly life. Reference work can be horny, too!!! I’m engaged to a librarian after all.

And with all that context, here’s my painstaking timeline of the Queerleader in film and television.

This post was originally written in January 2023 and updated/republished in September 2023.

---

1970s: The Sexploitation of Lesbian Cheerleaders

I tried very hard to find some readily available pre-Code films that 1. featured cheerleaders in a significant role and 2. had enough legible lesbian subtext to warrant a place in this timeline, but this proved difficult! Once I researched the actual history of cheerleading itself, the reason became clear.

Cheerleading has not always been a women-dominated sport. In fact, it was mostly for men prior to WWII. This makes sense, as cheerleading started at the college level in conjunction with intercollegiate sports. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, male volunteers would lead cheers to encourage spectator involvement during sporting events (Hanson, 11).

Stunts and jumps started becoming more popular in the 50s, and then the 70s saw the introduction of Title IX, which expanded athletic opportunities and funding for women’s sports. Cheerleading increasingly became more athletic and less about just shouting from the sidelines as a result. So, that’s your little mini history lesson on cheerleading and likely the reason why we don’t see a lot of filmic representations of women cheerleading in the pre-Code or Hays Code eras of Hollywood.

The first real instances I found of cheerleaders engaging in lesbian activity were the aforementioned 70s sexploitation movies in which hookups between women are used mostly as non-sequitur titillations. The Cheerleaders (1973) — in which high school cheerleaders decide to sleep with the rival team’s players so that they’ll be too tired to play well — and the absurdly titled The Great American Girl Robbery (1979), about a bus of cheerleaders taken hostage, were the most overt examples of these.

As that aforementioned Esquire article published in 1974 shows, the idea of the cheerleader as a sex symbol was already firmly in place during this decade, and it’s not at all shocking that we see Queerleaders cropping up in these soft core movies. I cannot in good conscience recommend these two particular films, but the lesbian sex scene in The Cheerleaders that prominently features an exercise bike is…very memorable! If you’ve seen any 70s-era titty movies, there’s nothing here that will shock you too much.

---

But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)

Jamie Babbit’s satirical teen film starring Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall as friends-turned-lovers at a gay conversion camp is easily the most iconic entry on this list — and arguably the prototypical Queerleader Movie even if technically some depictions do predate it. But given that Babbit is queer herself, this feels like the true beginning.

In an interview in 2005, Babbit had this to say about the decision to make the lead character a cheerleader:

Well, the reason we wanted to have the lead character be a cheerleader is because, for us, it was sort of the pinnacle of the American dream, and the American dream of femininity.

Babbit utilizes and flips the same image and assumptions those 1970s sexploitation movies with Queerleaders also put forth — but in a way that’s distinctly queer and subversive. Those 70s movies assume that a cheerleader engaging in lesbian sex is inherently horny (and mainly for straight men) because it seems forbidden and wrong in the context of the All-American Good Girl the cheerleader has come to represent. Cheerleaders exist, by the definition adopted by those movies, to root for and devote themselves to men and men’s accomplishments. To see them having sex with each other (even with the secret presence of a male voyeur, as those 70s scenes tend to involve) is at odds with that. With But I’m a Cheerleader, the primary intent is not necessarily titilation, but there’s something similarly fraught in how Megan’s queerness is considered at odds with her identity as a cheerleader. Even its tongue-in-cheek title nods to this: She can’t be gay because she’s a cheerleader. Only here, Babbit is indeed making fun of such a silly declaration, challenging not only the dominant narrative of how queer women look and act but also of how cheerleaders act, too.

The movie is not just one of the best and earliest Queerleader texts but also one of the greatest lesbian films of all time; in fact, it’s in the number one spot on our list of the 200 best lesbian, bisexual, and queer films.

---

Bring It On (2000)

This movie is the only one in this timeline that employs lesbian subtext rather than explicitly queer content, but it’d be silly to ignore Bring It On‘s ongoing popularity in the dyke community, especially since a lot of us who are over 30 and often clung to movies in our younger years that were not necessarily loudly queer but had an implied lesbian undercurrent to them (because some of us ourselves were not necessarily loudly queer but had an implied lesbian undercurrent to, like, every movement we made). Bring It On might not be an official Queerleader text, but it is almost too easy to project a Queerleader narrative onto it.

Bring It On, a very good movie, also inspired an entire multiverse of very bad straight-to-video/made-for-TV movies, and you’ll read a little more about that further down the timeline.

---

Veronica Mars, “Versatile Toppings” (2006) / Heroes, “Hysterical Blindness” (2009)

Season two of Veronica Mars gave us gay cheerleading activity in the episode “Versatile Toppings,” which is, unfortunately, a reference to pizza and not to lesbian tops. The episode feels like a 2006 pop culture time capsule in that it stars Kristin Cavallari of Laguna Beach fame as a closeted cheerleader. There’s also some throwback high school homophobia on display, with Madison Sinclair taunting another closeted character, Marlena, for looking like an Indigo Girl? Anyway, while lesbian cheerleading isn’t exactly a main throughline of this show or even this episode, I’m interested in how the Queerleader trope’s appeal and ubiquity makes it so that it even shows up in small moments like this. We see another quasi-instance of this in the fourth season of Heroes, which manages to combine Queerleader and Sapphic sorority shenanigans. Sure, Claire is no longer a practicing cheerleader at this point, but her college roommate’s obsessive crush on her does seem to hinge on a romanticization of the All-American girl aesthetics that Claire gives off. I’m counting it!

---

Degrassi: The Next Generation (2006)

Paige Michalchuk (Lauren Collins) is arguably television’s prototypical Queerleader. She first comes to terms with her bisexuality in season five, beginning a relationship with Alex Nuñez (Deanna Casaluce) in “The Lexicon of Love (2).” They have a classic enemies-to-lovers + opposites attract trope trajectory: Paige is the school’s Queen Bee and a popular cheerleader, while Alex is considered a “bad girl” from “the wrong side of the tracks.” They both have more layers to them than these stocktype categories suggest. It’s easy to interpret Paige’s attraction to Alex as directly connected to the fact that she’s different than the other girls Paige tends to associate with. A quick tumblr search reveals their ship portmanteau “Palex” is still popular to this day, and I found a few different fanfics that explicitly make use of Paige’s cheerleading uniform to erotic effect.

It’s quite easy to draw a line from Paige to Glee‘s Santana Lopez.

---

Across the Universe (2007)

The chokehold this Beatles-themed musical movie had on me when I was 15 and in performing arts school? Impossible to overstate. Though I was too closeted at the time to admit it, a big component of this obsession was the movie’s recontextualization of the song “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to be about a closeted cheerleader’s queer longing. Prudence holds it down for all the small-town Midwestern queerleaders out there. Played by Chinese American actress T.V. Carpio, she also stands out on this list, which incidentally tracks how a lot of on-screen portrayals of cheerleading default to whiteness. After all, queerleaders are known for being many things at once, and oftentimes characters of color are not allowed to be as complex and contradiction-laden as their white counterparts.

---

Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Underrated — and even maligned — at the time of its release and now accepted and celebrated as a classic after many years of cultural writing that has reconsidered and reframed the conversation around it, Jennifer’s Body is one of the best bisexual horror movies ever made. It was, by my memory, the first time I saw two women kiss on the big screen.

But even before that, Jennifer’s Body stirred within me some sort of feral animal force. It wasn’t the jumpscares or the body horror that got me; the thing that made me want to shut my eyes was the sexual tension between Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and her best friend Jennifer (Megan Fox). It was too much for my closeted self to bear. In their first scene together, Needy watches Jennifer do a routine in her cheerleading uniform — in slow motion — in the high school gym. Perhaps the slow motion is intended for the viewer’s own voyeurism, but my reading is that this is Needy’s perspective; she sees Jennifer’s body (*Beanie Feldstein voice* it’s the TITULAR ROLE) in aching, softened, sexy motion, so that’s what we see, too. She watches so closely, so intently, and with such unfiltered desire registering in her gaze that another student actually leans forward and says “you’re totally lesbi-gay.” To me, this entire moment is far more erotic than their eventual make out.

This is less a movie about cheerleading and more a movie about Jennifer turning into a flesh-eating succubus, but given that opening scene’s slowed-down, cheer uniform-clad, “lesbi-gay” iconic visuals, it’s an important film in this timeline. Jennifer’s status as a popular cheerleader is a big part of why she’s able to get close to men and subsequently kill them. She threatens natural social order at their school not because she’s maybe in love with her best friend but because she’s… a literal demon.

---

Fired Up! (2009)

Do I regret the hour and a half I spent watching this movie? Mostly! Was it perhaps worth it for the scene where all of the attendees of a cheer camp recite lines verbatim in unison while watching Bring It On? NOT QUITE. Fired Up! is about two football dudes who decide to go to cheerleading camp in order to up their body counts, so perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that the humor here is of the crude, bro-y sort.

The only Queerleader in this movie is a textbook example of a predatory lesbian, and I almost didn’t include it in this timeline for that reason. But I ended up wanting this exploration to feel really comprehensive and layered, and that means including the bad shit, too.

There’s a running gag in the movie that one of the airhead cheerleaders doesn’t realize the Queerleader is aggressively hitting on her. Fired Up! positions the Queerleader as an impure perversion of the cheerleader, as a stark deviation from what Fired Up! believes cheerleaders should represent. In a way, there’s even a parallel between her and the straight dude protagonists, whose proximity to cheerleading is predicated on them just wanting to have access to cheerleaders and their bodies. Only, the guys get to be the goofy and ultimately redeemable protagonists, while she remains a bit character we’re meant to think is gross.

Fired Up! came out when I was in high school, and I don’t think I saw it at the time, but this was an image of lesbianism I was very familiar with, and it’s actually this sort of casual representation of the lesbian as inherently creepy and aggressive within feminine spaces that did way more psychic damage on me than any overt examples of the lesbian as a villain or even as a killer. Remember how I wanted to shut my eyes during the opening cheerleading scene of Jennifer’s Body? It was exactly because of this; because I felt like a creep for looking at her the way Needy does.

Fun Fact: There’s a blooper reel during the credits, and in it Juliette Goglia’s Poppy — who is one of the main guy’s little sisters — actually says the word Queerleader during a runner of various alternative punchlines. It’s absolutely meant as an insult in this context, but again, I’m looking at alllllll filmic representations of this topic, baby! The good, the bad, and the ugly!

---

Glee (2009)

Ah, yes, if Across the Universe had a chokehold on me when I was a musical theater student in high school, well, Glee tightened that grip even more. Though about a glee club first and foremost and only sometimes about cheerleading by way of its central villain Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch, unfortunately not playing a queerleading coach), the image that comes to mind most readily and potently when I think of Glee is this: two girls in cheerleading uniforms, holding pinkies.

Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) and Brittany Pierce (Heather Morris) were formative queerleaders for me — and arguably they are THE Queerleaders in this timeline. The first time we ever see them kissing, they’re in bed together in their cheerleading uniforms. Those uniforms are inextricable from these characters. Brittany’s bisexuality isn’t really a source of conflict, and Santana’s whole thing is that on the surface she’s the prototypical Mean Girl trope but then there’s so much more to her. Indeed, she’s mean to just about everyone except Brittany. And they go from high school sweethearts to wives!

Fun Fact: One of the gayest things I ever did when still identifying adamantly as straight was when I wrote an “article” for a “pop culture zine” on my college campus about the merits and nuances of Santana Lopez’s coming out arc on Glee.

---

Hellcats (2010)

This series about college cheerleaders only ran on the CW for one season and is nearly impossible to stream these days. But during that brief run, Elena Esovolova played Patty “The Wedge” Wedgerman, an out lesbian on the squad. However, Patty only appeared in five episodes and never really got a fully fleshed out storyline. Despite having a lesbian character, there are no lesbian relationships in the series, and if anything the gayest parts actually seem to be the subtext between the show’s main characters Marti (Aly Michalka) and Savannah (Ashley Tisdale).

Apparently during a press tour in 2011, Michalka noted that Patty had been dropped from the narrative because the writers “found that it was really hard to involve her with the Hellcats and dividing all the story lines.” While supposedly Michalka noted this had nothing to do with Patty being a lesbian………….I’m not convinced. It sounds to me like another instance of the Queerleader rendered an “outsider,” and instead of that becoming a meaningful and potentially even powerful image dismantling ingrained images, it becomes an inconvenience for the writers. I genuinely enjoy lesbian subtext, but if you’re only willing to go there and not into more explicit queerness WHEN THERE IS ALREADY A LESBIAN CHARACTER AROUND, that’s a no for me.

---

All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

I watched this movie for the first time recently and was quite delighted by it! Is it perfect? No. But it’s fun horror trash with occasionally glimmers of brilliance. All Cheerleaders Die centers on Mäddy (Caitlin Stasey), a girl whose best friend dies during a cheerleading stunt gone wrong. (The found footage-style scene that establishes that death at the beginning of the movie is fantastic; I always love portrayals of cheerleading that acknowledge just how brutal the sport can be, which we’ll get into further down the timeline.) The following year, Mäddy joins the squad, which is very confusing to her recent ex-girlfriend Leena, who btw is a witch.

When an altercation with the football team leads to the cheerleading squad’s deaths, Leena brings them all back from the dead. The catch? They’re basically linked succubus/vampire-like creatures who have to collectively feed on men’s blood to maintain their strength. There’s body-swap shenanigans, body horror, all my favorite things. All the while, Leena seems to get a very kinky pleasure out of basically being in charge of the lives of these cheerleaders. And like a good monster lover, she lets Mäddy feed on her.

A double-feature screening of Jennifer’s Body and this movie would be very fun! I like my Queerleaders to be murderers of men!

---

Wynonna Earp, “Gonna Getcha Good” (2017)

In season two, episode three of the beloved sci-fi Western series Wynonna Earp, bisexual character Waverly (Dom Provost-Chalkley) dons a cheerleading costume and puts on a seductive routine for her girlfriend Nicole (Katherine Barrell). This show isn’t even a little bit about cheerleading, but this is a very important Queerleader moment in that Waverly is explicitly doing cheerleader roleplay to turn on her girlfriend. The scene directly acknowledges the erotic appeal of cheerleading for lesbians and bisexual women.

“I didn’t know if it was your thing,” Waverly says after she’s done with the cheer. Nicole’s jaw is on the floor. “Baby, that’s everybody’s thing,” she says. Which is basically my entire thesis for this piece in a nutshell.

---

Riverdale (2017)

Season two of Riverdale saw the official introduction of queer storylines for Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch), but some of us ahem SCHOLARS were picking up on the gay vibes emanating off of the red-haired and sharp-tongued cheerleader since basically episode one.

Indeed, Riverdale‘s pilot actually features a Queerleader moment — a kiss between Veronica (Camila Mendes) and Betty (Lili Reinhart) during their Vixens tryouts that Cheryl immediately dismisses as pandering and dated: “Faux lesbian kissing hasn’t been taboo since 1994.” But later in the series, Cheryl goes on to co-captain the Vixens with her literal girlfriend, the bisexual icon Toni Topaz (Vanessa Morgan). I strongly believe Cheryl is evidence of Santana Lopez’s lasting Queerleader impact. Here, too, is an on-the-surface Mean Girl stocktype who actually harbors a quiet vulnerability and softness in her, brought out by the fellow Queerleader she falls in love with.

In the final season of Riverdale, the characters are transported back to the 1950s and in high school again. In addition to on-and-off Vixens Betty and Veronica finally becoming canon — recontextualizing that kiss from the pilot — the series ends with Carol and Toni coming out as a couple to their fellow Vixens and a few of the other cheerleaders also coming out in response. Queerleading is inextricably baked into the wild world of Riverdale.

---

The Babysitter (2017)

Here’s another slight stretch, but I’m nothing if not thorough. Horror-romp The Babysitter‘s only Queerleading-adjacent moment comes when Samara Weaving’s Bee tongues Bella Thorne’s Allison during a game of spin the bottle. Allison is in her cheerleading uniform for the purposefully over-the-top make out sequence, during which Bee puts her gum in Allison’s mouth???? There’s no overt textual evidence of Allison’s bisexuality or queerness in the film — unless you count her very apparent arousal during this extended kiss, WHICH I DO??? Plus, I feel like every Bella Thorne character just radiates Bella’s own bisexuality.

We do see this slow-motion scene unfold from the perspective of an adolescent boy, so I can see how it might be viewed as a continuation of the sort of male fantasy of Queerleaders from back in those 70s movies or in modern-day porn. But the scene is also so long and so exaggerated that it actually feels like its poking fun at the voyeur and quite LITERALLY being tongue-in-cheek.

---

Dare Me (2019)

Yay, I get to now participate in one of my favorite hobbies: Screaming at people to watch Dare Me.

WATCH DARE ME!

No movie or show has captured the baked-in brutality of cheerleading as a sport as searingly as Dare Me, a slow-burn thriller full of blood, crunched bones, and contorted bodies. It also lives in another hyperspecific subgenre I’m drawn to: stories about toxic mentorship. In this instance, that takes the shape of a really fucked up coach-athlete dynamic. It doesn’t go the ways you think it might. But coach Colette French’s (Willa Fitzgerald) need for total control over the body and mind of Addy Hanlon (Herizen F. Guardiola) and the ways she manipulates the young girl are a true source of horror.

And that violent power dynamic never becomes overtly sexual, because queerness itself isn’t villainized in Dare Me — abuse of power is. Instead, there’s a slow-burn queer romance at the core of the show, sizzling just on the sidelines for much of the series. but ultimately hugely important for character motivation and development. Addy’s co-dependent friendship with bff Beth (Marlo Kelly) is gradually revealed to be something more. The subtext becomes bolder text in measured, scintillating increments rather than some gaudy big reveal, and it feels all the more real for that. And throughout, Dare Me explores just how dangerous and intense cheerleading itself can be, sticking up its middle finger to portrayals of the sport as something cute and fluffy. Femininity in Dare Me has sharp edges and bite.

I recently read the pilot script for Dare Me and was struck by some of the language it uses in its descriptions of actions. It describes the girls putting glitter on their faces as putting on their “cheer masks.” When a character falls, the script notes that this is what cheering really is. Here is a show that understands well the performance, risk, and almost battle-like stakes of cheerleading, which makes its exploration of Queerleading all the juicier.

---

Knives and Skin (2019)

A surreal psychological thriller that has been described as like if David Lynch made a teen movie without ever really living up to that admittedly alluring interpretation, Knives and Skin is a very strange movie that includes clownfucking, haunting a cappella renditions of pop songs, and strong use of color. For an experimental film, it just doesn’t quite take enough risks and could also have done with a tighter edit.

One of its many teen girl characters (the movie is largely about, among other things, the unbearable sadness threaded through girlhood) is a Queerleader named Laurel (Kayla Carter). Presumably, she’s in the closet or otherwise still figuring out her sexuality. She’s in a highly visible relationship with a boy but a shadow relationship with another girl. Even if they never officially “date,” they find a lot of homoerotic things to do together, including passing handwritten notes to each other that were kept…inside their vaginas.

---

The Prom (2020)

Ariana DeBose’s closeted Queerleader Alyssa is easily the best part of The Prom, a movie musical I wish I liked more! It is very heartwarming and lovely in moments, but there’s an emptiness to it that makes it almost instantly forgettable. But! Alyssa! Alyssa is a great character, and her relationship with her queerness is different than that of the film’s main character. The stakes are different for her.

Alyssa’s solo in the movie “Alyssa Greene” is all about her mother’s (Kerry Washington) molding of her into a perfect girl. She has to be beautiful and smart (“The hair has to be perfect / The As have to be straight”). She has to be the best at everything she does (“Trophies have to be first place / Ribbons have to be blue”). Cheerleading is one of the many things Alyssa has to ascribe to in order to achieve the level of perfection her mother demands and the level of perfection that ultimately buries her queerness deeper and deeper. It’s a tactic a lot of queer folks employed in our teenage years, myself included: You think there’s something “wrong” with you so you fight like hell to make everyone else see “perfection.” Her cheerleading uniform is like the rest of her life: a costume and an act. Or, maybe, armor to protect herself.

---

The music video for “Cheerleader” by Sir Babygirl (2020)

Queerleading-themed music videos have become a very specific canon of art, so while they technically fall outside of the realm of movies and television, I have now encountered so many that I feel they undoubtedly belong on this list.

In this example from nonbinary pop singer Sir Babygirl, the Queerleader is present in both the text of the song and its visual accompaniment — a true delight of a music video in which cheerleaders of all genders and body types lust for each other in the locker room and beyond. “Everybody wants to watch the cheerleader,” Sir Babygirl sings over it, which is basically one of the theses of this piece.

My favorite thing about this music video, though, is that queer comedic genius-freak Meg Stalter is in it as one of the many Queerleaders!

---

Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021)

I find Sam to frankly be the least interesting character in the Fear Street trilogy, but she is a Queerleader! We first meet Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) in the first installment. She’s in her cheerleading uniform on the football field at Sunnyvale High, where she has recently transferred from Shadyside. Up to this point, we know protagonist Deena (Kiana Madeira) is going through a dramatic high school breakup, but we don’t know it’s of the queer variety until this moment, Sam finally dropping the facade of her picturesque performance, wrapped in the arms of a football player, to have a full-on dyke fight away from everyone else with Deena. Sam’s clearly going through it, thinking that the only way she can have a happy and healthy life is to become this textbook, idealized cheerleader-dating-a-football-player high school trope. And frankly I think Deena should let Sam figure that out on her own and date someone more secure, but teens will be teens!

---

The music videos for “Somebody I Fucked Once” by Zolita and “Silk Chiffon” by MUNA and Phoebe Bridgers (2021)

Two Queerleader music videos came out in 2021.

MUNA’s “Silk Chiffon” directly references and reproduces images and storylines from But I’m a Cheerleader, a cute and fun tribute that feels fitting for the bubbly queer love pop song that seemed inescapable the summer it debuted. Phoebe Bridgers also appears in the tribute.

Zolita’s take for “Somebody I Fucked Once” is arguably the campier video of the two. It’s less of a straight riff and more like a mix-and-match collage of early 2000s aesthetics, teen movie tropes, and Queerleader imagery! In it, the blonde, pink-clad cheerleader falls for the goth brunette who’s into pottery. Yes, there is a sensual pottery wheel moment! Simply put, this is the hornier of the two music videos, still bubblegum pink and corny throughout but with more teeth to it.

The main reason I wanted to include the Zolita music video is because I feel like it’s ultimately doing the same work I set out to do with this list by paying tribute to the Queerleader and recognizing her stronghold in lesbian pop culture in a way that acknowledges that, yes, some of us queer women do indeed find the mere concept of Queerleaders very sexy! The Queerleader as an erotic image does not solely belong to the realm of male fantasy. This music video gets that in the same way the scene from Wynonna Earp does.

---

Bring It On: Cheer or Die (2022)

This made-for-TV entry in the Bring It On universe is not very good, despite having a solid hook (a cheerleading slasher) and being the first of ANY of the Bring It On movies to be directed by a woman (how!!!!). I did say going into it “if this movie doesn’t have a Queerleader, I’m rioting.” Thankfully, it does technically deliver, even if it’s only in the most minuscule way, near the end of the movie. But sure enough, one of the members of this cheer squad harbors a secret crush on a fellow cheerleader, and instead of leaning into the predatory vibes the way Fired Up! does, we get something much more sincere and sweet. Also, as far as slashers go, I didn’t hate the killer reveal here. But no, it’s not a very good movie, so consider yourself warned. Now, someone let me write Bring It On: Queerleaders Rise.

---

The music videos for “Cheerleader” by Ashnikko and “Cheerleader” by Liza Anne (2023)

There are so many songs called “Cheerleader” out there by queer and trans artists! A specific sub-trend I found within this overall specific media trend.

Pansexual and genderfluid artist Ashnikko’s song “Cheerleader” makes direct references to the movie Bring It On, but the music video is decidedly more horror-leaning. In it, demonic cheerleaders do routines in the woods. The song is steeped in themes of beauty standards and gendered expectations. The music video is a Queerleader Nightmarescape.

Gay and nonbinary musician Liza Anne also has a “Cheerleader” song with a very gay music video to match. Queer makeouts happen in the locker room, in the stadium stands, and on the football field. The video recreates classic high school tropes with queer and punk aesthetics. I love that this entry also continues the niche trend of “Queerleader music videos starring queer alt comedians” established by Sir Babygirl — that’s Eva Victor making out with Liza Anne the whole time!

---

Bottoms (2023)

Ah, yes, my personal movie of the summer for 2023. My Queerleader north star. The feature film Bottoms.

Directed by Emma Seligman, Bottoms is the latest Queerleader movie to grace our timeline, and it is quite the gem! In it, best friends Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennot, who co-wrote the movie with Seligman) start a fight club at their high school in order to woo hot cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber) into getting physical with them.

I found myself often thinking about 2009’s Fired Up! while watching the movie, as both belong to the genre of raunchy teen comedy. Whereas teen straight boys pretend to be cheerleaders in that movie in order to up their body count, here we have a movie about teen lesbians pretending to have gone to juvie and know how to fight in order to up their body count. Whereas the only lesbian or lesbian-coded character in that movie is very minor and is portrayed as a joke and a creep, here we have two lesbian protagonists whose queerness isn’t a joke but who are, indeed, kind of creeps! I think this comparison and deep dive into contextualizing Bottoms within the history of teen sex comedies rendering lesbians as predators deserves an entire separate essay from this timeline (at some point, I imagine there being an Appendix to this article). But what I’ll say for now is that while it might be controversial for some, I am delighted by the ways Bottoms doesn’t eschew those damaging tropes we see crop up in a movie like Fired Up! but rather lean in to the idea of manipulative queer teens and yet in a way that doesn’t ultimately feel homophobic but rather just true to horndog teenagehood in general.

***If you’re wondering where I got the idea for this piece, yes Bottoms was a huge source of inspiration starting when the film was first announced. But I am very much just personally interested in the topic, too! I was drawn to cheerleading before I was even close to being out and always as a spectator, never as a participant. In fact, I was interested in cheerleading specifically because it was expressly forbidden in my family. My grandmother had a rule that we were not allowed to ever cheerlead, because she deemed it too dangerous. My mother enforced the rule as well, but I think mainly because she thought cheerleading was stupid. After all, she let my brother play football, which isn’t exactly known for being a safe sport or one that isn’t also mired in performative gender. So yes, cheerleading was quite literally forbidden in my youth, and I also was attracted to it. Sounds more than a little gay if you ask me!!!!!!

During my research, I did not encounter any specifically trans representations of Queerleaders outside of the music videos, suggesting that even queer representations of cheerleaders come with rigid assumptions about gender, girlhood, and who gets to be a cheerleader. This was a disappointing finding. I’m glad music videos, at least, are holding it down for nonbinary and trans interpretations and visualizations of the trope.

Clearly, the Queerleader isn’t going anywhere — the character’s appeal is vast and lasting. Some stories use her to reinforce social rules and roles, some to subvert them. The built-in homoerotics of the sport makes it a terrific playground for lesbian activity, but it’s also the sheer position of the cheerleader as this mythical symbol of perfection and heightened femininity that makes it so enticing to inject queerness. The Queerleader is much more than a sex symbol, but at the same time, the character’s potential for distinctly lesbian erotics cannot be denied!

---

If you think there’s anything I’ve missed, please let me know! I love an excuse to watch Queerleading movies for my job, and as I’ve demonstrated, I want this to be as comprehensive as possible! I know cheerleading is distinctly American but any international movies I should check out? Let me know!

You’ll Never Guess Which Ships End Up Together in Riverdale’s Queer AF Series Finale

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors who are currently on strike, series like Riverdale would not be possible, and Autostraddle is grateful for the artists who do this work. The following review of the Riverdale series finale contains spoilers.

---

The Riverdale series finale reveals Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica spent their senior year of high school queer polyamorous relationship. The core four became a queer quad.

Yes, you read that correctly. Riverdale concluded seven seasons of serial killers, evil nuns, warring gangs, queerleaders, lesbian archery, bear attacks, cursed tabletop games, musical numbers, witchcraft, melodrama, and horror homages last night with a fittingly bonkers series finale. It kicks off with Betty Cooper, at 86-years-old and on her deathbed, wishing she could go back in time to relive one of the gang’s last days of high school when they all received their senior yearbooks. You see, Betty missed this day the first time around, because she had the mumps (season seven is set in the 1950s). But Jughead’s ghost (?) shows up at her deathbed and guides her on a journey back in time to experience that day from her youth. So, 86-year-old Betty now in her teenage self’s body does exactly that, taking a stroll down memory lane that also involves her recounting how every single character from the series dies? It’s a bizarre series finale and yet also one that feels distinctly Riverdaleian. Most importantly, we learn which ship was endgame all along for our core four, whose love quadrangle that has expanded to be something more like a love helix has been one of the driving forces of the show’s narrative. And the answer? All of them. All of them are endgame.

Ghost Jughead reminds Old Betty that she, Archie, Jughead, and Veronica all spent their last year of high school in a secret polyamorous relationship, a core four quad. As the memories come rushing back, Betty recounts to Reggie the wild escapades of hookups between herself and Jughead, herself and Archie, Veronica and Jughead, Veronica and Archie, and yes, most importantly, Betty and Veronica. The Betty/Veronica arc that has been brewing all season — and arguably since the show’s pilot — comes to complete fruition, Betty confirming that she and her best friend hooked up on many nights together during their senior year. We don’t get explicit confirmation that Jughead/Archie also hooked up during this time, but I choose to believe Archie’s dalliances with Reggie this season suggest it was a possibility.

So yes, our core four finishes out the series in a four-way queer relationship configuration. Betty and Veronica are both canonically bisexual. Riverdale doesn’t choose just one straightforward, boring endgame for its characters; it chooses something more complex, surprising, and deeply deeply queer. Even I, a devout documenter of all of Riverdale‘s queer happenings — which really ramped up in this final season for just about every character — truly did not see this coming! And yet, now I can’t imagine Riverdale ending any differently. I almost feel like Jughead predicted this outcome all the way back in season two’s “The Hills Have Eyes.” This friend group all loves each other. Why not make that love official by making them all date each other simultaneously?

As for other queer conclusions to the series: Kevin and Clay move to NYC together and live a beautiful life of queer theater, art, and literature in their apartment ABOVE THE APOLLO THEATER. Archie’s mom meets a woman at the dress shop where she works and spends the rest of her life with her. Cheryl and Toni move out West together and become combination artist-activists together. They have a son who they name…Dale?! I feel like River would have been the better name! Betty runs a feminist and women’s liberation magazine. Veronica becomes a hotshot movie producer. And even though the quad splits up after graduation, it’s clear this four-way relationship remained meaningful to them.

It isn’t all happy endings though. Kevin’s dad and Archie’s uncle — revealed to be queer last episode for some reason — are murdered?! By Chic?! The series finale’s determination to weave as many characters and plotlines from the past into its story is bold! Archie at one point reads a “poem” that is essentially just a rhyming roast of everyone with a lot of meta reflections on things that have happened throughout the series, including even that Reggie was recast.

I’ll have more I want to say about this series and what it meant to me soon. For now, I am just still basking in the glow of the CORE FOUR QUAD. A happy ending for Choni! My longtime prediction of Bisexual Betty coming true in the most glorious of ways! Bisexual Veronica, too, to throw an extra cherry on top of this sweet, sweet gay milkshake!

Revisiting Some of the Most Sapphic Moments in Riverdale History

Tonight, Riverdale ends its seven-season run. You can expect a review of the series finale by yours truly tomorrow, but for now, I wanted to reflect on some of the most homoerotic moments in the show’s history. This is a show that delivered us gorgeous lines of poetry like “I’ll lock this saucy sapphic wench in the chapel if you’re not back within an hour with the vicar!” I will miss it dearly.

Earlier this week, I presented 10 essential episodes to revisit during Riverdale‘s final week. Some of those episodes contain scenes that I’ll revisit below, delving deeper into specific Sapphic scenes and images that are forever emblazoned in my brain. Let’s take a walk down gay memory lane, shall we?

This list is long, but it is far from exhaustive, because let’s be real, from meaningful looks to instances of intimate touch or sexual tension, Riverdale‘s Sapphic moments are too numerous to round up in one place!

---

Betty and Veronica kiss, Chapter One: The River’s Edge

Fans have a range of ambivalent feelings about this kiss, which is technically a stunt Veronica initiates during cheerleading tryouts in the pilot when Cheryl accuses Betty and Veronica of being too boring. “Check your sell-by date, ladies, faux lesbian kissing hasn’t been taboo since 1994,” Cheryl replies, calling out the performative nature of the kiss.

But was it really just an act? I think the sexualities and desires of Riverdale‘s main characters — including the core four of Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica — have always been more complex than initially meets the eye. The kiss could be viewed as textbook queerbaiting. But an alternative reading, and one I prefer, is that Veronica was acting on a genuine desire in a way that felt accessible to her. I think of the Carmen Maria Machado essay on Jennifer’s Body, bisexuality, and what arguments about queerbaiting sometimes miss. She writes:

I went to college in 2004. I saw so many allegedly straight girls kissing each other at frat parties it would’ve made you want to burn down an Abercrombie & Fitch. Sometimes it was stiff and strange and sometimes it was organic, and yet far be it from me to say who really wanted what, or if the kiss itself wasn’t a gateway, or if one of them (or both!) wouldn’t be wrist-deep in a date in twelve years’ time. People always talked cynically about this gesture as if men were the reason, but it felt like no one ever considered that men were the excuse.

Machado goes on to quote José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: “We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. To accept loss is to accept the way in which one’s queerness will always render one lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives, codes, and laws . . . [to] veer away from heterosexuality’s path.” “A girl kissing her best friend,” Machado writes, “because she wants to see how it feels, because she’s curious, because a boy is nearby, because she’s in love, because she once bent her mouth to her best friend’s bleeding hand in supplication and this just feels like the next logical step — is the acceptance of loss, the veering from the path. No matter where she goes afterward.”

I’m sure you did not expect me to quote queer theory in a piece about Riverdale‘s gayest moments, but here we are! Is this Betty/Veronica kiss all an act or is it an acting out of real desires? There aren’t even boys present for it; the kiss is for Cheryl, a character who eventually does come out as queer. And then, in season seven, we see Betty become lost in queer fantasies about Veronica over and over, further cementing the idea that there’s something more to their friendship, even if it’s never explicitly explored. But we’ll get to that later.

Also, shortly after they kiss, there’s a close up of Veronica zipping Betty into her cheerleading uniform that reads as another instance of physical intimacy, further complicating that kiss. A lot of the locker room scenes on this show ping as homoerotic — including for the boys.

It also feels significant that Veronica and Betty’s arc in the pilot hits a lot of the same beats as Veronica and Archie’s arc. Veronica is the new girl at school, and she instantly has chemistry with both Archie and Betty — and, in some ways, that chemistry with Betty is actually more potent and narratively significant.

---

Cheryl does Betty’s makeup, Chapter Two: A Touch of Evil

Yes, technically Cheryl is just cozying up to Betty to get intel on Polly, and yes, the Cheryl/Veronica dance-off is the more overtly homoerotic moment of this episode, but Cheryl is practically straddling Betty as she pumps her for information. Also, doing another girl’s makeup is theeeee classic closeted femme tradition. It was such an easy and socially acceptable way to touch another girl or be touched by her intimately. There are a lot of ways Cheryl could have chosen to interrogate Betty; the fact that she specifically chooses this? She didn’t have to make it this intimate! As such, this early scene was one of the first times when I personally clocked that Cheryl could be queer, and I made sure to tell anyone who would listen. I’m so glad I eventually turned out to be correct!!

Sure, eventually we find out these two are cousins, but we don’t know that yet! And Polly and Jason being distant cousins didn’t prevent them from being a romantic pairing on the show SO. The fact that a sign literally says LOVE behind them really drives home the gay optics of this scene.

---

Veronica reacts to the first appearance of Dark Betty, Chapter Three: Body Double

I always wished Riverdale would do a little more with “Dark Betty,” but her first appearance remains iconic. Veronica and Betty team up to take down bad guy Chuck. And not only do we see Chuck’s reaction to Betty waltzing into the pool house in a black bra and brown bob, but we see it unfold through Veronica’s gaze as well. Her reaction is ambiguous; there’s fear and curiosity there. It also feels worth noting that Betty’s bob actually makes her look more like Veronica, and this doubling/emulation in and of itself feels very queer.

---

Cheryl brings Polly to prom, Chapter Eleven: To Riverdale and Back Again

Enemies-turned-co-conspirators Cheryl and Polly decide not only to attend prom together but to also run as co-queens. (Cheryl running with someone as prom co-queens will become a Riverdale tradition.) First Betty, now Polly: Cheryl Blossom simply loves to do a Cooper girl’s makeup.

---

Betty threatens Cheryl and they both seem very into it, Chapter Fifteen: Nighthawks

Another homoerotic locker room moment! Betty threatens Cheryl, and Cheryl seems both afraid and…aroused? It’s never when Cheryl and Betty are getting along that they seem queer; it’s always when they’re menacing each other.

---

Toni comes out as bisexual, Chapter Nineteen: Death Proof

After hooking up with Jughead, Toni tells him she’s not interested in being his post-Betty rebound and throws in a bit about how she’s more into girls anyway. By this point, the show already had out queer characters like Kevin and Moose. But this was the first explicit textual queer line for a woman on the show. And what a thrilling moment it was!

---

Cheryl and Toni have a Grease moment, Chapter Nineteen: Death Proof

In the same episode where we learn Toni is bisexual, we also get this brief but powerful Grease cosplay moment between Cheryl and Toni, during which Toni very clearly eyes Cheryl up and down! As usual, Cheryl’s best and most compelling chemistry usually has a bit of venom to it. She loves an enemies to lovers trajectory.

---

Betty flexes her auto-repair skills, Chapter Nineteen: Death Proof

Yes, this episode gets three shoutouts on this list, but it feels right that Riverdale‘s Grease-inspired chapter is rife with bisexual subtext and text. Every once in a while, Betty Cooper likes to remind us she’s an amateur car mechanic. And every time, I’m like: Just come out as bi already, Betty!

---

Cheryl sketches a portrait of her and Josie, Chapter Twenty: Tales from the Darkside

I know some folks have mixed feelings about the reveal that Cheryl is Josie’s stalker who left a pig heart in her locker, as it could be seen as playing into stereotypes about queer women as predators or a pathologization of the closet (Cheryl isn’t out at this point, but she comes out just seven episodes later). But I think it makes a lot of sense on a character level that Cheryl might have confusing and even disturbing ideas about what intimacy looks like. After the traumatic death of her brother (at the hands of her father), the abuse from her mother, and her tendency to push others away, she doesn’t have a great grasp on what healthy relationships look like. Whether she’s experiencing romantic feelings for Josie that scare her or just developing an obsession rooted in her own fractured sense of identity and intimacy, Cheryl’s fixation on Josie here feels distinctly queer, even if it’s also potentially toxic.

Something I talk about a lot is how it’s easy to make really self-destructive and damaging choices when we’re closeted. I see this as a complicated example of that rather than an implication that Cheryl’s dangerous or predatory due to latent queerness.

---

Cheryl comes out, Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Hills Have Eyes

After a screening of Love, Simon at the town theater (literally!), Cheryl Blossom comes out to Toni over milkshakes, making all of my dreams come true! I received so many texts on the evening this episode aired, and I wish I could bottle and preserve the sheer elation I experienced at the confirmation that a character I was obsessed with and also knew in my heart was queer was indeed very queer.

Cheryl tells Toni all about her best friend Heather, who she loved in junior high. When her mother Penelope caught them in the same bed together, she called Cheryl a deviant. Love, Simon plugs aside, it’s a moving coming out scene!

---

Toni supports Cheryl at her dead dad’s public will reading, Chapter Twenty-Eight: There Will Be Blood

Almost immediately after coming out to her, Cheryl starts spending A LOT of time with Toni. In fact, it almost seems like Toni moves in with her right away? They’re maybe not officially dating yet, but I think inviting a girl to the public reading of your evil dead father’s secret will basically counts as going steady! Also, Toni helps Cheryl pick out a sexy outfit to wear before the two are interrupted by homophobic Penelope. But even Penelope’s ire is just further proof that something very gay is going on here.

---

Cheryl’s lesbian hairplay slumberparty, Chapter Twenty-Nine: Primary Colors

There are actually too many homoerotic hairplay sequences on this show to count, but this line of hair brushing at Cheryl’s requisite slumber party easily takes the cake as the #1 in that specific subgenre of queer images. Though they happen off screen, we also learn that this sleepover — which again, Cheryl tells the other girls is mandatory — features “parlor games.” It’s easy to imagine some of the games having a sensual bend to them, especially given the setting of Thistlehouse, Cheryl’s gothic manor that replaces her ancestral home that she burned to the ground as an act of revenge against her mother. It’s the perfect setting for some gothic-tinged queer activity!!! They all pretty much look like they’re doing vampirecore here.

Unfortunately, this episode does end with Penelope sending Cheryl to conversion therapy at the town’s evil nunnery, and Riverdale ends up biting off way more than it can chew with that storyline. But we’ll always have hairbrush train!

---

Cheryl and Toni’s first kiss, Chapter Thirty: The Noose Tightens

Toni, Kevin, and Veronica (dressed in a catsuit!) break into the conversion therapy facility where Cheryl is trapped and get her the hell out. Toni and Cheryl kiss for the first time. I have mixed feelings about this kiss! I have mixed feelings about this conversion therapy storyline in general, especially because it’s revealed that out gay character Kevin knows about it but doesn’t seem to care that much?

Also, while there’s something lovely about the glow of the movie projector behind Toni and Cheryl as they’re kissing, the fact that their first kiss is only really seen in silhouette is a little frustrating. There’s a level of remove to it — just look how shadowy that screenshot is. It’s like you can barely see who’s kissing, and when you compare that to even the “fake” kiss between Betty and Veronica in the pilot, this kiss just lacks the closeness and emphasis of that one. Cheryl has so many big, bold, and literally colorful sequences on the show — the fact that this kiss is so dark and obscured feels wrong.

I love Choni a lot; I don’t say any of this to disparage the ship. I just sometimes feel as if some of Riverdale‘s most compelling queer moments are somewhat subtextual, whereas some of its actually explicit queer storytelling can feel less developed and more like instances of tokenizing queerness. Also, immediately after this kiss, subsequent episodes really didn’t show Cheryl and Toni interact very much at all, and a Choni number was even cut from the first musical episode, which aired right after this one. Queer viewers got a kiss and then…not a whole lot for several episodes! You would think Cheryl and Toni would especially have a lot to talk about after Toni rescued her from conversion therapy.

---

Cheryl saves Toni with her bow & arrow, Chapter Thirty-Four: Judgment Night

Now it’s Cheryl’s turn to save Toni! She dons Little Red Riding Hood drag and threatens villain Penny Peabody at arrow point, delivering a great Cheryl one-liner in the process: “Untie her, you Serpent hag.”

---

Toni tells Cheryl they should make it official, Chapter Thirty-Five: Brave New World

By “make it official,” Toni means Cheryl becoming a Southside Serpent. But it can easily be read with a double meaning of also making their relationship official. Cheryl also gets her own custom red Serpents jacket, and joinging your girlfriend’s gang is definitely an important part of defining the relationship.

---

Cheryl lets the gang know she spent the summer riding on a motorcycle cross-country with Toni, Chapter Thirty-Six: Labor Day

In the season three premiere, Cheryl makes a grand entrance by walking into Pop’s in slow-motion and wearing her new red Serpents jacket, a red bra, no shirt, and jean short shorts. She tells the core four she spent the entire summer riding around the country on the back of Toni’s motorcycle. I wish we could have seen footage of this, but alas!

---

Young Alice gleefully beats up Young Penelope, Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Midnight Club

I’m a big fan of this flashback episode of Riverdale in which the younger cast all play teen versions of the show’s adult characters. Lili Reinhart is especially great in the episode as a younger version of Alice Cooper, a bad girl from the Southside. She’s positively HORNY for the cat fight she instigates with young Penelope, and it’s delightful to watch.

---

Cheryl asks Toni to move in with her, Chapter Forty-Three: Outbreak

After a frightening opening when Toni collapses at Vixens practice, Cheryl brings her home to Thistlehouse to recuperate and then asks her to move in with her. I want to enjoy this moment more, but season three really drives home just how differently Cheryl and Toni are treated as a couple than a lot of the other romantic pairings on the show. We rarely see them kiss, never see them have sex, and now they’re moving in together? Toni says she wants to be the big spoon, which actually makes me think Toni might be the bottom, but I digress!

Early on in the arc of Choni, it felt like the couple was rendered both too chaste and too adult. We don’t really get to see the same brand of steamy teenage love between them that we get to see with the others. They mostly just wear coordinated outfits and appear in scenes near each other, sometimes touching sometimes not, and aren’t really developed fully as a couple on an emotional level or a sexual one — which only stands out because the show is so horny in so many other ways!

---

Jughead’s hot mom appears, Chapter Forty-Three: Outbreak

I’d be remiss not to also mention this scene from “Outbreak”: Meeting Jughead’s hot mean mom, played by Gina Gershon. Listen, she’s never officially established as a queer character, but we meet her as she’s literally welding.

---

Cheryl and Toni get off on stealing from the rich, Chapter Forty-Four: No Exit

This episode picks up after a one-month time jump, and Jughead’s signature narration catches us up on the lives of all the characters. Archie is living his best flannel lesbian life at a cabin in the mountains with his dog. And Cheryl and Toni are taking their relationship to the next level: regularly dressing in catsuits and stealing from Riverdale’s richest townspeople. How do they celebrate said victories? By having sex on a bed covered in cash, naturally. We cut away before we see much, but this feels like the first Choni sex scene, brief as it may be. And I love that it happens right at the start of the episode. More episodes of television should start with gay sex.

---

Cheryl and Toni being rapturously gay together, Chapter Forty-Seven: Bizarrodale

Toni has fully moved into Thistlehouse, and here we have her and Cheryl in post-coital bliss. Is Cheryl’s flannel over a red lacey bra a little on-the-nose? Sure. But it was great to finally see these two experiencing an actual intimate moment, especially as they were glaringly left out of the previous episode, which emulated noir and would have been a great chance for a Bound-esque Choni homage.

This scene is followed by the couple’s first real fight, sparked by Cheryl intentionally outing Moose during morning announcements. After coming out, Cheryl is able to be her more authentic self, but she doesn’t shed her mean girl tendencies, and we see that surface here. Toni opens up to her about how she was rejected by her uncle for liking girls and why that’s a big part of her joining the Serpents, who provided a support network. Cheryl then surprises Toni at the end of the episode with…

---

Cheryl gifts Toni a gay girl gang, Chapter Forty-Seven: Bizarrodale

I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated that the Pretty Poisons — the girl gang led by Toni and Cheryl — are all queer, but I mean look at them!!!!

---

Cheryl teaches the Pretty Poisons archery, Chapter Forty-Eight: Requiem for a Welterweight

Cheryl jumps all the way into being a gang mom, teaching her Pretty Poisons how to nail targets with their bows and training them to be her little Sapphic army. She does not take it well when Toni informs her that Jughead referred to the Poisons as her vanity project. And the Pretty Poisons actually fully beat up Sweet Pea and Fangs in the episode, which Toni isn’t thrilled about but kinda rules tbh!

This tension between Cheryl and Toni about how to run the Poisons (Cheryl wants them to be gay, do crimes and Toni wants them to just sort of…be a family? idk) drives a wedge into their relationship. In the following episode, Cheryl actually asks Toni to move out. To be fair, they moved in together way too quickly! Especially given the fact that they are teenagers!

---

Cheryl and Toni process their breakup via song and dance, Chapter Fifty-One: Big Fun

The series’ second musical episode makes up for the fact that the first cut its Choni number by spotlighting Cheryl and Toni’s dramatic breakup. Toni considers having a rebound threesome with Sweet Pea and Peaches, one of the Pretty Poisons. At the last second, she decides she doesn’t actually want that, and she has a real conversation with Cheryl about what’s going on between them. Cheryl admits that her idea of love has been poisoned by her family, which was all or nothing when it came to their love.

By the end of the episode, they’re back together. The power of musicals!

---

Toni distracts Cheryl from The Farm via sex, Chapter Fifty-Three: Jawbreaker

In addition to becoming a gang mom in season three, Cheryl also becomes embroiled in a cult when they convince her Jason is alive. Desperate to cling to the memories of her dead brother, Cheryl loses herself to The Farm. Toni doesn’t know how to best support her girlfriend, but she knows The Farm is bad news. She attempts to distract Cheryl from the cult by making moves on her, and it almost works! Cheryl misses a cult meeting. But unfortunately, she’s only pulled in deeper when asked to choose between Toni and The Farm. Classic cult tactics! Toni then also decides to join The Farm so she can stay close to Cheryl.

---

Cheryl and Toni run for co-prom queens, Chapter Fifty-Five: Prom Night

Like I said, Cheryl loves a co-queen moment! Betty Cooper ultimately wins prom queen this time around, but we aat least get Cheryl and Toni dancing together in their dependably over-the-top prom looks.

---

Veronica, Cheryl, and Toni perform “All That Jazz”, Chapter Fifty-Nine: Fast Times at Riverdale High

Honestly, I could include most of Riverdale‘s musical numbers on this list. Not only does this series deliver several actual musical episodes, but it also just loves a random musical interlude dropped into the middle of an episode. And even though sometimes the thematic underpinnings of the songs chosen are a bit of a stretch on a narrative level, these sequences always feature very Sapphic, very erotic choreography.

---

Cheryl and Toni conspire to push evil Blossoms out of their home under the threat of cannibalism, Chapter Sixty-Four: The Ice Storm

Cheryl and Toni’s relationship takes a twisted turn in season four when Cheryl gaslights Toni by making her believe their house is being haunted by her dead brother. There are clear reasons for Cheryl’s behavior throughout the season — namely, long-festering familial trauma — but that doesn’t make them excusable. I found myself rooting against Cheryl and Toni in season four, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I preferred this messy, troubling storytelling to the stretches of season three when they just didn’t have real, meaningful storylines at all. The problems in their relationship were what made the relationship interesting to me.

A pair of evil Blossoms arrive at Thistlehouse, and Cheryl and Toni eventually have to scare them off by making them believe they’ve eaten human meat pies. It’s a devilish trick, and it’s nice to see our girls up to their old habits of being gay, doing crimes together. But Cheryl’s unhealthy coping mechanisms are worsening at this point in the series. And even though she and Toni still connect on a sexual level, there’s a ton of disarray in their relationship emotionally.

---

Hermosa, Toni, and Cheryl on the dance floor, Chapter Seventy: The Ides of March

Veronica’s secret sister Hermosa arrives in season four to shake things up. She attempts to spy on Cheryl and Veronica’s burgeoning rum business, but Toni and Cheryl are onto her. They dance with her, but it’s less about seduction and more about DECEPTION. Which is even hotter, in a way. Again, Cheryl and Toni are at their best when scheming.

---

Archie’s mom gets a girlfriend, Chapter Seventy-One: How to Get Away with Murder

Listen, Mary Andrews is not who I predicted might be Riverdale‘s first queer mom, but here we are! Every time I rewatch season one, I become convinced something happened between Hermione Lodge and Alice Cooper when they were teens, but alas, nothing officially comes to fruition in that regard. Instead, we get Archie’s mom awkwardly introducing Archie to her new girlfriend. Good for you, Mrs. Andrews!

---

Cheryl and Toni — at last — are prom queens, Chapter Seventy-Seven: Climax

All of Cheryl’s gay co-prom queen dreams finally come true in the season five finale, but it’s a bittersweet conclusion to Riverdale‘s last prom. Cheryl learns Toni’s family doesn’t approve of their relationship — not because of their queerness, but because Cheryl is a Blossom, and her ancestors are responsible for the genocide in Riverdale that still affects Toni’s family to this day. That is…all very understandable! But even though Riverdale has a teen soap format, this feels like such a huge bomb to drop on its central queer relationship out of nowhere. For much of season four leading up to this, it was as if the writers only knew how to make Choni sexy or traumatized. Those were the only two options for most of their scenes together. As I wrote at the time: We got co- queer prom queens, but at what cost?

They don’t break up right away, and Cheryl sets herself on a path to try to distance herself from the bloody Blossom legacy. But then two episodes later, they do break up. And even though it’s a conclusion that makes sense for them at this point in the series, like much of the Choni arc from season three to now, it feels unevenly plotted.

---

Toni’s serpent dance, Chapter Eighty: Purgatorio

Riverdale famously time-jumps after its graduation episode in season five. Suddenly, all the characters are seven years older and have moved away from Riverdale. Except for Toni. She’s the Serpent Queen now, still lives in town, works at the high school, performs at the local speakeasy, is a graduate of Highsmith College (both a riff on Smith College and a shoutout to lesbian author Patricia Highsmith), and is pregnant! Her sexy pregnancy Serpent dance is very important to me! This is also a turning point in the series for Toni as a more fleshed out and central character on the show. At long last!

Cheryl also still lives in Riverdale, but the two have grown distant as Cheryl has lived a mostly reclusive life and believes herself to be cursed never to experience happiness due to her family’s violent past. She mostly does oil paintings now. It’s all very lesbi-gothic.

---

Toni brings back the Vixens, Chapter Eighty-Two: Back to School

Toni Topaz dons her own version of ex-girlfriend Cheryl’s iconic HBIC shirt, and just like that becomes Riverdale‘s top queerleader.

---

Toni makes Cheryl prove herself with a dance-off, Chapter Eighty-Three: Fire in the Sky

Toni and Cheryl’s new frenemy-exes dynamic in season five is a welcome development! It’s tense; it’s sexy; it’s very queer. Riverdale‘s dance-offs are some of my favorite moments on the show (the original Veronica x Cheryl one remains my favorite), and Toni knows she’s making a power play here. This results in them deciding to share the Vixens. Again, peak queerleader activity!

---

Cheryl gifts Toni a baby nursery in New Thornhill, Chapter Eighty-Four: Lock & Key

Here’s the problem though: Toni never asked for this gothic nursery. Cheryl asks Toni to move into her manor after freaking out about the fact that Toni is having a baby with Fangs and Kevin. Instead of supporting her ex-girlfriend in this journey toward building a nontraditional queer family, Cheryl acts out and reverts back to old patterns. The crux of this episode is that Cheryl is throwing a key party for all the old friends, but I wish it delivered more steaminess with this premise! Instead, we mostly get queer angst. But I’ll take that, too. And fear not, because…

---

Cheryl kisses Minerva the art dealer, Chapter Eighty-Four: Lock & Key

They key party may be a bust, but shortly after, Cheryl smooches up on Minerva, the art dealer she has been working with (and also scamming…Cheryl’s latest be gay, do crimes endeavor is counterfeiting artwork).

---

Cheryl and Minerva harvest some sweet sap, Chapter Eighty-Six: The Pincushion Man

And no, it isn’t a euphemism! They frolic through the woods on their way to harvest some maple syrup, but when they arrive at a tree, it doesn’t produce anything. Cheryl’s Nana says it’s because of the Blossom curse. Maple won’t come if Cheryl is happy. The episode ends with the Blossom women suggesting they might need to sacrifice Minerva to break the curse, but she runs away before anything too macabre can happen. Talk about a dramatic lesbian breakup!

---

Melody has a girlfriend, Chapter Ninety-One: The Return of the Pussycats

Josie McCoy and her Pussycats return to Riverdale! Josie split off to pursue a solo career, and meanwhile Melody became a published author AND got a girlfriend. Statistically, it seemed certain that at least one of the Pussycats had to be queer.

---

Just everything about this episode, Chapter Ninety-Nine: The Witching Hour(s)

It’d be impossible to pick just one or even just three moments from this episode of Riverdale to highlight. The entire episode is a three-timeline Sapphic saga about queer witches from the Blossom bloodline through the ages. This episode was part of Riverdale‘s experimental five-episode run known as Rivervale, all leading up to the show’s 100th episode. The five episodes take place in a pocket universe of Riverdale‘s main universe and explicitly takes the show into a supernatural space. This installment is also a crossover event with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Madelaine Petsch plays Abigail Blossom (1892), Poppy Blossom (1957), and Cheryl Blossom (present day), three Blossom women with interlocking queer stories through the centuries. Abigail has a secret lover in Thomasina, an ancestor of Toni of course. Poppy, meanwhile, runs a women’s group in the 50s and strikes up an illicit affair with married housewife Bitsy, played by Lili Reinhart.

The episode has horror, romance, and a ton of fun aesthetic details to flesh out the three settings. But most importantly, it’s queer as fuck. Cheryl comes from a long line of queer women with cursed love lives. Inherited trauma is kind of Cheryl’s whole thing, so that feels right.

---

Cheryl receives letters from Heather, Chapter One Hundred and Seven: In the Fog

Let’s just say that things get a little weird in season six of Riverdale — yes, even by this show’s wild standards! Cheryl learns she’s pyrokinetic, and she tortures her mother in this episode using her powers. Before Cheryl is finally able to banish her mother for good, Penelope presents a final peace offering. Remember how Cheryl came out to Toni by telling her about her best friend from junior high who moved away after Penelope drove them apart? Apparently, she wrote Cheryl a series of love letters after moving, and Cheryl’s wicked mom kept the letters from her this whole time.

The pain of Cheryl’s past surfaces in such a gutting way here, and it’s a strikingly grounded scene amid all the supernatural chaos of the season. There are times when Cheryl’s arc feels overly tragic, but I think that works best in zoomed-in, fleshed-out moments like this where the emotional stakes are so raw and real.

---

Heather arrives at Thornhill, Chapter One Hundred and Nine: Venomous

Cheryl’s past comes crashing into her present when Heather arrives at her doorstep. And guess what! She’s a witch!

---

Heather and Cheryl kiss, Chapter One Hundred and Twelve: American Psychos

Cheryl gets to act on her young, closeted queer desires that her mother tried so hard to stomp out of her in the back half of season six, when she and Heather pair doing witchcraft together with doing makeouts together. The witchy Sapphic vibes of Riverdale always felt like part of its fabric, but that becomes very literal in season six.

---

Heather casts a spell so that Abigail Blossom and Thomasina Topaz can be together in Cheryl and Toni’s bodies, Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen: Night of the Comet

Yes, you read all of that correctly! This is honestly one of my favorite queer hookups in Riverdale history. Body-swapping, time-traveling, witchcraft — it’s so wonderfully over-the-top and matches the tone of the season, whereas sometimes past queer hookup scenes felt disconnected from the central narrative of the show. All television shows should get continuously queerer over time, and Riverdale does exactly that. By the time the show’s final season hits, it almost seems like everyone is queer.

---

New queer character Lizzo arrives in 1955, Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen: Skip, Hop, and Thump!

The comet that hits at the end of season six triggers a cosmic event that sends the Riverdale characters back in time to the 1950s and also ages them down to teens again. Consequently, Cheryl and Kevin go back into the closet, which I have mixed feelings about. But we also meet a new queer character in Lizzo, who taunts Toni for going for the “straight-laced, square girls.”

---

Toni and Cheryl fantasy-makeout, Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen: Skip, Hop, and Thump!

This episode also features a “makeout party” hosted by 1950s-ified Veronica. In a fantasy sequence, Cheryl and Toni act on their desires for each other, even if Cheryl isn’t ready to do so in their real lives. The things this final season is doing with fantasy and repressed desire are really intriguing!

---

Cheryl and Toni repeat the…future, Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five: Hoop Dreams

History begins to repeat itself with Cheryl and Toni’s arc in the 1950s…or, history begins to repeat…the future? Sometimes time travel storylines hurt my head. But the characters on Riverdale don’t remember their lives before the comet, so I suppose it’s more like they’ve been rebooted entirely.

---

Betty fantasizes about Veronica, Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Six: Betty & Veronica Double Digest

Betty’s arc in season seven largely concerns her struggles to understand herself sexually. She fantasizes about sex constantly — with all of her peers, including Veronica. These bisexual desires, even though they’re expressed entirely in a fantasy space, make for some of the most intricate queer storytelling the show has ever done. I’ve written a lot of words about it this summer. And it even made me reconsider that kiss from the pilot. Here’s some of what I wrote about this Betty storyline:

Sure, the show does have openly queer characters, even in this 1950s timeline, insinuating that if Betty is queer, she could just act on it more explicitly. The way Cheryl does, the way Toni does, the way Kevin does. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all arc when it comes to queerness. And in some ways, I’m more personally drawn to Betty’s storyline in season seven than I have been to any queer storyline on the series that came before. Cheryl represents a queer youth I never had but wish I did. Betty represents the repressed queer youth I did have and, on some level, regret, even if it was out of my control.

---

Betty and Veronica choose each other instead of Archie, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-One: Archie the Musical

Riverdale‘s final musical episode opts for original music, and Kevin has Betty and Veronica sing a love song. The episode initially sets things up as if they’re going to fight over Archie, but Betty and Veronica reject that storyline in favor of this one. It feels like a deliberate confrontation of the love triangle set up in the pilot.

Once again, Betty and Veronica kiss in a fantasy sequence. Again, the fact that it’s imagined makes it actually feel more real. So many characters are exploring possible bisexuality in this season — even Archie and Reggie.

---

The Cost of Pepper, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Three: Stag

A couple times in season seven, we see a copy of The Cost of Pepper, a spoof of The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. In the episode “Stag,” Toni and Cheryl do an entire boudoir photoshoot together that prominently features the novel, and it’s peak Sapphic camp in a way only this show is capable of pulling off.

I mean, let’s be real, there’s a lot of queer shenanigans going on this episode largely about the characters discovering porn for the first time. Betty and Veronica also eagerly want to watch porn together — you know, as friends!

---

Cheryl teaches Betty to masturbate, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Four: A Different Kind of Cat

Cheryl helps a pal out by introducing Betty to the wonders of self-pleasure. She’s really channeling Poppy Blossom by spreading sexual liberation to her fellow 1950s girlies! See, there are some good things about Blossom blood!

Cheryl also loans Betty a copy of Femme and In magazine, a feminist and lesbian mag she and Toni are fans of, and Betty brings it into the tub with her for a masturbation sesh. She’s literally getting off to a queer erotica magazine!!!

---

Cheryl comes out to her Vixens and they come out to her, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six: The Golden Age of Television

In the penultimate episode of the series, Cheryl tells the River Vixens she wants to stand in the light, opening up to them about going steady with Toni. In turn, some of her cheerleaders decide to tell her they want to stand in the light, too. Even in 1950, Cheryl’s Vixens are of course a bunch of homos! This show may have gone back in time, but that doesn’t stop it from ramping up the queerness!

---

And with that very long stroll through the show’s wild, dramatic, horny, and winding queer history, I’m finally ready to head into Riverdale’s last episode of all time tonight. What are some of your favorite (subtextual or explicit!) queer moments from the series?

10 Essential Episodes of Riverdale

With Riverdale coming to a close this week, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a viewing guide of sorts for folks who either 1. Want to revisit some of the most iconic moments in the series’ history or 2. Want to plunge into Riverdale for the first time but want to get a taste of what it’s all about first (or, you know, just not commit to 137 episodes). This proved to be a difficult task! So much has happened over the course of seven seasons (I mean, just peep my Riverdale quiz for a small sample), and the thing I love about this show is that it constantly reinvented itself. Selecting just 10 episodes to represent the series as a whole is a fool’s errand, but it’s one I have attempted nonetheless.

With a one exception, I tried to avoid just making this a list of premieres and finales. Of course all the premieres and finales are great! That’s pretty standard for a long-running network drama. But to really get into the meat of this series, you have to reach into its middleparts, where the show experiments and plays with form, style, and story with reckless abandon. The episodes of Riverdale most often made fun of online are actually some of the finest installments of the series, showcasing just how strange and surreal the series is willing to go. I’ll have more to say on that as the final week of Riverdale unfolds, but for now, let’s dive into the 10 episodes I think you should check out right now, whether you’ve seen them before or not!

As a note, the list does not include any episodes of the final season, as it’s not yet readily available to stream online in full. Also, it’s meant to be more of a retrospective, so the new season is a little too fresh. Also, because this is a list specifically for Autostraddle, I’ve focused intently on a lot of the show’s queer moments in the episodes I’ve highlighted — though not all of them will be explicit/obvious in that regard. A list highlighting some of the show’s gayest moments is coming soon.

Again, there’s no way to capture all of the show’s bizarro magic in just 10 installments, but if you watch all of these, you’ll meet just about all of the Biggest Bads, the most significant serialized storylines, and a lot of the show’s many MANY ships. It will be a disorienting mini marathon, sure, but it will also be delightful! So in Cheryl Blossom’s honor, light a hundred candles, put on an elaborate outfit, and press play on the following 10 must-watch episodes of Riverdale.

Spoilers abound for all seven seasons of Riverdale!

---

1. Chapter One: The River’s Edge (Season 1, Episode 1)

Here, we have my one exception to the no premieres or finales rule, but of course I had to include the show’s pilot. Rewatching it feels like visiting a simpler time, and there are fittingly lots of parallels between it and the penultimate episode of the series — Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six: The Golden Age of Television — which aired last week. If you watch the Riverdale pilot without having seen any episodes before, you might be surprised that the show really did start out as a pretty straightforward teen drama with a murder mystery plot. It was about a town undone by the death of a teen boy and all the familial secrets, lies, and histories that death kicks up.

I’ve seen this pilot a lot — to the point where I have much of it memorized. Something that stands out to me is how laden with queer subtext it is from the start, even as its supposedly about mostly heterosexual teen romance and drama (with the exception of Kevin Keller, who really did used to be so much more fun back in the day!). Archie going to find the “girl next door” (aka Betty) at Pop’s only to instead find Jughead? Romance! Veronica choosing friendship right away with Betty even though they’re set up to be rivals with a typical love triangle premise? Romance! The other thing that stands out to me is how Lili Reinhart’s acting is leagues above the rest of the younger stars from the start. They catch up to her, but whew Reinhart, along with Cheryl Blossom one-liners, were definitely the initial hook that made me stay up for two late nights in a row catching up on season one when I first dove into the show.

Veronica and Betty share a kiss in this first episode, and while it’s played off as “not real,” which soon-to-be-queer character Cheryl rolls her eyes at, events in the final season cast that kiss in a new light in my opinion.

2. Chapter Twelve: Anatomy of a Murder (Season 1, Episode 12)

In a big swing, Riverdale reveals what really happened to Jason Blossom in the penultimate episode of the season rather than in the finale. We learn Jason was killed by his own father Clifford Blossom and that Jughead’s father FP made a false confession because Clifford threatened to kill Jughead the same way. Kevin, Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead all watch a horrific video of Clifford shooting Jason in the head at close range, and look, I don’t want to wander too far into the weeds of trying to justify why Riverdale allows its narrative to go so off the rails from pretty much this point on, but in a lot of ways, Riverdale‘s sharp evolution into a show that dabbles in the absurd, the surreal, and the straight up supernatural actually does make sense when you consider this act of violence to be the firestarter. How can these teens ever go back to normal after seeing that? The town is never the same, and Riverdale pushes that to outrageous proportions. But did anyone really want seven seasons of a formulaic suburban crime/mystery narrative? Seems like there are plenty of shows out there that do that! Riverdale does something different. Very different.

3. Chapter Twenty-Four: The Wrestler (Season 2, Episode 11)

Remember when queer film icon Gregg Araki directed an episode of Riverdale?! Because I will never forget!!! This show has always felt queer in its marrow, even when that queerness isn’t explicitly at the surface. The homoerotics of all the wrestling sequences in this?! Araki’s touches are distinct and evocative. Sometimes I swear this show is at its most queer when dealing mostly with subtext/ambiguity than with its more straightforwardly gay storylines.

Season two sets up two Big Bads: a serial killer dubbed The Black Hood who is introduced in the season premiere when he shoots Archie’s dad Fred and also Veronica’s father Hiram Lodge, who remains a villain over the course of the series until Veronica eventually has him killed. (Sometimes fathers kill their sons on this show, and sometimes daughters kill their fathers.) At this point, the Black Hood is assumed to be dead and assumed to have been the school janitor. Neither of these things will be true by the end of the season.

In this episode, Jughead also learns the truth about Riverdale’s violent, genocidal history and its residual effects on the town. You’ll meet Chic, thought to be Betty’s long-lost half-brother (and product of the teenage relationship between Betty’s mom Alice and Jughead’s dad FP), but his real identity is more complicated than that. But most significantly on a plot level, this episode sets up the intense and toxic mentor/mentee relationship between Hiram and Archie. Daddy issues! Everyone’s got em in Riverdale.

4. Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Hills Have Eyes (Season 2, Episode 14)

Hiram Lodge’s villainy ramps up in the background of this episode, in which central couples Veronica/Archie and Jughead/Betty head out to Veronica’s family’s gorgeous lodge in the woods for a romantic getaway. Acting out after being hurt she wasn’t invited, Cheryl calls Jughead right as the couples arrive for their fun weekend and tells him she saw Archie and Betty kiss outside her house around Christmas. Not such a fun weekend anymore! Archie had already told Veronica about the kiss, so the two just bang about it, which is kind of their whole thing. Jughead and Betty eventually work through it, too (and also have sex, Betty donning a wig and embodying her sexy alter ego Dark Betty who’s initially introduced in season one), and the core four drink too-green margaritas while having a horny — albeit fraught — weekend away.

Veronica decides that the best way to resolve the tension is for Jughead and her to make out, and at first it reads as pretty fanservicey, thrusting under-explored ship (at the time; in season seven, they become more solidly canon) Vughead together. But it all unexpectedly comes together rather organically in a later scene when Jughead talks to Archie about how it’s both a good and a scary thing that the friend group is all tangled up together and intimate in a way that sometimes leads to new romantic feelings for each other? If the final season of Riverdale highlights anything, it’s that literally any ship on this show works convincingly — even queer ships for characters previously believed to be straight.

The weekend is mainly made fraught not by the shipping wars but by Hiram’s background behaviors, which include buying up the trailer park Jughead lives in, the newspaper run by Betty’s parents, and additional properties throughout the Southside of Riverdale.

Yes, that’s right, one of the big evils of this season of Riverdale is GENTRIFICATION and the devilish acts of developers determined to destroy small towns for their own capitalist gains! Even at its most over-the-top, Riverdale does manage to weave in some real world stakes to its dramatics.

This is also the episode in which Cheryl Blossom officially comes out as queer! I have mixed feelings about it, because the moment sort of doubles as a promo for Love, Simon, Cheryl deciding to come out to out bisexual character Toni Topaz (who will go on to be her girlfriend) after a screening of the movie in Riverdale. But I suppose it is believable that a small town closeted teen wouldn’t really be exposed to queerness on-screen until a big studio release like Love, Simon, so I’ll accept. It helps that Madelaine Petsch nails Cheryl’s brief but effective monologue about her junior high friend Heather who she loved (also, for a very good and classic Cheryl Blossom moment, go back to the season two premiere).

It was immediately following this episode that I started doing episodic recaps of Riverdale, which continued through mid-season five.

5. Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Midnight Club (Season 3, Episode 4)

I love when Riverdale does a gimmicky episode (and as a result, there are several on this list). This one operates as a flashback episode as well as a twisted homage to The Breakfast Club (which has an extra layer of meta to it, considering Archie’s mother is played by Molly Ringwald). The cast’s younger actors get to try something new by playing younger versions of the parent characters, and it’s very fun! Cole Sprouse is particularly good at evoking the physicality and general vibe of his older counterpart, Skeet Ulrich. And no one is having as much fun as Lili Reinhart playing a teen Alice Cooper, who was a bad girl with a penchant for starting fights. We get to see some of the relationships between the parents that later play into the dynamics of the present timeline, starting in season one, like Hermione/Fred and Alice/FP.

The episode is also the clearest overview of Gargoyles & Gryphons, the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired tabletop game that spreads like virus throughout Riverdale in season three, teen characters so drawn into the game and also the drugs that seem like a requisite for playing that it leads to multiple suicides and deaths. You must accept you’ll never fully understand the inner-workings of G&G, but that’s okay! The point is that the game makes its players into monsters…or, perhaps, brings out the monsters already within. As with a lot of Riverdale storylines, the meaning is a pick your own adventure situation.

There are many Riverdaleisms throughout the series, like the drug Jingle Jangle or the…other drug, Fizzle Rocks, which you’ll see here. They’re like pop rocks but drugs!

6. Chapter Fifty-One: Big Fun (Season 3, Episode 16)

IT WAS VERY HARD FOR ME TO CHOOSE WHICH MUSICAL EPISODE TO HIGHLIGHT. The first one — which takes on Carrie: The Musical — made me cry the first time I watched it. But the more I considered what exactly I love about Riverdale‘s reality-bending musical episodes, the more I kept coming back to the second one, all about Kevin’s decision to put on a production of Heathers: The Musical. Hermione Lodge says it all in the episode’s opening: Doing a musical about teen violence and suicide in RIVERDALE? A town wracked by those exact things?! There’s only one way to grapple with the macabre fates that have befallen this town, and it’s to lean into camp!

While it’s introduced earlier in the season, this episode also paints a picture of the season’s (second?) central conflict. In addition to a wicked D&D-like game, there’s also a cult in town called The Farm, and they’re sponsoring the musical. The cult is led by a man named Edgar Evernever, played by Chad Michael Murray, a sentence I like to type out because it sounds totally an entirely made up.

Reggie and Veronica are together in this part of the show, and I’ve always thought they were an underrated ship. Cheryl and Toni are full-on exes at this point, too, and Cheryl returns to her baddest mean girl ways, and that descent fits very well with the musical’s themes. But the episode also hints at the eventual rekindling of their relationship, which is on and off for the rest of the series.

7. Chapter Sixty-One: Halloween (Season 4, Episode 4)

I love when this show tilts into horror territory, and I love when any show does a special installment for Halloween, and this checks both those boxes! It opens with a very unsettling setup: Several of the families in Riverdale receive VHS tapes containing hours of footage of their front steps. Everyone, it seems, is being watched.

What follows is a Frankenstein of classic horror tropes and references. Scream, When a Stranger Calls, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and more all have their DNA woven into the episode, which provides several scary stories to tell in the dark at once. Betty Cooper, dressed up as Laurie Strode, receives a call coming from inside the house. Jughead Jones is drugged and locked in a coffin by his creepy rich literary freak classmates at Stonewall Prep, the private school he has transferred to. Cheryl Blossom’s manor — where she currently lives with her girlfriend Toni — is being haunted by the spirit of her dead brother (whose corpse she has been conversing with as if he’s alive). A stranger shows up late at Pop’s where Veronica is working in search of a hot meal, and a news story casually reveals a serial killer recently escaped a local hospital and is on the loose. Archie goes full 80s grunge thriller at the boxing gym/youth center he’s trying to run. The episode is a fun and stylish exploration of genre, but there are still some very real and very frightening emotional layers to it all, especially for Cheryl/Toni, as the true source of the haunting is much more fucked up than if we’d just been dealing with a ghost.

8. Chapter Seventy-Five: Lynchian (Season 4, Episode 18)

By this point, Jughead has already faked his own death and revealed that he faked his own death. It was all a ruse to expose those Stonewall Prep classmates and the nefarious doings of their secret literary society Quill and Skull. I know it sounds like we skipped a lot of plot, but we really didn’t!

Cheryl and Veronica are just two teen girls running a rumpire — that’s right, a rum empire! They’re full-on business rivals with Hiram, and my favorite brand of unrealistic things the teens of Riverdale get up to are the unrealistic BUSINESS ventures. I love the commitment to giving the teens adult storylines before they’re adults. High school drama gets too repetitive, you know? But on the high school drama front, Archie and Betty are once again feeling feelings for each other despite still being in relationships with Veronica and Jughead, having just kissed in the series’ third musical episode, which I wasn’t really a fan of at the time but might revisit. Betty revisits old journal entries in which she yearned for her neighbor Archie as a little girl. I love how often over the course of the series we delve into Betty’s psyche in terms of her desires. While this season four entry mainly looks at early, youthful conceptions of love and romance, season seven is largely about her exploring the messy contours of her sexual fantasies. I feel like every season provides a new challenging of Betty as the “girl next door” trope.

The voyeur tapes sent in “Halloween” have escalated to now feature a recording of someone in an Archie comics-like Betty mask bludgeoning someone in an Archie comics-like Jughead mask in the woods. Jughead uncovers a seedy underground video rental operation, which has a library that includes a sex tape of him and Betty filmed without their consent. As its title suggests, strange and cinematic images are the name of the game for this freaky episode, which also has a subplot about Reggie, Kevin, and Fangs getting into the very specific business of making tickling videos.

While there were certainly a lot of more explosive moments on the show (literally, season six involves a bomb that triggers a new pocket universe), the voyeur tapes were some of the most legitimately scary things to happen in Riverdale history. Art imitating death, as Jughead puts it.

9. Chapter Eighty: Purgatorio (Season 5, Episode 4)

Speaking of the teens becoming adults…they’re adults now! After season five’s high school graduation episode, we do a seven year time jump into the new mid-twenties lives of our main characters. The gang has been away from Riverdale for a while, and Archie calls them all back to the roots of their various traumas by asking them to return to town for Pop’s retirement party.

The episode has one of the most nonsensical cold opens of the show’s history: In a nightmare sequence, Archie is haunted by recent memories of war (? it’s never clear what active combat zone he has been in in the time between graduation and the time jump) and distant memories of high school — from football to longtime nemesis-daddy Hiram Lodge.

Betty, meanwhile, is an FBI agent specializing in serial killers (which is fitting, since it’s revealed in previous seasons that she has something called the “serial killer gene,” another Riverdaleism). She’s haunted by a murderer called the Trash Bag Killer (TBK, a play on BTK) and fucking her superior, because these characters will simply never learn any lessons about toxic and ill-advised relationships! Veronica is married to a rich man named Chadwick and living a secret Uncut Gems life. Chad’s basically a Hiram wannabe. Don’t worry, she’ll eventually kill him! Cheryl is living a reclusive life painting in her manor and gearing up to entire the wonderful world of ART FRAUD. Don’t worry, she’ll get a temporary girlfriend out of this business. Before eventually going back to Toni.

Here’s another one of Riverdale‘s episodes where it feels like we’re getting a smattering of distinct genres all at once — from war drama to serial killer thriller to Jughead’s honestly quite entertaining literary noir narrative. I enjoy these collage-y episodes of the series for the visual stories they tell.

But the most important part of this episode to me personally is Toni Topaz doing a sexy musical number while pregnant. At a certain point, I think we have to all admit Riverdale isn’t just a series that does musical episodes but a musical series period. Toni’s working at the high school, and that’s what the others end up doing, too, after Archie convinces them their new purpose in life is to revitalize the dying town of Riverdale, which has been starved of resources by Hiram as he continues to work on his SoDale luxury community project nearby, a storyline that has somehow been going on since season two. But hey, again, when the true source of evil is money-hungry developers ravaging small town America…consider me hooked!

Another episode from season five that exemplifies the themes of the season is “Chapter Eight-Six: The Pinchushion Man.”

10. Chapter Ninety-Nine: The Witching Hour(s) (Season 6, Episode 4)

I just realized that four entries on this list are the fourth episodes of their respective seasons. I guess Riverdale just really knows how to do a fourth episode!

Building to its 100th episode (Chapter One Hundred: The Jughead Paradox, which is in some ways essential viewing, too, but also so extremely pushes the boundaries of metafiction/paradox/alternate universe storytelling that it’s almost headache-inducing, so if you’re the kind of person who mentally spirals out any time there’s time travel involved, be warned!), Riverdale did its wildest experiment to date and created a five-episode arc called Rivervale — like Riverdale with a V! Jughead turns into a classic horror host for this arc, introducing each increasingly bizarre episode that pushes Riverdale into its most overtly supernatural territory. You see, a bomb goes off in Riverdale leading up to these events, triggering a pocket universe where things are just slightly off and where magic, witchcraft, and mystical comets exist.

This is my favorite of the Rivervale episodes, for obvious reasons (it’s gay gay gay). It tells a three-timeline story about Cheryl Blossom in her ancestral manor Thornhill in the present day; Poppy Blossom in Thornhill in 1957; and Abigail Blossom in Thornhill in 1892. In all three timelines, a comet is set to pass Riverdale. This is the comet that Cheryl will eventually be tasked with melting (using witchcraft), which will lead everyone to time travel back to the 1950s and also age down to teens again…which is where season seven picks up!

But before all that, we get this trio of witchy period dramas, the episode doubling as a Chilling Adventures of Sabrina crossover! In case you were wondering, yes, Poppy and Abigail are also both queer, so this episode contains three magical Sapphic love stories as well as some confusing plot points about bodily possession, but try not to overthink anything that happens in Rivervale, which is very much Riverdale‘s version of doing an experimental art project. In fact, a part of me wishes we had just stayed in Rivervale for the rest of the series! It got to basically be a new show every episode.

And that’s exactly what I love the most about Riverdale: Its proclivity for play. Episodes that feel like costume parties, gimmicky narrative structures built around themes, character arcs that allow actors to go big and bold and theatrical — these are the Riverdale moments I’ll cherish the most.

---

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors who are currently on strike, series like Riverdale would not be possible, and Autostraddle is grateful for the artists who do this work.

Guess Which of These Riverdale Storylines Is Real and Which I Completely Made Up

The final week of Riverdale is upon us, and I am not emotionally prepared!!!! So I’m coping the only way I know how, which is to revisit some of the wildest, weirdest, and WTF-iest (complimentary) storylines the show has given us through the past seven seasons. All week, I’ll be serving up some retrospective Riverdale content as I look back on the show that taught me how to embrace the absurdity of life.

First up: this chaotic quiz! Be warned that spoilers abound for the entirety of Riverdale, including season seven, which ends THIS WEDNESDAY. I mayhaps (as Cheryl Blossom would say) had a little too much fun coming up with fake storylines and details for Riverdale. I hope you have as much fun taking the quiz as I had making it!!

---

I Just Need Everyone To Know About Riverdale’s Patricia Highsmith Parody Called THE COST OF PEPPER

This Riverdale recap was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors who are currently on strike, TV shows like this one would not be possible, and Autostraddle is grateful for the artists who do this work. This recap contains spoilers for Riverdale season seven, episode 16, “Stag.”

---

Just when I think the final season of Riverdale can’t get any better, it surprises me. I’ve even come to adore the 1950s setting, even if it means characters tend to speak in charmingly goofy colloquialisms, anachronisms, and American history 101 lessons. In fact, this week, Archie Andrews learns about the beatniks! He’s very interested in these authors and artists who eschewed convention, and Clay even teaches him the word heteronormativity. As a reminder, Archie is experimenting with poetry rather than football these days. And that experimentation ends up expanding to sexuality as well. Yes, I do believe “Stag” confirms some bisexual leanings for our dear Archie, who is grappling with the fact of his own squareness and finds himself in something of a situationship with his best friend Reggie. There’s a lot happening in this final season, which seems determined to try out every possible pairing the show has to offer, effectively making every single character queer — even if it so far has only played out in fantasy for some.

I find it fascinating that this 50s-set season has been obsessed with sex, sexuality, and sexual shame and repression, because it really highlights just how much the culture wars of our real world today are cyclical of the past. Much of what the teens contend with in this season of Riverdale is familiar in our real world context. “Stag” sees Jughead fighting against fascist oppression in town when a new code emerges explicitly banning certain topics — namely, violence and sex — from any comic books produced in Riverdale. The adults implementing these restrictions — including Cheryl’s evil father Clifford Blossom — use all the same talking points popular with the far right these days about book bans and what subject matter is “appropriate” for children. This season of Riverdale is actually the most timely depiction of censorship and restrictions on art and teenage autonomy I’ve seen on television recently.

“Stag” brings the sexual exploration themes of the season back to the forefront. New queer character Lizzo introduces Toni and Cheryl, who have been dating on the downlow, occasionally using secret boyfriends Clay and Kevin as part of lavender arrangements, to the underground lesbian pinup magazine Femme-and-In Magazine. The photos inspire Cheryl and Toni to have a pinup shoot of their own, with Cheryl planning to turn one of the resulting photos into a giant oil painting in the style of the pulp novels she and Toni have been burying their little queer noses in. During said photoshoot, Toni at one point holds up one of these in-universe pulp novels, and it is called….THE COST OF PEPPER. As in, an obvious and hilariously precise riff on The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith.

THE COST! OF PEPPER!

I had to pause my television and process this for at least 45 seconds. It’s just so silly, so good, so Riverdale.

While Cheryl and Toni are bonding over being hot together, the rest of the Riverdale teens are grappling with sexuality and desire as well. We don’t get a ton of concrete content on the ongoing Betty/Veronica front, but this episode no doubt continues their amorphous and scintillating arc as best friends who are also undeniably something more than best friends. When Veronica learns the boys in town are all riled up over a “stag” movie (also called “smokers” and essentially retro pornos that were black-and-white, short, and silent) Julian Blossom got his hands on, she insists she wants to attend the viewing herself and bring along a friend. That friend, of course, is Betty. But whereas I thought this might lead to Veronica and Betty continuing to feel curiosities about each other, it actually gets a lot messier. The film begins, and Betty cuts it short, recognizing her sister Polly as the star. Soon, she learns her sister is actually a world famous burlesque dancer under the stage name POLLY AMOROUS. And while Betty initially seems to have some internalized shame and stigma against what her sister does, she quickly comes around on it, feeling empowered by her sister’s sexual liberation and also coming to understand Alice’s strict grip on her own desires and libido as a harsh reaction to Polly’s life. Realizing just how deep her mother’s hatred of anything sexual runs, Betty finally stands up to Alice at episode’s end.

But before that, Betty and Veronica plan a special performance at the Babylonian (Veronica’s movie theater, because yes, no matter how many iterations of Veronica there have been over the course of the series, Teen Business Owner has been a consistent throughline) for the one and only Polly Amorous to showcase her talent. What follows is a burlesque performance set to “Rose’s Turn” — one of my personal favorite showtunes of all time — in which Betty ends up imagining herself in the position of her sister. Betty’s fantasies all season have been some of my favorite storytelling. I love the intricate nature of this moment here; Betty is only able to access her true desires by projecting herself onto her sister. Isn’t sexuality just strange and uncomfortable like that sometimes?

And after a full season of homoerotic friendship between Archie and Reggie, the two boys finally move their dynamic from a subtextual space to a very embodied one. When Julian attempts to “prank” them by giving them a stag movie about two boys wrestling, Archie and Reggie are confused at first, but their confusion gives way quickly to curiosity. They keep watching, together. Later in the bedroom they share, they wonder aloud about things, like whether Kevin and Clay are together (which, obviously, they are) and if there can be room for sexual experimentation between boys. Archie posits that there could be some “wiggle room” between straight and gay. And when their poetry teacher Ms. Grundy (who thankfully is not having a relationship with Archie this timeline around) challenges her students (Archie, Betty, and Clay) to do something they’ve never done before and stay up all night to see the sun rise, Archie ends up inviting Reggie along to visit a sex worker, who the boys see together. We aren’t privy to exactly what happens in that room, but it’s safe to assume the lines between a platonic broship and queer desire were blurred. After, as Archie and Reggie watch the sun rise, they tell each other “I love you.” It’s a surprisingly tender moment, one that again makes me feel as if Riverdale is doing much more with these relationship shakeups and sexual curiosities than just basic fanservice. It’s all shockingly organic storytelling — horny and ridiculous, sure, but not pandering or salacious. (In fact, the only moment that really feels like empty fanservice in the episode is the Veronica/Jughead kiss, but I’m not too mad about it.)

In both the Archie/Reggie and Veronica/Betty arcs, there’s so much nuance and complexity to these distinctly queer friendships and to how these characters are starting to explore their sexualities beyond the confines of rigid 1950s heteronormativity. In some ways, these storylines feel more queer than some of the beats we get from Cheryl/Toni and Clay/Kevin. With previously believed to be straight characters like Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Reggie, Riverdale is quietly blowing up everything we might have once assumed about them, the characters each questioning their own desires in visceral ways with real stakes to it all, even when it unfolds somewhat at the periphery. Of course I love the overtly erotic and femme lesbian aesthetics of Toni and Cheryl’s photoshoot, but I’m almost more invested in the sexy-strange nature of Betty imagining herself as her sister, of Veronica wanting nothing more than for her best friend to be by her side when she watches porn for the first time.

But at the end of the day, nothing tops The Cost of Pepper. The Cost of Pepper immediately belongs in the Riverdale hall of fame. Good golly, I’m gonna miss this show when it’s over.

Now, enjoy Archie learning the word heteronormativity:

In Riverdale’s Final Musical Episode, Betty and Veronica Dump Archie for Each Other

It seems like three lifetimes ago that the first musical episode of Riverdale made me cry (I’m a former performing arts high school LOSER, okay?!), but I suppose it was technically only five years ago. But haven’t we lived so much life since 2018, all of us, but especially the fictional characters of Riverdale? They’ve time-jumped, time-traveled, experienced celestial and supernatural phenomena, gotten lost in a pocket universe, and explored just about every ship combination possible, creating not love triangles, not love quadrangles, but love helixes. Now, in its final season, Riverdale serves up a fresh musical episode — FEATURING ORIGINAL MUSIC.

That’s right. Whereas previous Riverdale musical episodes have borrowed songs from the likes of Carrie, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Heathers, “Archie the Musical” features exclusively original songs, composed in-universe by Kevin Keller. It plays out like a meta-musical contemplation of some of the central high school tropes and ongoing, cyclical character arcs of the show’s main players. Most importantly, it’s very gay. Boyfriends Kevin and Clay share a love duet before the title card even hits, and they sing another love song later in tandem with Cheryl and Toni explicitly “about the longing of being in a queer, interracial relationship in the 1950s.” “Archie the Musical” also begins with a typical love triangle arrangement of Archie/Betty/Veronica (boring!) and twists it into a much queerer shape, continuing the season’s slow-burn exploration of a Betty/Veronica romance (thrilling!).

(As a reminder: This season is set in the 1950s. Please don’t ask why; “why” is not a question that should be asked of Riverdale, because it exists on a plane beyond mere mortal logic.)

Early on in “Archie the Musical,” Betty, Veronica, Cheryl, and Toni (in character for this deranged musical Kevin penned) sing about being in competition over Archie’s affection, and the girls promptly accuse Kevin of seeing them as vapid teen girls obsessed with a teen boy who has no interest in any of them. It feels like a fun self-referential moment that acknowledges just how goofy the idea of fighting over a bland boy like Archie is! Or at least, that’s my reading. Archie has a solo where he sings about choosing between Betty and Veronica, and even though that’s the bold text of Kevin’s song, Archie’s psyche injects some of subtext of its own, expanding his indecisiveness to be about whether to pursue sports or poetry as well as choosing between Reggie and Jughead as his best friends. Even this subtle equating of a choice between Betty/Veronica and between Reggie/Jughead feels distinctly queer. Kevin’s musical constructs a world where all these characters are forced to fit into neat boxes that follow archetypical narratives — narratives many of them have already gone through at some point in the series. What makes the episode so compelling is how the characters bristle against these musicalized, conventional — if heightened — versions of themselves and forge different, less expected paths.

The most striking example of this happens with Betty and Veronica. Following their pushback against Kevin’s sexism-coded song, the two are cozy in Veronica’s penthouse, and Veronica confesses to Betty that she kissed Archie, because she knows Betty also has feelings for him. But instead of this creating conflict between the two girls the way it would in the musical world Kevin has constructed, it does the opposite. Veronica and Betty decide to put aside Archie and to focus, instead, on their friendship, an agreement they seal by clasping each other’s hands.

Later, they sing the new song written for them by Kevin, an accidental love song about how they don’t feel seen by anyone but each other. It ends with them kissing. Now, this kiss technically happens in the fantasy space of the musical. Every time characters are singing in this episode, they exist in this fantasy realm, but the veil between it and their realities isn’t just thin; it’s gaseous, barely there. Indeed, when we slip back into reality, Betty and Veronica’s eyes are locked. Clay and Kevin are in awe, ask what just happened. “Some kind of energy exchange, I think,” Veronica says. “Yeah, a seismic one,” Betty agrees. Seismic energy exchange might as well be a euphemism for lesbian sex IMO!!!!!!!!

After, they process together, agree that their musical connection was “primal, charged, intense.” Veronica says: “All this time we’ve been thinking, ‘When are we going to climb Mount Archibald?’ When in fact…” Betty interrupts: “Maybe there are other, more…emotionally complex mountains to climb.”

Archie, of course, chooses this time to bust in and say that while he has kissed both of them, he is in a place of growth and doesn’t feel like it’s the time to choose between them and instead would like to focus on himself. Okay, sounds good Arch! Literally no one asked or invited you!

I’ve already gone long on my thoughts on Betty/Veronica this season, and “Archie the Musical” gives momentum to this arc, even if it’s still in small, gradual doses. I think it would be overly dismissive — and tbh, not even true to a lot of young queer experiences — to downplay the significance of Betty and Veronica’s mutual attraction to each other by saying all of their kisses have only happened in fantasy sequences. What are fantasies if not the purest, most primal expressions of our innermost desires? In some ways, what Betty and Veronica have feels more real specifically because it exists in this yearning, aching interiority rather than in their outer lives. And we’ve seen it seep into their outer lives, passing through that wispy veil. This is especially true in “Archie the Musical,” the looks they give each other in the final minutes of the episode suddenly tinged with something new, something as charged and intense as they say they felt earlier.

I enjoy the explicit queer storytelling we’re getting from Clay/Kevin and Cheryl/Toni. But there’s something to be said of this slow-burning, genuinely emotionally complex (as Betty herself says in the episode!) arc between Betty and Veronica, a romance that hasn’t previously been explored on the series with as much urgency and weight as it is now and yet carries immense urgency and weight, even as it remains in this fantasy space. Ironically, Betty/Veronica as it has played out so far has actually felt more entrenched in realism than Clay/Kevin and Cheryl/Toni. In many ways, it’s those more explicitly queer pairings that feel like a fantasy, especially in the 1950s setting. That’s not a problem all the time. I welcome Riverdale‘s ahistorical approach to these storylines that softens the edges of the homophobia and racism they experience (up to a point; some of it crosses a line into the same issues with Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, though I’d argue Riverdale does a marginally better job at threading its needle when it comes to its acknowledgement of race). This is, at its core, an escapist show. The fact it has made musical episodes a regular occurrence rather than a one-off gimmick speaks to that.

But perhaps this is exactly why Betty/Veronica stands out. Veronica and Betty are escaping the daily pressures and expectations of their lives with each other, but this storyline itself doesn’t drip with the same level of escapism as many of the show’s other plot beats this season. It doesn’t feel like mere fanservice, because if it were, then I think it would happen in a faster, louder way. They would have made out one time — in reality rather than fantasy — and that would be that. I think viewer frustration with this storyline could paradoxically mean it’s working well. This isn’t a battle being fought in the shipping wars; it’s a messy and hard-to-define romance blossoming between best friends. It tracks that a queer, romantic dynamic between teen bffs would play out largely in fantasy — in the 1950s, yes, but also even today. In many ways, it’s the current Riverdale storyline that looks most like my actual experiences at a performing arts high school where, yes, preparing for the twice-a-year musicals were always times simmering with latent gay yearning.

Horny Bisexual Betty Is the Best Part of Riverdale’s Final Season So Far

I’m wondering if my interest in understanding sеx is really more about understanding myself. Who I am. I mean, what better way to understand a person than to understand their desires? Including your own. — Betty Cooper

When I planned to do a mid-season drop-in review of Riverdale‘s final season, I imagined it would mostly be a cheeky account of the most ridiculous subplots of the show’s increasingly absurd swan song. I thought this review would mostly be jokes and goofs. Well, joke’s on me! Because Riverdale‘s final season unexpectedly has me thinking a lot about desire and queerness way beyond my usual feelings of just THIS SHOW IS SO HORNY. (This show is, still, so horny.)

Trust, there are plenty of absurd storylines to lovingly mock this season, as with all seasons that come before it. Set in the 1950s following a time-travel-plus-memory-loss supernatural phenomena that sent its central characters not only back in time but back in age, season seven is easily Riverdale‘s campiest and most fantastical season yet — and that’s saying something. But nestled within all the spectacle and surreality and over-the-stop storytelling, there are still little character-level moments that surprise me with their depth and weight. The above quote, for example, is spoken by Betty in a session with the psychiatrist she’s forced to see due to her obsession with sex. What really seems like a natural teenage obsession is pathologized due to her being a young woman in the 50s — but it’s easy to imagine Betty’s inclinations being just as pathologized today, not only due to her being a woman but due to her latent queerness.

In the episode “Betty & Veronica Double Digest” from earlier this season, these sessions between Betty and her psychiatrist — who, of course, is not at all interested in helping Betty understand her sexuality but is instead working in tandem with her mother Alice to repress them — give specificity and verve to Betty’s innermost desires. And they’re queer as fuck. Archie is at the nexus of these desires, but he isn’t the only peer Betty has her sights on. When asked how often she thinks about sex, Betty ponders, and we’re treated to a montage of her walking through school and fantasizing about pretty much everyone she encounters. Archie, sure, but Veronica, too. She watches Veronica button up her shirt in the locker room and then pushes her against the lockers to make out with her. Later, Betty shares she has a recurring fantasy about being a seductive teacher, her friends cast as her pupils. Again, we get to watch this fantasy sequence play in a montage that plays like 1950s-ified porn. It again includes a moment for Betty/Veronica, a longtime ship since the days of the Archie comics.

It’d be easy to label the ways Riverdale has been teasing an amorous connection between Betty/Veronica over the course of the series — and then with renewed vigor in season seven — as “queerbaiting.” But I see that as a vast oversimplification. Sure, we usually get Betty/Veronica moments in brief, titillating bursts. In the show’s pilot, actual canonically queer character Cheryl Blossom — who isn’t out at the time, but who eventually comes out as a lesbian and has an on-and-off relationship with bisexual character Toni Topaz — rather explicitly accuses Betty and Veronica of being straight girls kissing for attention in their cheerleading tryouts. “Betty & Veronica Double Digest” and the episodes that have followed in season seven suggest a more complex arc for Betty and her latent bisexuality, which has perhaps been brewing all along.

Of course Archie is at the forefront of her sexual fantasies; he is the safest option. He’s the all-American boy next door. Literally. From season one to now, Betty has long been the voyeur, watching Archie through her bedroom window. The fact that Betty’s sexual psyche frontloads Archie but still allows room to fantasize about others, including her on-and-off best friend Veronica, speaks volumes to the power of the desires she’s desperate to suppress. It’s like her queerness is so strong that even the safety of desiring Archie can’t squash this part of herself completely. Archie has been put on a pedestal in her mind, but this doesn’t make him the “real” object of her affection; he’s just the easiest one to project obsession onto, an idea I’ll return to.

Sure, the show does have openly queer characters, even in this 1950s timeline, insinuating that if Betty is queer, she could just act on it more explicitly. The way Cheryl does, the way Toni does, the way Kevin does. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all arc when it comes to queerness. And in some ways, I’m more personally drawn to Betty’s storyline in season seven than I have been to any queer storyline on the series that came before. Cheryl represents a queer youth I never had but wish I did. Betty represents the repressed queer youth I did have and, on some level, regret, even if it was out of my control.

Even though Cheryl’s arc has had its fair share of repression and phases where she was fully closeted — including some frustratingly repetitive beats in the 1950s timeline — she has always seemed at least on some level aware of her own queerness on a level Betty just isn’t. In the 1950s timeline, it’s easy for Betty to obscure her sexual fantasies about Veronica with the theory she’s simply “sex-obsessed,” which is what the adults in her life are telling her. Not queer, just horny. That’s an easily internalized stigma for queer folks and especially bi people, who have faced biphobic accusations of “promiscuity” far beyond the 50s.

But Betty isn’t fantasizing about a crop of female peers; these fantasies are pretty fixated on Veronica in particular.

Betty reaches the conclusion in “Betty & Veronica Double Digest” — with no help from her creepy, Lolita-obsessed psychiatrist — that her obsession with sex is really just a desperate quest to be seen and to better understand herself. That Veronica remains mostly on the periphery of Betty’s gaze also feels believable. “Betty & Veronica Double Digest” splits their storylines in two, and they have little to do with each other, Veronica’s scenes far less immersive. We’re not watching a straightforward love story; Veronica is unaware of Betty’s fantasies about her, especially because Betty’s very surface-level obsession with Archie makes her inscrutable even to those close to her.

On that note, in the subsequent episodes “American Graffiti” and “Halloween II”, Betty is mostly fixated on teen boys again. Sitting with Veronica, she openly leers at Archie. In the shoproom where she’s helping Archie and Reggie fix up an old car, she slips into a fantasy daydream about both boys making out with her. There’s a popular narrative that maintains forbidden love is the most potent, but I read Betty’s leering gazes at Archie (and Reggie) as evidence that sometimes it is actually the more socially acceptable forms of romantic obsession that feel the strongest and therefore are the easiest to perform — or vice versa, that are the easiest to perform and therefore feel the strongest. It was so easy for me, as a closeted dyke, to perform being “boy crazy” because it was expected, normal-ish. I do read Betty as bisexual (like her portrayer Lili Reinhart), so her attraction to these boys is realer than mine was, but there’s still something to be said of performance here, of the way she lets herself go further in some fantasies than in others.

It also feels significant that Veronica is right there with her for some of these moments, in closer proximity and therefore theoretically more accessible to Betty as a place to direct her sexual urges, but of course, that would be more of a risk than openly gawking at men’s bodies. Betty tells Veronica about her simultaneous crushes on Archie and Reggie in the season’s retro horror Halloween episode, and even this registers as an act of intimacy given what we’ve seen previously of Betty fantasizing about Veronica.

It might seem odd for me to read so much queer subtext onto a show that brims with queer bold text. Even in this 1950s timeline that has introduced more overt homophobia back into the universe, Kevin has a boyfriend. Toni and Cheryl’s love story has resumed, Cheryl returning to the closet but still finding ways to explore what she knows sits inside her. But I think that’s actually what draws me so much to Betty’s more ambivalent arc; this is not a show that readily grapples with some of the more subtle aspects of sex and sexuality, and yet with Betty, even when her obsession with sex is loud, there are so many quiet layers to it.

Riverdale isn’t just super queer in-universe but also just in the textual sense; this is a show where bisexual chaos reigns supreme and homoerotic visuals and blocking can be seen in just about every episode. So sure, one could argue that surely there’s plenty of space for Betty’s queerness to blossom more fully, for it to not be so relegated to fantasy. But I’m reminded, once again, of my own journey with queerness. I went to a performing arts high school, where there were out teachers and students, where queerness was woven into the very fabric of our environment, and yet where my true self remained invisible to myself and my constant sexual fantasies felt like a sickness. Betty is proof that queerness — and really, any desire that deviates from rigid heteronormative expectations — isn’t always perfectly legible or definable, even in extremely queer contexts and environments. I’m not concerned with rigid distinctions between fantasy and reality when it comes to queer characters, especially as someone who was only queer in my fantasies for so long.

As of the most recent two episodes, Veronica isn’t on the periphery anymore. In “After the Fall,” Veronica and Betty decide to have a never-ending slumber party after their mothers effectively disown them. Alone one night, they sit close on the couch and talk about how they think Kevin and Clay have a great relationship. Veronica says a same-sex relationship sounds easier than a straight one, which, lol. I mean, I’ve had a fair share of women say that exact ridiculous sentiment to me, so while I rolled my eyes, it also was familiar. Betty brings up that she read 81% of girls experiment with other girls before they’re 18, and Veronica discloses she has kissed a girl before, teasing that it’s someone famous. I have no doubts! Veronica, especially in her 1950s iteration, seems like the kind of (mostly) straight girl for whom kissing another girl isn’t much of a risk. Betty confesses she has thought of kissing Veronica, and Veronica doesn’t balk at this, sweetly encourages it. And then the two friends are leaning into each other.

Their almost-kiss is interrupted, a trope that especially plagues queer pairings. And yet, I still don’t see this as “queerbaiting” or a frustrating non-development. It still feels like authentic storytelling for Betty’s arc, and it’s far more interesting than the show just throwing us a Betty/Veronica makeout willy nilly. An almost-kiss still means fantasy is now blurring into reality. An almost-kiss means even when it’s not at the forefront of the episode’s plot, Betty’s still being pulled to Veronica in ways she doesn’t quite understand.

Veronica phones Betty later, and Betty says she had wanted to call her, too. “I love you, Bee,” Veronica says. “I love you too, Vee,” Betty says. Veronica invites Betty to sit with her at the big game the episode hinges on, wants to chat about what they should wear. A surface-level reading of this would be that Veronica is shifting things back into a platonic position, not wanting the almost-kiss to have changed things. But I choose the queerer reading, the messier one, the one in which Veronica and Betty are having this bestie phone call because it’s a safe way to express their nascent queer desire for each other without it going detected — by others or maybe even themselves. It makes me think all the way back to season one when then-closeted Cheryl gives Betty a makeover, an easy way for young girls to be physically close to each other, maybe even touch each other’s lips, without it being “too gay.” Lord knows I cajoled my friends into “playing makeover” persistently in my youth. And this isn’t me reading queerness onto any close interaction between girls who are friends. We’ve already seen Betty’s fantasies! There’s so much foundation this Veronica/Betty phone call sits on. Calling it mere friendship seems laughable to me.

In fact, in last night’s episode, “The Crucible”, Betty awakens to discover her bedroom phone has been removed, cut at the cord, suggesting that even her mother might be picking up on it being a line between Betty and her queer desires. In fact, the entire town of Riverdale finds itself suppressed in the episode, 1950s anti-communist sentiment sweeping the community and leading to harsh restrictions on the arts, education, and how people move through the world. Cheryl’s fascist parents pressure her to corroborate a list of students accused of having “unnatural” sexual proclivities. As a result, Cheryl and Toni enter into lavender marriage-like arrangements with Kevin and Clay so they can all protect themselves. Betty has her typewriter taken away and the student newspaper she runs shut down, so she decides to start an anonymous newsletter called The Teenage Mystique, soliciting letters from fellow teens in which they can ask all the things they feel they cannot ask in other spaces, express their desires and fears on the page. The censorship, book burning, and extreme attempts to control the bodily autonomy of high school students throughout the episode are familiar, of course. And against that familiar anti-LGBTQ backdrop, Betty’s creation of this underground newsletter seems just as much an act of queer resistance as Cheryl’s refusal to out any fellow students.

I won’t speak for others who desire more fully realized queer relationship storytelling, especially when it comes to a show that does indeed play to shipping culture. But I personally don’t need Betty and Veronica to “consummate” their feelings for each other during this final season — sexually or even just in the sense of them “actually dating.” To me, this type of simmering, ambivalent tension between the two of them, especially as it pertains to Betty’s burgeoning bisexuality that she can’t quite seem to grasp, is fully realized storytelling. It appeals precisely because it’s at the margins of Riverdale‘s main storytelling. Teen and young adult queerness so often feels exactly like that.

So keep up the fantasies, Bisexual Betty! They’re easily the best part of Riverdale‘s final season so far.

Riverdale Has New Queer Characters but Is Being Weird About Some of Its Old Ones

“Sex Education” is the horniest episode of Riverdale to date, and that’s a high bar to surpass! I mean, less than three (3) minutes in, and we have Cheryl Blossom scooping the sweet juicy fruit of a papaya — LITERALLY.

The episode truly begs the question: WHY NOT JUST MAKE EVERYONE BISEXUAL YOU COWARDS? Indeed, the entire point of the episode seems to be that any pairing goes. There’s something for fans of Barchie, Bughead, Varchie, Vughead, and all the lovely little heterosexual ships that sound like nicknames for weed strains. The plot is thusly: The teens of Riverdale receive a rather incomplete, school administration-approved sex education lesson and are then sexually awakened by a spoken word and dance performance by Toni Topaz at The Dark Room, the town’s local beatnik hangout, prompting them to have sexy dreams and also a real-life makeout party under the tutelage of makeout maestro Veronica Lodge. As a reminder in case any of that was confusing, the characters are indeed high schoolers again and also are in 1955, because of a magic comet that made them time travel and forget their previous lives.

As a result of this decision to be set in 1955, Cheryl Blossom and Kevin Keller have been re-closeted. It’s a strange and dissatisfactory choice on a lot of levels, but the one that gets me the most is that it’s just kind of boring. Kevin is way more closeted now than he ever was in the previous timeline, and Cheryl’s arc seems to be following more or less the same exact one as before in terms of her closetedness being a direct result of her mother’s homophobia and family’s general bad vibes. It’s just unfolding faster this time. Recloseting these characters doesn’t add any depth to them, and it just seems like the writers think the only compelling conflict a queer character can struggle with is being in the closet.

Of course, it’s easy for Riverdale to just use the 1955 of it all as an excuse for these choices, but that doesn’t hold up, because even the show knows there were indeed queer people in the 50s who acknowledged and acted upon their own queerness even though it was dangerous to do so. Toni Topaz is allowed to live somewhat openly though still covertly as a queer woman, and so is Kevin Keller’s new love interest Clay. Toni and Clay are both Black and because of the ways racism and homophobia can touch would in actuality have less power to express themselves freely than Cheryl and Kevin. So I’m having a hard time accepting historical context as the reason for recloseting Cheryl and Kevin.

On the upside, in addition to Clay, Riverdale has introduced another NEW queer character in Lizzo, a high school dropout who rides a motorcycle and has a flirtatious dynamic with Toni. After Lizzo catches Toni inviting Cheryl to a poetry reading and being promptly rejected, Lizzo teases: “Same old Topaz, always going for the straight-laced, square girls.” We don’t get much Lizzo in the episode, but we see her watching Toni just as intently as literally every character during her performance. It’s possible a Toni/Lizzo/Cheryl love triangle is being set up.

But for now, Cheryl is too entrenched in the closet to be a part of any real love triangle. Thrown off by her obvious attraction to Toni, she doubles down in the other direction and agrees to go on a date with Archie, who has been convinced to ask her out by her twin brother Jason under the orders of their evil mother. When Cheryl realizes it’s her mother behind the Archie setup, she uses it against her, coming home with a giant hickey and insinuating she and Archie had hot, dirty sex to shock and silence her mother. Meanwhile, she breaks down crying, her diabolical Blossom act just that, a performance. Now, all of this could make for an interesting narrative about compulsory heterosexuality, burgeoning queer desire, and the psychic damage homophonic parents wreak on young queer people, but only if this were the first season of a new show introducing us to new characters! I know the characters of Riverdale have had their memories wiped, but we haven’t. We’ve already seen Cheryl struggle to come out, come out, and then struggle in its aftermath. Watching it again with some 1950s aesthetics and contexts slapped on it doesn’t feel fresh.

Veronica’s makeout party specifically only pairs boys with girls, which technically makes sense for a mostly straight group of teens in the 1950s, but this is Riverdale! It picks and chooses when and how it wants to be “logical” and “historically accurate” and “sensical.” A horny makeout party seems like the perfect setting for some lite gay kissing experimentation. I mean, if we’re gonna recloset queer characters, then why not shake up some sexuality details across the board? It has been heavily implied that Betty has bisexual leanings in the regular timeline, but 1950s Betty only cares about the fact that her boyfriend Kevin doesn’t seem interested in her (because he’s gay, Betty!). The only time Clay/Kevin and Cheryl/Toni get to kiss is in a fantasy sequence. In real life, Kevin and Cheryl are still trapped in cover-up hetero relationships and still denying parts of themselves.

All of the characters’ sex dreams melt together into one gooey glob of erotica, which in and of itself feels queer as hell. Cheryl watches as Veronica and Archie make out. A makeout between Cheryl and Archie, I have to admit, is upsettingly hot, perhaps especially because we know it isn’t real at all. The characters’ desires twist and turn, swelter and swell. It’s a fun, indulgent montage that actually goes beyond fan service and is more like sexual chaos, one of the most realistic parts of the episode in terms of the feral nature of teenage sexuality despite being a fantasy sequence. It contrasts well with the real makeout party later, which is full of awkwardness and discomfort, also a believable depiction of teen horniness. But there’s just something missing that holds this ultra sex-obsessed episode of Riverdale back — perhaps because it still feels so confined to certain limitations of sexuality and desire, even as it supposedly mixes pairings up with abandon. I’m stuck on the recloseting of certain characters, especially when others are more liberated. I come to Riverdale to watch the unexpected, the wild. Not to see things I’ve already seen before.

Let’s Check In on Riverdale’s Final Season, Set Inexplicably in the 1950s

Ahhhh, yes, Riverdale. The show I used to recap here at Autostraddle but fell off of — not because I’d grown tired of its increasingly absurd antics but rather because life simply got in the way, and falling behind on Riverdale and then attempting to catch up is a Herculean task. Many people have given up on Riverdale, and I get it. If you came for a teen melodrama initially touted as “like if the Archie comics were horny,” then perhaps you did not wish to stay for increasingly chaotic supernatural horror show featuring alternate timelines, witches, superpowers, ghosts, possessions, cannibalism, and resurrections. I, however, deeply admire Riverdale‘s persistent ability to outdo itself, to literally drop a bomb on its main characters and say: “You know what? Everything you thought you knew is over, time for a new show entirely.” It’s almost like an anthology series but also isn’t, has somehow managed to invent its own constantly mutating format that I can’t even think of a name for. Perhaps future series that attempt such feats will be referred to as Riverdalian.

In any case, Riverdale has now entered its seventh and final season. Before we delve into the specific ways it has managed to reinvent itself for this last chapter, here is a very incomplete but informative list of reminders of things that occurred in season six, just for fun:

• For a five-episode arc, the characters ended up in Rivervale, a pocket universe where several key details about relationships, circumstances, and characters were suddenly new.
  • For example: Everyone developed superpowers! Betty Cooper could suddenly, like a lot of white lesbians in specific parts of Los Angeles claim to do, see people’s auras. Archie had superhuman strength. Veronica could kiss people to death. Cheryl Blossom became a full-on witch with pyrokinetic abilities. Jughead could read minds.
• Reggie sold Veronica’s soul to the devil in exchange for the prosperity of their speakeasy casino Babylonium, but then Veronica reversed the deal and sold Reggie to the devil, and he was promptly dragged to hell.
• Cheryl Blossom was possessed by her ancestor Abigail, also a witch, and sought vengence on the descendants of the townspeople who murdered her.
• Rivervale eventually merged with Riverdale in a process that remains confusing to me but also eventually results in Jughead needing to become a “living battery” for the town of Rivervale by generating new stories on his typewriter in perpetuity so that the pocket universe no longer needs to pull from the main universe — or something.
• Tabitha Tate was determined to be the guardian angel of Riverdale.
• A giant, apocalyptic comet headed to Riverdale, and Cheryl attempted to use her phoenixy powers to melt it, which is what brings us to…

SEASON SEVEN. Following the cataclysmic comet, the characters of Riverdale wake up…in the 1950s. Not only have they time-traveled, but they have also gone backwards in age. Remember that seven-year time jump in season five that brought them all into their mid-twenties? WELL FORGET ABOUT IT. They’re juniors in high school again, and things look and feel a lot like season one — except for the crucial difference of being set in the 50s. The only person who remembers their lives before is Jughead, naturally, because Jughead is always the paradox in these Riverdale situations. There was a whole episode about it, “The Jughead Paradox,” the series’s 100th episode last year.

In yet a new timeline for Riverdale, Betty is dating Kevin Keller, a closeted crooner. Archie has a crush on the new girl Veronica, sent to live here by her famous Hollywood actor parents because she was tangentially involved in the car crash THAT KILLED JAMES DEAN and they want to keep her name out of the papers. But Archie’s got competition in Julian Blossom, also hot for Veronica. He is a new twin for Cheryl Blossom and is different than Jason Blossom, the character whose death began this series oh so long ago. Toni Topaz is a student activist organizing students of color at the newly integrated Riverdale High. Lots of familiar faces return, including Ethel Muggs, Dilton Doiley, and other names that sound like I’m making them up off the top of my head but are real characters on this real show that I love so dearly. It is unclear if anyone has superpowers.

However, some semblance of the supernatural indeed exists, given the time-travel of it all. There are two version of Tabitha, one who belongs to this timeline and one who is the town’s guardian angel, seemingly able to move between timelines and universes. At the end of the season seven premiere, she informs Jughead that the plan to melt the comet did not work, causing an extinction-level event. The only way she could save everyone was to stuff them in this different timeline, but she thinks they’ll eventually, maybe be able to merge back into the original universe and not just restore Riverdale but make it a better place than it was before. But in order to do so, she first needs to wipe Jughead’s memory so that he too does not remember where he came from and thinks he’s just a regular degular dude with a crown in the 1950s.

The season premiere weaves in actual historical events to mixed results, including the aforementioned James Dean detail of Veronica’s new backstory. But more seriously, the episode is set in 1955, shortly after the murder of Emmett Till. Toni returns to Riverdale from Mississippi after having attended the trial, hoping to publish her coverage of it in the student paper the Blue & Gold. (Side note: I remain confused on where Riverdale is set, but I thought it was…New York? Or is it just an everytown that could be plopped anywhere in like the northeast U.S.? It does also sometimes give off Midwest vibes.) Betty is on board to publish, but the school administration shuts her down. So do her parents, who run the local radio station but who fear they’ll lose their top sponsor — Blossom Maple Syrup — if they report on racism. Eventually, Betty and Toni team up to convince Cheryl to read the real Langston Hughes poem “Mississippi—1955” about Emmett Till’s murder.

On the one hand, I’m glad Riverdale isn’t shying away from certain political realities of 1955. I do believe if you’re choosing to set a story in a specific time, it should feel grounded in that time and not overtly romanticize or soften the edges of it — even in the scope of a series that employs fantasy, supernatural, and sci-fi elements. On the other hand, to attempt to address such a serious real piece of violently racist American history in the scope of a campy, absurdist show is, well, an odd move. I don’t feel like the seriousness of it is downplayed per se; it isn’t just a fleeting mention but threaded into an entire central storyline of the episode. But it is, to say the least, much more than Riverdale can chew. Last season’s episode “Angels in America”, which saw Tabitha traveling through time, similarly took on historical events and contexts pertaining to racism in America, and while it was uneven, it worked much better, directly acknowledging that a Black character’s time-travel journey through American history would not be the same as a white character’s. By the end of the season seven premiere, Jughead wonders if he even wants to return to the future; maybe here is better. But of course, it’s easy for him to say that — he’s white and straight. Riverdale does, at least, seem aware of this tension held by its new setting. The 1950s were sock-hopping fun for only a specific group of people.

I’m left wondering why Riverdale chose this particular story as its way of exploring race relations in 1955 since it is not (as far as I’ve ever been able to deduce) set anywhere near Mississippi or the American South. Was it all in service of incorporating the Langston Hughes poem? Is it just because the writers assumed most viewers would be familiar with Emmett Till and the sham trial that acquitted his murderers? I’m left with more questions than answers, which is par for the course with Riverdale, but it’s rather frustrating in this context, because ultimately it also just feels like the show placing Betty and other white characters on a pedestal for being Good White People. I don’t wish for Riverdale to ignore issues of race in its new time period, but it’s hard not to see this plotline as performative rather than meaningful issue-driven storytelling. No one’s necessarily acting out of character. I believe the Coopers and the Blossoms would be on the wrong side of history (and that Cheryl would, slowly, start to push back against her family). Toni’s role as a student activist advocating for students of color at the high school does indeed track with her previous characterization as someone who fought for the Southside Serpents to be treated equally when they joined Riverdale High. But while characters’ motivations are easy to track here, it still feels like we’ve veered into territory Riverdale has difficulty navigating in a cogent way.

Also, in both of the episodes of this season that have aired so far, it’s clear Riverdale has pushed Kevin Keller and Cheryl Blossom right on back into the closet. This is made the most explicit for Kevin, who is very distant with his girlfriend Betty and has eyes for another guy at school. Cheryl, meanwhile, seems to be overcompensating by leaning into puritanical thought and behavior, all the while longing to be able to freely dance with Toni at the sock hop the second episode hinges on. Again, I’m not totally sure what Riverdale is doing here. While it certainly does seem realistic for the time period that Kevin and Cheryl wouldn’t be fully out and proud at school, re-closeting them is frustrating from a viewing experience, because we’ve already done this with them, especially with Cheryl, who seems to not just be closeted to the world but also to herself, which is exactly how things played out the first time around in present day, too! Riverdale shifts the context by applying 1950s-specific homophobia to Cheryl’s arc, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if there were an actual character-based shift? What if Cheryl did know she’s gay and was secretly dating in the 1950s — a dangerous thing to do but still something that did indeed occur. What if Cheryl and Kevin went to an underground gay bar together?! Retelling their coming out stories but strapping them with mid-century homophobia just isn’t all that compelling to watch — at least not yet. I suppose I’d be more upset if they were straight in this new timeline, but this almost feels just as boring as that!

We’re only two episodes in, so I’m hoping that while Riverdale blessedly continues to go off the rails, it at least rights its course in terms of some of these early missteps that take me out of the story too much. A blend of camp and grounded storytelling is welcome, but I think the balance is off at the moment. Making the characters return to high school indeed feels like a fitting “the end is the beginning” premise. Plopping them in the 1950s seems like primarily an aesthetic choice rather than a narrative or thematic one, and that’s fine, especially on a show like this that makes a lot of aesthetic choices and leans into camp. The costumes are indeed magnificent. Time travel is complicated and should thusly be treated as complicated. I’ve always thought that when it comes to time-traveling shows which can sometimes oversimplify history or ignore it completely. But Riverdale isn’t just juggling a lot with this new premise; it’s juggling while trying to do backflips at the same time, and it’s only landing some of them.

I won’t be recapping this final season, but I’ll try to drop in any time there’s a particular queer episode and will also weigh in for the series finale.

Boobs on Your Tube: “Grey’s Anatomy” Wishes Us All a Smoochy Queer Holigay!

Have y’all noticed how many straight people have shown up in our comments these last few weeks? I think I summoned them here on accident by writing about Sex and the City. They keep yelling about “WHO CARES that everyone on this show is gay now!” And, like, obviously you do, Bonnie, or you wouldn’t have taken the time to click through and comment. But thanks for the traffic anyway!

Anyway, basically everyone really is gay on And Just Like That. Also on the recap front this week, Kayla wrote about Yellowjackets and Carmen wrote about the season finale of Twenties. Xoai made a watchlist for trans people who need a smile this holigay season. I wrote about Wheel of Time‘s big canonical gaymos and also reviewed Christmas Is Canceled, in which Mona Vanderwaal dates Dermot Mulroney and there’s a gay BFF.

We also rolled out several end of year lists!

+ Autostraddle’s Favorite and Least Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans TV Characters of 2021

+ Autostraddle’s Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer TV Couples of 2021

+ The Best Lesbian Movies of 2021

+ And, because you asked, Riese made you a list of all these lesbian Christmas movies coming out this year, and the few from years before!

Notes from the TV Team:

+ On Station 19, Maya and Carina did Toys for Tots and also told the firehouse they’re going to be trying for a baby. I was going to write a whole blurb, but look at all of this week’s content! We have a lot to catch up on! — Carmen

+ Last week, on S.W.A.T.‘s midseason finale, Chris Alonso took center stage as the team worked to rescue an undocumented woman, kidnapped by the gangs she thought she’d escaped in Honduras. Chris tries to ease tensions with Mama Pina, a woman providing safe harbor for refugees, and butts heads with Deacon when he gets too accusatory. The entire episode — from the emotional confrontation with Deacon to the physical, close combat fight scenes — put Lina Esco to the test…and she rose to meet the challenge. — Natalie

+ Reminder: this Sunday on TNT, Claws kicks off its fourth and final season. Come for Quiet Ann’s queer storyline, stay for Niecy Nash in her amazing jumpsuits. — Natalie

---

Grey’s Anatomy 1808: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”

Written by Carmen

Dr. Kai Bartley walked their sexy self into Grey’s this season and right away I knew they had the potential to be a Shondaland romance legend. First of all, they have that perfect McDreamy hair (you know the look), they have perfect broad shoulders that makes them almost look gangly and geeky (so, approachable) but also incredibly hot, they nerd out for science (a requirement of Grey’s), and when they talk to Amelia Shepherd, every single effiing time it sounds like velvet.

Ok so now that you have your official primer, let’s talk about how we got here. Dr. Bartley is a research lead on the groundbreaking Parkinson’s trial that has brought Meredith out of Seattle and into Minnesota, on paper so she can save lives, but in reality so she could reunite with my favorite post-Derek love interest, Scott Speedman. Of course Parkinson’s means nerves and as it so happens Meredith knows a once-in-a-generation world class neurosurgeon who shares her cereal in the morning, so she brings Amelia along. And Amelia and Hot Doctor Kai (sorry, that’s their name, I cannot help it) have been flirting over beakers and burners and test tubes ever since.

Also — critical intel if you haven’t been following along in the later years of Season 29 Million of my favorite soap opera. Amelia casually came out as bisexual back in Season 15 while riding in a cab with Teddy. She also told Link, the father of her child, that under no circumstances is she marrying him because he’s very kind and loving but also the idea of domestic life terrifies her, so please stop asking. Hot Doctor Kai, errr Dr. Bartley, is the first reoccurring non-binary character in the show’s history, played by E.R. Fightmaster. Ok so you are caught up —

Dr. Bartley is in Seattle this week because they had to move the Parkinson’s trial out of Minnesota now that Meredith’s love life has been established and set up. Things get hairy and I forgot to mention that the stress of surgery stresses Dr. Bartley out, so that’s why they are a researcher. But Amelia comes outside of the hospital to meet them in the parking lot.

Amelia takes Dr. Bartley through a guided meditation to help calm their anxiety, which is so gay and so hot (it also mirrors their very first hot scene together, when Dr. Bartley offered the same skill set to Amelia over the phone. Is it gay to flirt using therapy? Yes, we established already that it is.) Then Hot Doctor Kai holds Amelia’s face in their hands.

Then the music swells, just like it loves to do on Shondaland.

Then Amelia leans in to their hands, turning her face ever so slightly.

The breath mingles between them. Kai puts their hands around Amelia’s waist, bringing them closer together.

And then they kiss in what has to be, easily, one of the most beautiful, long held, simply epic kisses in the show’s history (which is saying a lot, since it is two gazillion years old).

Whew. I can’t wait for winter break to be over!

---

The Sex Lives of College Girls 109-110: “Cheating” and “The Truth”

Written by Natalie

After excluding Alicia from her brother’s birthday party, Leighton shows up at her apartment to make amends. She apologizes with a grocery store cake and suggests a getaway — an overnight trip to somewhere that they can be themselves — for them both. Alicia agrees and selects a quaint B&B for them…a decision that Leighton promptly nixes to get them into a swanky hotel. Alicia would complain but, once they’re in the room, she notices the bed and realizes that’s all they truly need. They kiss, quickly begin to undress and collapse on the bed. Alicia climbs on top, kisses down Leighton’s body and slides her hand into her pants.

After christening the bed, Alicia and Leighton wrap themselves in the hotel’s robes and try to figure out what to do next. Alicia snaps a selfie and posts it to Instagram but when Leighton spots it (and her expensive YSL purse in the background), she insists that Alicia take the picture down. Alicia’s taken aback by Leighton’s reaction and assures her that she’s being ridiculous. But once Bela likes the photo, Leighton demands that Alicia it down. Alicia acquiesces but the interaction taints the getaway’s entire mood.

“I think we need to end this,” Alicia admits, “I can’t keep dating someone this closeted. I can’t keep sneaking around. I feel like you’re bringing me back in the closet with you, I’ve already been through this…I can’t go backward.”

Leighton wonders where that leaves her; she’s not ready to come out yet. Alicia understands but pushes Leighton to understand what a difficult situation that creates for her. She urges Leighton to come out, recalling what a liberating experience it was for her, but Leighton refuses. She doesn’t want to announce to the world what type of people she sleeps with, nor does she want that to define her. Alicia insists that it doesn’t have to be that way but Leighton is convinced that coming out will effect how she acts, speaks, dresses and the things she does…and she doesn’t want that. She likes herself, Leighton insists, but as Alicia listens, she realizes the gay “cliché” Leighton’s describing is her. Alicia admits she really likes Leighton but draws a line in the sand: that if Leighton can’t be out with her, they can’t be together.

“Then I guess we’re done,” Leighton answers, doing her best to avoid crying in front of Alicia. When she returns to campus, Leighton learns that her brother still hasn’t made things right with her roommate, Kimberly, and she rushes over to tell Nico’s girlfriend that her brother cheated on her. The blowback is immediate: Nico confronts his sister about ratting him out to his girlfriend. He claims Leighton doesn’t understand because she’s never dated anyone seriously. Leighton deflects but, in the wake of her break-up, Nico’s barb stings.

What also stings? Seeing Alicia back on the apps so soon after their break-up but now seeking exclusively “no closeted girls.” Leighton stops by Alicia’s apartment after a party and admits that she misses her. Alicia confesses that she misses Leighton too but she’s unmoved from her position: she wants to move on and thinks Leighton should too.

Alicia’s pronouncement finally cracks Leighton’s tough exterior and she begins to mourn her first real relationship. Kimberly catches Leighton crying in their room and gets her to admit what’s going on. Kimberly’s taken aback by the reveal that Leighton was in a relationship but quickly pivots to being a supportive friend: if this guy’s too stupid to recognize what a catch Leighton is, it’s his loss. Hearing the wrong pronouns come from Kimberly — of all people, given the lies she’s had to endure from Leighton’s brother — pushes Leighton to share her truth.

“It wasn’t a guy, it was a girl. I’m gay,” Leighton admits.

Surprised both by the news and by the fact that Leighton told her, Kimberly tells Leighton that she’s proud of her. But whatever relief Leighton’s supposed to feel by coming out, alludes her and, instead, she breaks down in Kimberly’s arms.

“I don’t want to be like this,” Leighton cries. “Really, it’s terrifying. I don’t want my whole life to change.”

“I get it…coming out seems really scary…but I think the only way you can be happy is if you’re yourself,” Kimberly assures her.

Final Thoughts on TSLOCG‘s first season:

– I highly recommend Reneé Rapp’s interview at Vulture where she talks about the personal impact of showcasing Leighton’s internalized homophobia.
– If you’re looking for something to fill that Bold Type sized hole in your heart, The Sex Lives of College Girls may well fit the bill.
– If you’re hoping that this would be the Mindy Kaling show that finally deals with race in an open and authentic way, this ain’t it. The show did however have black affinity housing so that feels like a small step in the right direction.
– Has there ever been a female character on television that wears blazers and ties as often as Bela who wasn’t gay? Feels like false advertising, TBH.
– Lauren ‘Lolo’ Spencer’s Jocelyn is an absolute scene stealer. More of her in TSLOCG‘s second season, please!

---

Hightown 208: “Houston, We Have a Problem”

Written by Natalie

Jackie wakes up to Daisy’s cat staring at her, as if it’s plotting her murder or saying, “find out what happened to my human”…I’m not sure which. Ray questions whether the previous night’s rants were the byproduct of her drunkenness but Jackie assures him that she was telling the truth: Daisy is dead. She plans to tell Alan and get homicide on the case. Ray encourages her to do some more investigating to confirm her hunch. But first, he advises, maybe she should go to a meeting.

“Meetings don’t help me, doing my job helps me,” Jackie answers, dismissing Rayn’s suggestion outright. She meets Donna between classes at the local community college and asks if she’s seen Daisy at Xavier’s. Donna can’t recall seeing Daisy or Jorge since before Thanksgiving. With one confirmation, Jackie goes out to seek another: she approaches Daisy’s daughter, Valentina, about the last time she talked to her mother. Valentina confirms that she last heard from her mom last Tuesday, despite a promise to join the family for Thanksgiving. Despite being certain that her hutch about Daisy is right, she lies to the little girl and assures her that her mom will be back soon.

Jackie heads back to Ray’s to share the news about Daisy’s fate. She’s completely undone by the confirmation (and withdrawal) and Ray offers up a solution: finally taking down Frankie Cuevas. He shares the info he got from Renee — Frankie’s fiancée who destroyed Ray’s life in the first season — about Charmaine’s upcoming trip to New York to bring back carfentanyl. Jackie promises to act on the intel if she gets to talk to Renee about Daisy after the operation is over. Ray acquiesces but stops Jackie from taking his intel to Alan, knowing the Sergeant will see his fingerprints all over it. Jackie goes to Leslie instead and though, she also sees Ray’s fingerprints all over his intel, she relents and invites Jackie inside to plan their stakeout.

The next day, while they’re waiting for Charmaine’s flight, Jackie offers Leslie a surprising apology for being “too spun out.” She admits that Leslie became a substitute for her other addictions but assures her that she’s fine now. Leslie accepts the apology and the pair settle in to await a plane that never comes. Frustrated and embarrassed by the tip that never materializes, Leslie drops Jackie off in a huff and promises to talk about Daisy tomorrow at the office. Jackie takes her frustration out on Ray, who insists that Renee didn’t know Frankie wasn’t going show up. Jackie insists on talking to Renee who, ultimately, has nothing to offer, and afterwards, realizes that Ray set her up. She pushes him for an explanation and Ray admits that he’s worked out a deal with the brass to get his job back if he can get Frankie and his NY connect for the State Police.

“You know, I always knew you were an asshole. Just never thought you’d be an asshole to me,” Jackie laments before taking Daisy’s cat (in perhaps the funniest scene ever on Hightown) and leaving.

But Jackie’s not done making bad decisions today: she shows up at Alan’s house and tells him that Daisy’s dead and she needs his help. He reminds her that the time to come to him for help is before she launches investigations behind his back. Alan (rightly) chews Jackie out for adopting Ray’s bad habits, even while admitting that she has the potential to be a good cop. Chastened, Jackie drives back to her apartment and who would be waiting for Frankie Cuevas and his muscle. He tries to intimidate her but Jackie’s landlord interrupts and lets Frankie know they’ll see each other soon.

---

All American 407: “Prom Night”

Written by Natalie

It’s prom season at Beverly and South Crenshaw and all our favorite couples are getting ready for the big night. Coop’s extra excited about prom: she’s got Patience’s corsage all picked out, the bubbly chilling in the refrigerator and plans set for the afterparty. But, as has been the case so often this season, just as Patience and Coop are devoting some time to their relationship, Amina interrupts and distracts Coop from the pre-prom preparations. Amina is having a “OMG themed Princess tea party” and she needs Coop to save it from her hapless dad. Because if there’s anything that Tamia “Coop” Cooper would know a lot about, it’s princess tea parties.

Patience gives her the okay to Coop to skip their nail appointment but makes her promise not to be late. But not only is she late, Coop changes the location of their prom prep to Preach’s house so she, Patience and Amina can all become princesses together. But as Amina and Patience are working on their makeup, the young girl reflects on the time she spent with her mother. She tells Patience that she misses her mom a lot — “she wasn’t perfect, but she was my mom” — and Patience notes that no one is perfect but we love the people we love anyway. She puts a tiara on Amina’s head and later, they step out, completely done and ready for their respective parties.

Once they get to the prom, Coop and Patience dance and spend time with their friends but, as hot as they look together, it feels the like the warmth between the two is gone. When they’re crowned Prom Queens, neither of them offer any warm words for the other, nor are they affectionate. Maybe they should just stop going to dances, things never go well for them. During the prom, Coop gets text from Preach, documenting Amina’s successsful tea party.

“Patience said Auntie Coop will do anything for the people she loves,” Amina tells her father, after her friends leave. “That’s why I don’t get it…if she loves me, then why’d she kill my mom?”

Guess the secret’s out…so much for Amina being just fine.

---

4400 108: “The Kaminski Experiment”

Written by Shelli Nicole

Bill Greene and the government wants to have some of the 4400 go on television to show the world how “normal” they are. They want Shanice, her ex-husband Logan (I think…they need to get that settled lowkey), his new wife, Mariah, and Hayden to go on and pretend to be a happy blended family. They also want a surprise 4400-er to come on that no one has met, and of course our resident smooth-talker, Isaiah. The surprise person is one of the 4400 they have been testing on who has the power to create fire. This is obviously a trap — the government wants him to go on air, get mad and show his power. It would scare the public and trigger the conservatorship papers that some of them signed, giving them just cause to control the 4400 under the guise of keeping everyone safe.

Well — filming goes horribly wrong. While Shanice & Co. are downstairs faking it on TV, Bill is upstairs in his office watching. He’s confused as to why his surprise guest hasn’t made an appearance yet and then guess who breaks into his office? MILDRED! She is back and upset. She uses her powers to throw him around the room until he agrees to free the folks he is testing on — which includes her sister Millicent who we literally have heard nothing of until now. She throws him out the window and everything is caught on camera, and just as Mildred is about to kill him by using her powers to drop a vase on his head, Isaiah runs in and stops her by tackling her.

She tries to use her powers to hurt Isaiah but — they are suddenly gone. Isaiah tells her to run so the government doesn’t catch her, but, is this his power starting to surface?

Anyway, Doc wasn’t at or watching the event because he was setting up the abandoned bar to reflect 1920’s Harlem as a surprise date for Shanice (who…doesn’t deserve him but whatever). Earlier he was confused about where they stood (“Is this what dating is in 2021 — no declarations, just vibes?” is the cute Doc question of the week btw), but she just storms in and tells him what happened. She thinks the conservatorships are about to be triggered and Doc signed one so this impacts him. He’s scared but says he wants to worry about all that tomorrow, but for now — he just wants to dance with her.

Also, Also, Keisha was at a grief group telling all her business about breaking up with her GF and fucking Soraya. Like, ma’am, this is an Arbys….

---

Riverdale 605: “The Jughead Paradox”

Written by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Sometimes, you become aware you’re living in a parallel universe to a prime universe and you also learn that both universes are at the risk of expanding to the point of collapsing (I was terrible at astronomy in college, but this sounds like reasonable science to me!) so you have to destroy your pocket universe in order to save the main one, but then you realize actually no both universes can continue to exist in harmony with each other if you just find a power source stable and strong enough to fuel both! You know?

And thus ends the five-episode Rivervale experiment, a truly bonkers and delightful chapter of Riverdale. “The Jughead Paradox” is the story’s conclusion and also the 100th episode of the series overall. Here, Riverdale writes its own internal logic for why Jughead is the show’s narrator. As omniscient narrator and a character, he both exists inside and outside of the show’s narrative. It also does the thing I think all 100th episodes should do: catering to fans’ nostalgia via a slew of flashbacks and callbacks!!!!!

Everyone in Rivervale wakes up from shared nightmares they had: Toni and Fangs dreamed of Toni becoming La Llorona. Betty and Archie dreamed of Archie’s Yellowjacketsy blood sacrifice. Reggie and Veronica dreamed of Veronica sending Reggie to hell. And Cheryl and Nana Rose dreamed a triple-timeline lesbian witches love curse body swap tale. So, even within the parallel universe of Rivervale, these stories are…just dreams I guess?

Jughead becomes aware he’s in a parallel universe when walking casually down the halls of Riverdale and seeing people and things who shouldn’t be there. He sees the past high school versions of his friends. And he even sees dead people. In Rivervale, Ethel, Dilton, and even Jason Blossom are all very alive, even though they were killed off in the prime universe. Jughead also encounters…his own dead self. The lines between Rivervale and Riverdale continue to blur when he finds a stack of comics depicting the exact events of Riverdale (the first 95 issues of the comics aka the first 95 episodes of the show), the exact events of Rivervale (comic issues 96 through 100 aka these most recent five episodes), and the exact events of what he’s doing right now…looking at a comic of a comic of a comic of a comic etc. THE VERY SEAMS OF REALITY HAVE COLLAPSED!!!!

Remember in season one when Reggie was played by Ross Butler but then was replaced by Charles Melton due to filming conflicts? Well, Ross Butler shows up here, and there are suddenly TWO REGGIES who try to battle it out to see who is the one true Reggie, which seems very silly, because Veronica’s idea of them just becoming a throuple sounds so much more fun and hot and they should really take her up on that!

P.S. In Rivervale, people don’t stay dead. So even though Cheryl, the Reggies, Jughead, and many other characters “die” in this episode, they all come back. The person who keeps killing people? ARCHIE. He’s this parallel universe’s Big Bad, because he’s doing a bunch of serial kills in hopes that no one will catch onto the fact it’s a parallel universe because he wants Rivervale to keep existing because he thinks it means his dad might come back from the dead one day.

That power source I mentioned before that would be the key to the ongoing existence of both the Riverdale and Rivervale universes? JUGHEAD’S WRITING. Imagination/creation as the opposite of destruction is the only way to keep both worlds going, so Rivervale!Jughead is locked in a bunker indefinitely so he can click-clack at his typewriter and make up his silly little stories, effectively generating enough idk creative juice? to keep both universes afloat.

Which I think…technically leaves the door open for Rivervale and its more fantastical in-world rules to come back anytime, so the Riverdale writers now have that in their back pocket. But I’m mentally struggling with this: Did the events of the past four episodes actually happen/have stakes and consequences in-world for the characters of Rivervale or…were those just dreams the Rivervale versions of these characters had? Because it seems like the latter but if that’s the case…what exactly makes Rivervale the supposedly darker, more twisted, warped version of Riverdale????? I mean I guess magic does exist in-world because dead people are reanimating and whatnot, but why make those four stories dreams if strange things are possible in this parallel universe? AM I OVERTHINKING THINGS? ALSO IS IT JUST ME OR WAS RIVERVALE!BETTY A LITTLE RUDE TO DR. CURDLE? ALSO, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, IF THIS WAS A PARALLEL UNIVERSE WHY NOT MAKE THEM ALL GAY?

---

Nancy Drew 309: “The Voices in the Frost”

Written by Valerie Anne

This week in Horseshoe bay, Bess is feeling a little wigged out by Temperance stealing her daughter’s face, and is starting to worry that her magic tutor is a bit of a sociopath.

But they don’t really have time to deal with Temperance this week, because Eve has a problem: she’s the main suspect in her boyfriend’s death, but she has no memories of the incident.

Bess doesn’t trust Eve and thinks she’s guilty, but then the Drew Crew realizes that Eve could be having blackouts for the same reason George used to have blackouts. So they set off to find out if Eve is possessed, when they find her in the water. Nick saves her life but when she comes to, she has no idea how she even got outside, let alone in the water.

Nancy does what she does best and sleuths out the truth, and they realize that Eve’s boyfriend’s death was purely an accident, and Eve’s blackouts are trauma responses from the incident that landed Nick in juvie.

Bess apologizes to Eve, and explains that she has a bit of a trust problem, and she didn’t mean to take it out on Eve.

Also this week: George and Nick decide not to get married so they can keep growing side by side instead of becoming codependent vines, Nancy has an idea about how to find the rest of Charity’s soul shards, Bess learns the truth about Temperance, and Ace lands himself on a ghost plane with Historical Society Hannah, who happens to be Nancy’s phantom knocker.

---

Legacies 409: “I Can’t Be The One To Stop You”

Written by Valerie Anne

This episode was ACTION PACKED so I’m going to leave out a lot of the stuff about the mummified monster-maker who turned out to be a hunky boi and dive right into what our girls were up to.

Hope is stalking around in Aurora’s body, terrified Aurora is hot on her heels, but the truth is Aurora took Hope’s body out to brunch, and is just hanging out with a glass of afternoon wine. Lizzie interrupts and threatens her with the red oak stake until Aurora proves she’s not Hope by missing with Hope’s favorite cantrip spell.

Aurora tells Lizzie who she is, and how Klaus Cask of Amontillado’d her, and takes Lizzie to her basement. Aurora’s idea for stopping hope is less stake-y and more ancient sarcophagus in the ocean but that seems a little dark, even to Lizzie. She sees a potential version of herself reflected in Aurora’s wild eyes and realizes she’s gone too far.

At school, Josie packs a bag and worries about telling Lizzie and Finch about her plan to leave. When she does eventually tell Finch, she’s mad until Josie reveals she bought a ticket for Finch too. She has to go save Hope, away from the pressures and distractions of the Super Squad, and Finch agrees to go with.

Lizzie traps Aurora in the sarcophagus and calls Hope, who shows up lickety split. When it comes down to it, Lizzie can’t kill Hope. As much as she hates to admit it, when she looks at the tribrid before her, she sees family.

Lizzie throws down the stake and Hope smiles at Lizzie and says her humanity is back, so they use the trident to switch Hope and Aurora’s bodies back, Hope saying “panda promise” to prove it’s her. And then Hope reveals that her humanity is NOT on, and burns the stake. Lizzie is SO sure Hope won’t kill her, because she’s had the chance before and spared her friends, but Hope proves her wrong by snapping her neck.

At the bus stop, Josie feels like something is off, not realizing it’s her twintuition. Finch knows Josie has to go, because there will always be another monster to distract her, but Finch also knows now that she has to stay. She has to be alpha to the pack while Jed is injured, and honestly she loves being part of a community who needs her. So they tearfully kiss goodbye as the bus pulls up.

On the bus, Josie gets a vision of Lizzie telling her how much she loves her and that no matter what happens she has to remember that. She says they both have to follow their own plans and see them through, and Josie agrees.

In Aurora’s basement, Lizzie snaps back to life. Hope is surprised, because Lizzie isn’t dead…just hungry. And I am down for this turn of events, especially if it’s a Merge loophole!

Lesbians! Witchcraft! Murder! Milkshakes! It’s Time for the Riverdale/Sabrina Crossover Event

Part four of Riverdale’s five-part television event — otherwise known as Rivervale and furthermore also known as the best fever dream I’ve ever had — arrives like a comet this week. A celestial event blurring the lines between reality and magic. Something to be watched with wide eyes and a dropped jaw. The night sky and Riverdale — two ever-expanding presences full of secrets and wonders. And that’s especially true for this Rivervale series-within-the-series, which pushes the show’s world into strange and topsy-turvy lands. This Riverdale/Sabrina crossover gay extravaganza truly has it all: axe-murder, witchcraft, romance, body swaps, and cosmic phenomenon. And gay kissing! Lots of gay kissing!

If I were to describe “The Witching Hour(s)” in just ten words, they would be this: Gay witches do murders in three different, interconnected timelines — HOT. More specifically, Jughead in his Rod Serling drag sets up the premise at the top, as he has done for all of these Rivervale tales: “The Witching Hour(s)” features three Blossom women, their stories echoing through time. There’s Abigail Blossom of 1892, headmistress of the Thornhill Academy For Girls, a finishing school. There’s Poppy — full name POPPY SEED BLOSSOM — of 1957, a purveyor of herbal potions for the town’s housewives, who she also has over to weekly salons where they discuss topics like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, naturally. And there’s the Cheryl Blossom we know, chaotic queer teen turned chaotic queer adult, who also runs a school for girls of sorts, though I’m not totally sure what exactly it’s a school for. Archery and witchy hijinks? Also, all three of these Blossom women are queer. Mainly because…they’re the same person? More on that later!

I’m a sucker for multi-timeline narratives (as evidenced by my Yellowjackets obsession), and Rivervale pulls out all the stops here in terms of over-the-top wardrobe, set dressing, and aesthetics for each of the three. It’s a triple-layered period piece, really. Because even “present day” Riverdale is ambivalent about its time period (and that has been especially true of the Rivervale episodes, which are folklorish in scope and design, further blurring notions like time and geography). In fact, in the lovely opening sequence that bounces between Blossoms, it took me a second to differentiate Abigail/Poppy/Cheryl, but the hair turned out to be the key (half-up curls for Abigail; a long bob with bangs for Poppy, and the usual soft waves for Cheryl).

The three interwoven tales begin at 8 a.m. on the morning of the day Bailey’s comet is set to pass over town. We watch as Abigail/Poppy/Cheryl ready themselves before their vanities, and assuming their morning routines take about an hour, that means Poppy Blossom’s boozy salon starts at, like, NINE IN THE MORNING? I suppose it was the 50s!

In the present, Cheryl reads Poppy and Abigail’s stories to Nana Rose, who is on her deathbed. Apparently, this is part of some spell. Because yes, this episode officially does establish Cheryl Blossom is a witch, a sentiment that’s presented as if we surely already knew this, and you know what? Even though it has textually been vague, of course I knew this. Even back in season one before magic descended upon Riverdale, I took one look at Cheryl Blossom and said…that’s a witch.

Let’s go through each of their stories then, shall we? In 1892, Abigail is visited by a mysterious and alluring stranger named Thomasina Topaz, played by Vanessa Morgan and presumably an ancestor of Toni. Thomasina is seeking a teaching job at Abigail’s school and also wants to shake things up by teaching the girls about science and other things beyond etiquette. Abigail asks Thomasina if she is married, and Thomasina offers a hesitant no. “Good,” Abigail replies. “I have no need for women with husbands.”

Abigail and Thomasina briefly skirmish over Thomasina’s forward-thinking philosophy about educating the girls, but Abigail rolls over easily, visiting Thomasina who’s casually stargazing through a telescope in the parlor of Thornhill. Astronomy is, in and of itself, gay. And the fact that Thomasina says in a previous episode “a comet is like a poem” ???? Incredible. Abigail tells her she’s right, which is in fact the best form of foreplay. They share my favorite kind of on-screen kiss, which is just a quick peck, a pull back to look deeply into each other eyes, and then going back in for a full-on makeout. The kiss-stare-kiss maneuver! Love it!

Thomasina isn’t technically lying about her marriage. She indeed has no husband. Because she has murdered him. Constable Keller (ancestor of Kevin) comes a-knocking, interrupting Abigail and Thomasina’s post-coitail bliss. He is in search of a MURDERESS (yes, the actual word used) by the name of Thomasina Topaz. Riverdale’s version of u-hauling is when a lesbian starts dating someone and then IMMEDIATELY harbors them as a fugitive no questions asked. That’s exactly what happens here, Abigail faking smallpox to get the constable to leave them alone.

Abigail asks Thomasina for the truth, and it goes like this: Thomasina had an arranged marriage with a cruel man who controlled and abused her, and one day she realized if she didn’t kill him first, he’d kill her. So she murdered the bad man and skipped town, seeking refuge on the steps of Thornhill. “Stay here. Stay with me. Forever,” Abigail says, a very chill and normal thing to say to a woman you’ve been romantically involved with for three seconds.

But this is, as all the other Rivervale chapters have been, a horror story. A horror story brimming with romance and camp but a horror story nonetheless. So something bad must happen. And it does. Fen Fogarty (ancestor of Fangs) shows up to inform Abigail her beloved brother has died at battle. He presents a letter supposedly from her brother stating that his dying wish is for her to marry Fen. Um! Thomasina is like this sounds weird! And indeed, Thomasina and Abigail go snooping and find lots of evidence of forgery as well as occult objects as well as a stack of death portraits, which include Abigail’s brother. “Fen Fogarty is not just a scoundrel. He’s a warlock,” Thomasina observes.

They’re interrupted by the monster himself, wielding an ax that he uses to threaten Thomasina’s life (he calls her a “saucy sapphic witch,” which like, the t-shirts make themselves!) and pressure Abigail into marrying him. DUN DUN DUNNNN.

Over in 1957, Poppy Seed Blossom is just chilling, throwing salons, giving potions to her housewife friends. Velma (1950s-ified Veronica) is bored with vanilla sex with her husband. Poppy’s got a potion for that! Tammy (1950s-ified Tabitha) wants to work the register at Pop’s, but her husband won’t let her. Poppy’s got a potion for that! Bitsy (1950s-ified Betty) wants to leave her marriage to Jack (1950s-ified Jughead), who’s pressuring her to have another child even though her first pregnancy was traumatic. Bitsy’s got a potion for that, too, offering Bitsy birth control but also…a KISS.

We’re all thinking it, right? ARE Bitsy and Poppy cousins? Some liberties are taken when it comes to the whole lineage thing in the sense that both Mädchen Amick and Lili Reinhart appear in these 50s scenes and are seemingly playing contemporaries rather than mother-daughter. Also, the eventual conclusion that Poppy is actually Abigail (again, more on that later!) suggests that even if they are related, it is extremely distant.

But I digress. Jack and Bitsy show up on Poppy’s doorstep, and Jack makes Bitsy tell her she was wrong and that she’s actually quite happy in her marriage and definitely does want to have another child with Jack. It’s very upsetting! Free Bitsy! Jack takes things even further and tells Poppy if she ever interferes with his marriage again, he’ll kill her. He rallies the rest of the men in town, and they all show up on her doorstep to tell her to stop talking to their wives, essentially. But Poppy Blossom will not be told what to do!!!!!!! Unfortunately, Kirk Keller (another one of Kevin’s cop ass ancestors) seizes the opportunity to accuse Poppy of communist sympathizing, seizing Thornhill and locking her up in the single-cell jail in town…indefinitely? Bitsy visits her in a very devastating scene where she reveals she is indeed pregnant and then, brainwashed by Jack, turns on Poppy. “You don’t know anything about me,” she says to Poppy, and it’s like a knife, because if anything, Poppy is the only person who really knows Bitsy and sees her.

At last, the night of the comet. Abigail marries Fen in a red dress and veil. Jack shows up at Poppy’s cell and begs her to help Bitsy, who has gone into labor, is having a complicated delivery, and has insisted the only person who can help is Poppy. If she helps, Jack promises to free her from this cell. Poppy goes to the hospital and delivers Bitsy’s baby, the comet throwing red light over them. But when Jack and Kirk come back, they tell Poppy she might not be going back to her cell but that she’s now on indefinite house arrest, doomed to haunt the halls of Thornhill. Bitsy waits a smooth year and then uses poison — Poppy’s last gift to her — to murder her asshole husband.

Meanwhile, Abigail ax-murders Fen, Borden-style (and in fact outright asks Fen if he has heard of Lizzie Borden mere seconds before hacking him up in bed). When she goes to Thomasina to tell her the good news, she finds a corpse and a death portrait. Fen already killed her. And in another final act of cruelty, he staggers into the room, bleeding out but still slightly alive, using his dying breaths to cast a curse on Abigail. He dooms her to immortality: “May you remain unloved and alone for all your miserable days.”

Cut to the present when a doorbell interrupts storytime with Cheryl and Nana Rose. Ding dong the witch is here! Sabrina Spellman shows up for the final minutes of the episode. “Youknow I’d do anything to help a fellow witch,” she says, hugging Cheryl and also informing us that their covens play in the same SOFTBALL LEAGUE? I’m going to need an entire episode about that (or, at the very least, a 10+ chapter fic). They then perform the ritual the entire episode has been leading up to: a transference spell.

You see, Cheryl Blossom is not actually Cheryl Blossom. She is Abigail Blossom, whose immortality forced her to construct new identities through the years. Earlier in the episode, the scene of Thomasina and Abigail’s first kiss cuts to Poppy zoning out with a little smile on her face while talking to Velma, almost as if she were remembering the kiss herself. BECAUSE SHE WAS. Poppy is Abigail and Cheryl is Abigail, and their curse is finally broken with Sabrina’s help, Abigail’s soul going into Nana Rose’s so she can die and join Thomasina in the afterlife, a reunion we indeed get to see when the two lovebirds frolic in a graveyard together. Which also means…Nana Rose’s soul has entered the body formerly known as Cheryl Blossom?

“Happy-sad endings are the best,” Sabrina says. And I’m like wow, true. But also like…wait what just happened?

Surely this isn’t retconning all of Riverdale. Rivervale has its own internal logic that exists outside of the main show’s (often paradoxical) internal logic…………right? Wrong! Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has been very adamant about the fact that everything that happens in Rivervale is canon. There will be consequences in the main universe. And you know what? Yes. Cheryl Blossom is a witch across time. This I believe whole heartedly. And since Thomasina is also established as a witch, I choose to believe Toni Topaz is a bisexual witch legend in the main story as well. It also means the softball league for witches is CANON.

Besides, this isn’t the first time Cheryl has suggested she might be cursed and, specifically, love-cursed. She says as much, over and over, on regular-style Riverdale. Perhaps other people will have different interpretations, but I actually find the narrative in “The Witching Hour(s)” to be an interesting play on/challenging of a queerness-as-curse trope. Because, really, the character’s queerness is not at all the source of horror or what the curse is rooted in. She was queer long before she was cursed. The curse was placed on her by a vengeful man, and even despite it, she found ways to access queer love even while cursed. She was told she would live life unloved, but haven’t we seen otherwise? Cheryl and Toni might not be together in the present, but they did, at one point, love each other. The ability to subvert a powerful curse in the name of love? Baby, that’s gay!

All in all, the episode views like fanfiction fantasy brought to life tbh. And I think it works as a standalone story as well as fitting into the larger arc of Rivervale, this strange and imo successful experiment Riverdale‘s been running that boils the show’s most basic themes down into little horror-fantasy mythologies. The experiment concludes next week with “The Jughead Paradox,” the series’ 100th episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYJLfWCMYV0

Boobs on Your Tube: Ryan Wilder and Alex Danvers, Together at Last!

We had our December TV Editorial Team meeting this morning, and y’all are not ready for the ten million lesbian Christmas movies coming our way. We couldn’t even keep the titles straight (lol). Heather actually wrote about one of them already this week: Hallmark’s An Unexpected Christmas! And so buckle up your reindeer ’cause there’s an avalanche more coming next week. Also maybe next year? Aubrey Plaza says there’s gonna be a Happiest Season 2.

Until then: Carmen reviewed the new season of Saved By The Bell, which has landed on Peacock and given us an Afro-Latina love story straight out of the Zack and Kelly playbook. Carmen also recapped the newest episode of Twenties! Kayla recapped an all-new Yellowjackets, the queer show that’s got everybody buzzin’. And Riese let us know what’s new and gay and streaming this month.

Notes from the TV Team:

+ Wildmoore. That’s all. — Heather

+ I’m sorry y’all, I know I owe you Home Economics and Queens updates! I’ve been doing more full length tv and film writing the last few weeks and it’s been taking time. But I’ll be back soon! Can’t wait to see what the lesbians are up to! — Carmen

+ Last season on The Equalizer, Queen Latifah Robyn’s Aunt Vi decided to try her luck on a dating app. When it came to choose the gender of prospective suitors, she scoffed at the thought of limiting herself to men: “why limit it?” she asked. It was a throwaway line and I nearly forgot about it, until this week, when a past love of Vi’s re-emerges (sort of). Her ex’s daughter tracks her down based on a portrait Vi drew when they were in college. Vi resists at first but eventually agrees to meet with a love that she thought time had forgotten. — Natalie

---

Hightown 206: “Behind Every Skirt is a Slip”

Written by Natalie

For a minute, it looked like Jackie Quiñones had finally found happiness: she had a job that gave her purpose, one that she was actually good at. She had a girlfriend (sort of), a supportive chosen family and, most importantly, her sobriety. But over the last few episodes, that’s all unraveled: her informant is dead, her girlfriend has ghosted her and she’s grossly offended her Ed, the head of her chosen family. All she has left is her sobriety and Jackie spends all of “Behind Every Skirt” trying to hold on.

Jackie heads into work, more interested in finally talking to Leslie than doing any actual work, but when she finally crosses paths with her partner in the office kitchen, Leslie refuses to have the conversation. Jackie pushes — “wait, we can fuck at work but we can’t talk at work?” — but Leslie stands firm: she won’t allow anyone else in the office to witness dissension between them. Even though she doesn’t allow Jackie to have her say, Leslie makes her position clear: they were supposed to be nothing serious but Jackie took things too far, too fast. To put some distance between them, Leslie insists that Jackie take a sick day.

Heartbroken, Jackie tries to find some comfort. She goes to Ray first but between his disdain for Leslie — he told Jackie to stay away from her — and his rekindled affair with the woman who ruined his life, he doesn’t have time for her. She reaches out to Ed to apologize for lashing out at him following their stakeout. He accepts her apology — he acknowledges that some of what she said was true — but the damage has been done: Jackie no longer has a seat at his table for Thanksgiving. Jackie retreats to an AA meeting for some comfort but finds no solace there. She storms out and heads straight to a bar…a bar in which her ex-girlfriend, Devon, happens to be having a drink.

Unable to find any comfort for her pain, Jackie aims to sate it by pressing against a familiar body. After years of dealing with Jackie’s fuckboi shit, though, Devon is impervious to Jackie’s charms. Thankfully, though, Devon’s friend, Riyah, is more than willing to take her place. The hook-up does not go well — at least not for Jackie, Riyah at least gets an orgasm out of it — and Jackie abruptly ousts Riyah from her bed. Left to her own devices, Jackie still can’t find relief. After an unhelpful visit from Ray, Jackie decides to finish that conversation with Leslie. The interaction is painful and realistic: Jackie’s utterly heartbroken while Leslie is cold and detached. She chalks their entire dalliance up to just having fun but Jackie insists there was more to their relationship. The text, Jackie says, scared Leslie because it made her realize that she had feelings for Jackie.

Leslie: When you told me you loved me, I realized I wasn’t being fair to you because I don’t feel the same way. Because I’m straight, which I told you from the beginning.
Jackie: So, when you were eating my pussy, that was you being straight?

(I was not expecting the jolt of euphoria I got from hearing Jackie say that.)

Leslie dismisses Jackie and she ends up at the one place that won’t turn her away: her parents’ home. Unfortunately, her mother’s not there, but her fuckboi father invites her in for a beer. There goes Jackie’s sobriety.

---

The Sex Lives of College Girls 103-105: “Le Tuteur,” “Kappa” and “That Comment Tho”

Written by Natalie

Feeling suffocated by the pressure of maintaining a façade, Leighton decided to booze it up on the Essex College grounds and, of course, she gets caught. She tries to buy her way out of a punishment but the University President insists she take some responsibility: he sentences her to 100 hours of community service at the women’s center. Leighton goes, begrudgingly, and tries to set the terms of her service but the center’s volunteer coordinator, Alicia, won’t be budge. She insists that Leighton show up when they need help and chastises her for mocking the center’s work. It’s enough to send Leighton rushing back to the President’s office to offer a larger donation in lieu of her community service hours. For me, though, the confrontation got my hopes up about one of my personal favorite tropes: enemies to lovers!

Unable to bribe her way out of community service, Leighton returns to the women’s center for poetry night. It is, predictably, bad but Leighton keeps herself entertained by pilfering the center’s wine and snacks. Alicia reminds Leighton that she’s at the women’s center to actually work and won’t be given credit for her hours. Later, as they’re cleaning up, Leighton urges Alicia to take things a little less seriously. She justifies her mid-show laughter by pointing out that the performers were actually terrible. Alicia admits that she’s right but encourages her to mock people behind their backs like a normal human being. Leighton promises to be less of a “dumb cis bitch.”

Days later, Leighton finally gets the envelope she’s been (seemingly) waiting her whole life for: an invitation to the Kappas’ pre-rush brunch. But she’s not the only member of the suite to get one: Whitney, the freshman phenom soccer player who’s secretly hooking up with her assistant coach, also scores an invite. At the brunch, Whitney struggles to find her footing amongst a sea of Ashleys/Ashleighs/Ashlees while Leighton tries to ingratiate herself to the Kappas by showcasing her encyclopedic knowledge about each and every one of them. It feels kinda stalkerish, honestly, but the Kappa president — Quinn, AKA Future Leighton — offers her a slight reprieve. During their solo conversation, Quinn lets her know that Cory, Nico’s fraternity brother, is interested in her. Leighton knew that already, though, and has been trying to avoid his advances whenever they cross paths. But when Quinn tries to push them both together, Leighton can’t say no. After a shift at the women’s center, Leighton meets up with Cory who is, admittedly, taken aback by her about face. She apologizes for her behavior and tells Cory that she likes him. She kisses him and, despite her assurances to Alicia, actually does sleep with Cory on the first date.

But later, when Leighton spots Cory at the biggest Theta party of the year, she goes out of her way to avoid him. She spends time with her roommates — helping Bela make sense of her predatory editor’s actions — and playing hostess for her friends from the women’s center. Much to the chagrin of her brother, Leighton invites Alicia and Ginger to the Thetalympics, in hopes that they might see that fraternity’s aren’t the misogynistic nightmares they’ve been protesting against. For a while, it looks like Leighton’s plan might actually work — Alicia develops an easy rapport with Nico and they spend the evening doing keg stands and beer curling together — but when a drunken frat bro insults Alicia, things go awry. Alicia stands up for herself but Leighton pulls her away from the fight. Alicia questions whose side Leighton is actually on and storms out. Leighton follows close behind, explaining that she was only trying to keep Alicia from getting hurt. She apologizes for the frat bro’s behavior and assures Alicia that she’s never seen them treat anyone else like that.

“Of course you haven’t,” Alicia retorts. “I’m just this queer girl that they can’t fuck but you? You’re this pretty, blonde, straight girl who they actually think is worthy of respect.”

Leighton insists that Alicia’s wrong about her but Alicia remains unconvinced. Leighton tries to summon the words but can’t, so she just kisses Alicia instead. A shocked Alicia pulls away, dismayed that she got Leighton so wrong, but Leighton silences her with another kiss. They return to Alicia’s apartment, hook up — though, it happens entirely off-screen, unlike the straight sex scenes — and after it’s over, Leighton tries to sneak away. Alicia is sympathetic to Leighton’s need to escape but invites her to Netflix and chill with her. Leighton, much to my surprise, agrees.

---

Legacies 407: “Someplace Far Away From All This Violence”

Written by Valerie Anne

After reading a TVD recap about the time Caroline turned off her humanity and Stefan helped her switch it back on with a memory of her mother, Josie gets the Super Squad together to make a plan to get Hope to do the same. Before they have time enough to plan, Hope shows up to get some weapons, but our Hope is still in there somewhere, so she doesn’t kill them all immediately. In fact, she even lets them attempt to turn her humanity back on by way of a variety show of friendship. When that proves futile and Hope says some mean things to all her peers, Dark Josie comes out to go face to face with Dark Hope.

Dark Josie tells Hope that she has turned humanities back on with a snap before, and that betrays a hint of fear in Hope, and she thinks that will help her get Hope’s humanity back on. “Even the almighty Tribrid can’t outrun her trauma forever,” Dark Josie threatens, but Hope just says, “Watch me.”

Hope manages to knock Dark Josie over but when she zips over to finish her off, it’s regular Josie’s sweet eyes looking up at her. Eyes that have only ever been full of kindness for her. Josie faces Hope, unafraid, and when Hope realizes that Josie is the first real threat to her humanity switch that she’s encountered so far, she freezes her.

The squad rightly thinks this is a sign that there’s still some of their Hope left inside the Tribrid, and they tuck Josie into the Therapy Box until they can figure out how to unfreeze her. But as Josie goes in, Lizzie comes out, and she’s willing to do what no one else is, to save her sister, to save them all. She’s willing to kill Hope.

---

The Flash 801-803: “Armageddon Parts 1-3”

Written by Valerie Anne

Ryan and Alex finally showed up in this 5-Episode Event at the very end of Part 3, so now that it seems likely we’ll get more of them in the next episode, I wanted to give you a little ARMAGEDDON primer so Nic and I can get right into yelling about them next week.

The overall premise is that an alien from the future, Despero, has come back in time to kill Barry, because according to him, in the next 10 years, Barry will lose his mind and destroy the world.
Team Flash manages to convince Despero to give them a chance to prove The Flash wouldn’t hurt his friends, let alone the world, but it seems something is indeed messing with Barry’s mind, causing him to have rage blackouts. Plus, when Barry mentions his adoptive father/father-in-law, everyone is horrified because Joe died six months ago. And I’ll admit, I missed a handful of Season 7 episodes, but I watched the finale, so I was 90% sure Joe didn’t die on screen. But as Barry lost grip with reality, so did I.

The first Alex Danvers appearance is when Caitlin calls her for alien advice. Kara is “off-world” so she helps them the best she can from afar. At the end of Part 3, Barry runs to the future to get more clues about what made him snap, and he finds himself at Iris’s engagement party…to his nemesis and mine, Eobard Thawn, aka the Reverse Flash. There they are, happily in love, witnessed by two of Iris’s gay best friends, Ryan Wilder and Alex Danvers, looking hardly a day older than the last time we saw them, let alone a decade. The episode ends with our ladies (et al) turning to confront Barry, so here’s hoping that’s where we pick back up again next week.

---

Riverdale 603: “Mr. Cypher”

Written by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Welcome back to Rivervale, the five-part ~event~ that boldly asks the question: What if Riverdale but FULL THROTTLE FANTASY? This week, the devil comes to town, going by the name of Mr. Cypher, first name Lou…as in Lou Cypher. Lucifer. You get it!!! Jughead Jones sets the episode up in direct address, saying it’s a tale of the devil coming to town to make little deals with townsfolk in exchange for their souls, prompting my girlfriend to say “okay Needful Things by Stephen King!”

The King parallels do not stop there. Last week’s ep had some Christine vibes in Reggie’s storyline. And it seems that this little Rivervale experiment is all building to a very The Stand-esque final showdown between good and evil.

I’ll keep this week’s recap brief, because Cheryl and Toni make nary an appearance! But since I’m heavily invested in the overall Rivervale arc, I didn’t wanna skip this installment. Here’s what goes down for each character:

Jughead interviews the devil, because he thinks it’ll be good for his writing career. He makes a deal that will grant him success for this ONE profile of the devil (“I can’t imagine anything more boring than hearing the life story of satan” – my girlfriend with the gems this week!). In turn, he will never be able to write again. This leads him to make a second deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for the ability to write once more.

Reggie and Veronica open a casino! Reggie sells his soul in exchange for the devil’s investment. Veronica comes up with a solution by instead offering the devil the soul of Nick St. Clair, who should indeed rot in hell. But it turns out Reggie ALSO sold Veronica’s soul to the devil?! Which he tries to walk back by being like babe I only sold your soul to the devil because I knew you’re so smart and talented and could find a way out. Well bitch does she ever! She sacrifices Reggie to the devil, confirming my theory that a major character will die in each of these five installments. Also, when Veronica still thinks it might be her last night on earth before the devil collects her soul, she gives a performance of Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” while men dressed as sexy devils dance around her. I…love this show.

Kevin Keller sold his soul in a heartbeat in exchange for musical stardom.

TABITHA IS VISITED BY A GUARDIAN ANGEL WHO GIFTS HER A VIAL OF THE VIRGIN MARY’S TEARS THAT THEY USE TO CONSECRATE POP’S DINER AND WARD OFF THE DEVIL BY SLIPPING TEARS IN HIS MILKSHAKE.

Betty is paid a visit by the Trashbag Killer except it’s actually the devil who tells her there’s something “100% evil” inside her and then tricks her into murder-stabbing her ex boyfriend Glen. Awkward!

Alice Cooper drinks a cranberry spritzer.

And that’s this week’s Rivervale for you. Have you seen next week’s promo yet? Sabrina Spellman comes to town, and uhhhhhh Betty? And Cheryl???? KISSING???? I mean, I think the actresses are playing ancestors of Betty and Cheryl for that particular moment but!!!! There will seemingly be much to discuss next week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0C2UGMFpVI&feature=emb_title

Boobs on Your Tube: “The Sex Lives of College Girls” Is — Surprise! — G A Y

Before we hop into the TV, did you know you can get 25% off everything in the Autostraddle store today through Monday? 40% if you’re an A+ member! Okay and now let’s hop! This week, Carmen interviewed Lena Waithe!!! Carmen also recapped Twenties, reviewed Gentefied, and reviewed Halle Berry’s Bruised, AND reviewed Tessa Thompson’s Passing! (All on “vacation,” by the way!) Sally brought us one final update from Dancing With the Stars. Kayla recapped the first two episodes of Yellow Jackets. Nic recapped Batwoman. Valerie Anne recapped Legends of Tomorrow. And Drew ranked Elliot Page movies by transness.

Notes from the TV Team:

+ I am following Wheel of Time very closely and will be bringing you a standalone post of gayness very soon. — Heather

+ Still not quite enough to report back on re: The Flash’s ARMAGEDDON but the team did call Alex (Kara and J’onn are apparently “off-world”) so hopefully soon we’ll have some fun gay shenanigans to talk about. — Valerie Anne

---

All American 405: “Can It All Be So Simple”

Written by Natalie

Last week, as Coop beefed with Layla over another artist using her music, she criticized Patience for not taking her side. At the time I thought it weird that no one mentioned that Patience was also one of Layla’s artists and that jeopardizing Layla’s business meant endangering Patience’s own career, so I convinced myself that I was misremembering. Maybe Patience hadn’t signed with Layla? Maybe it was just something I thought happened but didn’t, like season six of The L Word? But, apparently, I wasn’t wrong: All American was just waiting a week to use Patience’s career as a plot point (again).

Patience is putting the final touches on her album and Layla is loving the results…so much so that she recommends pushing up the release date and replacing Coop on a headlining tour. Patience questions if she’s even ready for that but Layla assures her that she is. Layla reminds Patience that she’s been building her buzz by opening on Lil’ Jewel’s tour and now there’s an opportunity to take advantage of her hard work. Patience is ambivalent about taking a slot that was meant for Coop but Layla’s unsympathetic. She reminds Patience that she’s running a business and gives Patience 48 hours to make a decision about the tour.

The next day, Coop’s babysitting Amina (Mo and Preach’s daughter) when Patience interrupts. After Amina scurries off, Coop asks Patience about her music and she downplays her success. Olivia overhears and corrects the record: Patience’s album is great and the fans will love it when she goes out on tour. Olivia quickly realizes that she’s let the cat out of the bag but Patience insists she was just about to tell Coop about the tour. Again, Patience minimizes the details but still rushes away from the growing tension as soon as she possibly can.

Later, Coop stops by Patience’s house and apologizes for making it hard for her to celebrate what’s going on in her career. Patience insists that Coop wasn’t making it hard, she was just trying to be sensitive because of all that Coop’s lost. Coop assures Patience that she doesn’t need to walk on eggshells with her and she absolutely should headline the tour. The couple embraces and Patience invites Coop to join her on tour. She admits that things have been a little off lately and being alone together on tour would give them the time and space to do that.

“I love you but I can’t leave Amina right now. I’m the reason her mom is dead. She needs me and I owe that too her,” Coop answers and Patience immediately pulls away from her. Patience shifts from her usual warmth to all business and agrees that “we have to do what we both have to do.”

And personally, I’m hoping that what Patience has to do is break up with Coop because she deserves so much better. Patience was truly right when she said, earlier this season, “the person to blame for all the drama that follows Coop around is Coop.” When Mo’s devil spawn, Amina, finally gets the revenge she’s seeking on “the grim reaper of the hood,” Coop will have brought it on herself.

---

New Amsterdam 410: “Death Is the Rule. Life Is the Exception”

Written by Natalie

“How much did you spend?” Leyla asks.

This week’s New Amsterdam doesn’t offer us a second of reprieve — no moment of warmth — it just hits us, straight out the gate, with the secret that’s been hanging over our favorite couple the entire season. Oh, happiness…it was nice while it lasted.

Lauren doesn’t catch on to what Leyla means at first so she clarifies: “How much did you spend to buy my residency?” And that’s when Lauren’s panic sets in. She tries to deflect but Leyla remains firm, asking about how big a bribe Lauren paid. Lauren insists that she didn’t bribe anyone, she just made a donation to the hospital, but Leyla sees a distinction without a difference. Lauren defends herself by suggesting that she was just righting wrongs: the wrong that Leyla had to repeat her residency and the wrong that caused the dean to dismiss Leyla’s application in the first place. And while I know that Lauren messed up here, I feel a bit of sympathy for her because she’s not wrong.

Leyla, however, is unmoved and asks again how much Lauren spent. Lauren confesses that she donated $90k — which, frankly, is a bargain — and insists that she did this for Leyla and for them. Iggy interrupts with hospital gossip and it gives Leyla an opportunity to escape before she cries in front of everyone. Left alone in the office, the panic plays out on Lauren’s face.

A bacterial outbreak at the hospital keeps the couple apart for most of the day but when the day’s over, Lauren greets Leyla as she walks out of the hospital. Still not over it, Leyla calls Lauren out for lying to her, as she’d asked Lauren directly if she had a hand in securing the residency. Lauren assures Leyla that she earned her spot and that her only role was helping others see how deserving she was.

“If I hadn’t, I mean, you’d be half way across the country. You’d be gone. We’d be over,” Lauren admits. “Leyla, I would write a million dollar check to keep us together.”

And that’s the thing: because Lauren didn’t do this for Leyla, she donated the money to save their relationship. And for someone who grew up like Lauren did, throwing money at something may look like love, but as Leyla points out as she walks away, “That’s not love.”

---

Riverdale 602: “Ghost Stories”

Written by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Welcome back to Riverdale — ahem, RiverVALE — where ghosts are doing lil ghosty things and also where I’m simply beginning someone, anyone, to turn on like one light? Okay, I know the whole dark colors + neons + soft lamp light thing is the show’s Aesthetic, but I literally cannot see anyone. It’s reminding me of trying to make Vampire Diaries gifs for tumblr in like 2011-2012 and needing to bump up that brightness just to be able to see people’s faces!!!!!!!

Anyway, sometimes you just gotta go to your ex-girlfriend’s haunted estate to do a seance to summon a vengeful spirit who is trying to kill your baby because you accidentally lethally knifed a boy in the heart during a gang brawl, you know? That is indeed what Toni Topaz finds herself doing in “Ghost Stories,” Riverdale’s take on La Llorona folklore. The episode opens with a street fight between the Serpents and the Ghoulies, and apparently Toni is still moonlighting as a gang member, because she’s right there in the thick of it, throwing a knife in, according to her, an attempt to wound rather than kill. Seems dicey!

The dead boy’s mom inexplicably waits three months and then summons La Llorona. Riverdale’s iteration of the weeping woman is a veiled presence who lives in Sweetwater River. Once summoned, she gets down to standard La Llorona business: killing children. She attempts to drown Juniper and supernaturally terminates Betty’s pregnancy. (Reminder: Last episode, Betty became pregnant with Archie’s child with the help of Cheryl’s magic? Shortly before Archie was then blood sacrificed for the sake of the town’s fertility in both a literal baby sense but also in terms of its maple supply? Anyway, the blood sacrifice did work: The maple is plentiful once more, and Cheryl and Nana Rose enjoy maple-infused brandies in this episode.)

La Llorona is mainly after baby Anthony. And during a seance at Thornhill, they learn La Llorona used to be a woman named Martha Mallon, who was a nurse in a maternity ward in Rivervale’s first hospital. She was blamed for the high mortality rate of children in town, so a bunch of townsfolk drowned her and her children in Sweetwater River.

I’m still digging Riverdale’s all-out plunge into the fantastic! The show has always had a tenuous grasp on logic and laws, so let’s let go altogether! Apparently, this whole Rivervale experiment is slated to be a five-episode event. And I have a theory: I think they’re going to kill off a main character in every installment. Because while Toni does not technically die at episode’s end, she does trade places with Martha, becoming the new cursed weeping woman.

Elsewhere, Reggie’s having an affair with a car. Or, more specifically, a car reminds him of his former driver’s ed teacher, who was apparently accused of having inappropriate relations with students. I’m not sure if Veronica lecturing Reggie on the toxicity and abusive nature of a student-teacher relationship is Riverdale’s attempt to atone for Ms. Grundy in season one or what! But Reggie says the driver’s ed teacher was merely there for him when he was being abused by his father (who dies in this episode) and nothing inappropriate happened.

Jughead and Tabitha have a ghost story of their own. Specifically, a couple — named SAM AND DIANE — died in their apartment. More specifically, Diane brained Sam with a hammer and hung herself. Jughead and Tabitha’s typical domestic squabbles (Tabitha feels undervalued since she works all day and Jughead…stays home to NOT write; Jughead feels pressured by Tabitha; Tabitha doesn’t like it when he leaves the cap off the toothpaste?; etc.) take on a sharp edge when it starts to seem like they might be becoming Sam and Diane. Riverdale leaves it somewhat up in the air whether they’re actually being possessed/influenced by the ghosts or just falling into bad patterns together and then projecting the ghost stories onto themselves — a creative choice I’m into! But seriously, these two are…not great together. They have their first real fight, and it’s bad! And it ends with them saying “I love you” for the first time? Seek help!

---

Nancy Drew 307: “The Gambit of the Tangled Souls”

Written by Valerie Anne

This week, Bess takes George’s advice and asks Addy for that second date, but almost as soon as Addy agrees, she has to reschedule because George needs Bess’s help with some soul splitting. When Addy makes an offhand remark about it being an ex, Bess can’t help but think of Odette and can’t honestly deny the accusation, and Addy is pretty bummed about it.

As Bess takes care of George as she goes through the soul splitting journey and Odette comes out one last time, and Bess starts to panic about this whole plan.

Back at the youth center, Addy is becoming her own character outside of Bess and talking to Nick about processing his trauma, and says that a period of time where she unplugged helped her gain clarity.

When Nancy and Bess realize that they’ll have to destroy a crystal that houses Odettes’s soul, Odette begs Nancy to help her find another way. She was holding onto a secret hope that maybe somehow they could get Odette back someday, so she could live her best gay life, but Nancy says it’s time for Odette to move on.

Bess panics and takes off with the crystal, and when Nancy finds her and apologizes for not considering how hard this would be for Bess. But with some convincing, Bess says goodbye to Odette and smashes the crystal, bringing George back to life. Bess feels like a bad friend, but Nancy understands and so they don’t tell George when she wakes up.

Bess buries the Odette crystal where the lilacs bloom in spring, and promises her that her story won’t be forgotten. She asks for a sign that Odette is at piece, and at that exact moment, Addy shows up, and they plan a proper second date.

---

The Sex Lives of College Girls 101-102: “Welcome to Essex” and “Naked Party”

Written by Natalie

Leighton Murray had it all planned out: she’d join her brother, Nico, at their father’s alma mater, Essex College, and she’d spend her year living alongside her high school besties. But you know what they say about the best laid plans: when Leighton arrives at Essex, she greeted by a trio of strangers — Kimberly, Whitney and Bela — and rushes out to figure out how this mix-up happened. Her high school besties, Esme and Francesca, feign dismay but a trip to the housing office reveals the truth: both of Leighton’s so-called besties explicitly asked not to room with her. When Leighton confronts Esme and Francesca about their deception, they admit that they were never really friends.

“The truth is, we never really felt like we knew you,” Esme confesses.

“Yeah, you were always so secretive or something. It was like being friends with a stranger,” Francesca adds. Leighton pushes back, insisting that she shared everything with them, but Esme and Francesca recall their history differently: it’s like a wall existed between them. Dismayed, Leighton flicks them both off and storms off but later it’s clear that she’s hurt by her friends’ betrayal.

The thing is? Esme and Francesca weren’t wrong.

Even in her dealings with her new roommates, Leighton is cold and dismissive. The Regina George of Essex College (Leighton’s portrayer, Renee Rapp, played the mean girl on Broadway, coincidentally). When her brother, Nico, encourages her to be civil to her new roommates, Leighton tries to make amends — buying them iPads and offering them “sage” advice — but when they decide to go to a fraternity party together, Leighton’s wall goes up.

Behind that wall, Leighton’s finding women to hook up with on a Tinder-like app: the first, a sexy red-head at a nearby casino, the second, a realtor in her mini-van, in between showings at one of her listings. The realtor, Chloe Wright, confuses the hook-up for a first date, asking Leighton about her Essex keychain and stumbling onto the fact that Leighton’s still in the closet. She encourages Leighton to come out, assuring her that it’s worth it, but Leighton is unmoved.

“I don’t want being gay to be my identity, I like my identity. I don’t want to be the gay Kappa girl or the lesbian cousin. I don’t want to be other, I just want to be me,” Leighton insists.

Chloe continues to push but Leighton reminds her that this was just supposed to be a hook-up and escapes the mini-van. Later, Chloe calls to check on Leighton and promises her that it gets better. Leighton scoffs, dismissing Chloe’s PSA, and asserts that she’s absolutely thriving. Chloe points out that Leighton is living a lie and Leighton assures her that she knows that.

The Sex Lives of College Girls is the latest creation from Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble. The pair last worked together on Never Have I Ever and you’ll notice a lot of the same archetypes reappearing here. But Sex Lives is risqué in a way NHIE can’t be, thanks to the college setting. New episodes of Sex Lives are available Thursdays on HBO Max.

Boobs On Your Tube: Welcome Back to Riverdale, Where Everyone Is HORNY

Oh well hello and a happy Friday to you! It’s that time of year again, the time when the sunsets at 4pm in the northeast! Which means it’s also time to snuggle down under a pile of blankets with my cats and watch so much gay teevee! Speaking of! This week! Riese brought you great tidings of Kristen Stewart’s forthcoming gay ghost show? I (Heather) wrote about how that dang Netflix Goop sex show actually self-helped me. Sally updated you on JoJo Siwa’s latest routines on DWTS, which got her through to the finals! Valerie Anne is here and queer to tell you about the lesbian on Yellowjackets. She also recapped Legends of Tomorrow! Nic recapped another VERY GAY Batwoman. Carmen recapped another VERY GAY Twenties. And special guest Juan Barquin wrote about the new adaptation of Cowboy Bebop.

Notes from the TV Team:

+ I just wanted to reassure all the CWDCTVLGBTQ+s that Nic and I are all over ARMAGEDDON, keeping an eye on the Flash five-episode event for the arrival of our beloved gays. So far the only non-Flash character is Ray from Legends, none of our ladies yet. But at the end of the episode, they said they were going to call Alex Danvers for her alien expertise so hopefully her and Ryan are on their way to Central City as we speak! We’ll be sure to report back when they show up. — Valerie Anne

+ I’m ALMOST caught up on Dickinson enough to write about it for you! This season is impeccably gay so far, and I remain devastated it will be the last one. — Valerie Anne

+ Few shows have brought me more unexpected joy this fall than The Big Leap (which, of course, means it’s going to be cancelled). Stef Foster, Paulie Oster, my favorite boyfriend from Felicity (IYKYK), a big girl as the romantic lead and dancing montages set to classic Missy Elliott and Whitney Houston? It’s like my own personal catnip. But just in case I needed a reason to love this show more, they gave it to me this week when they revealed Monica Sullivan (the show’s unflinching judge/dance instructor) is bisexual and shares a matching tattoo with her ex-girlfriend, Annie. — Natalie

+ On Station 19, Maya changed exactly one (1!!) diaper and decided that she’s actually ready to have a baby with Carina after all. I debated writing a full blurb about it, because I miss writing about Maya and Carina so much! But honestly? The decision to make them mothers so quickly after marriage is a lazy writing choice, and to have Maya turn around so quickly on it (yes, I get she’s still grieving losing Miller) was bad writing at that. — Carmen

+ Also I know you updates on Home Economics and 4400! I’m in a bit of a content hole that I am digging myself out of rapidly (I owe stuff to everyone), but after Thanksgiving we should be back to normal. I miss y’all! — Carmen

---

Nancy Drew 306: “The Myth of the Ensnared Hunter”

Written by Valerie Anne

This week, Bess regrets being so adamant about Addy being a one-time thing. She “casually” looks for Addy at the youth center, but when she’s not there, Bess tries to play it like she doesn’t care but she’s barely convincing herself let alone anyone else.

Bess tries to distract herself by helping George with her Odette problem, and while she’s at the Historical Society, she gets a start when Nancy emerges from a secret door in the wall after searching some tunnels for a monster that looks like a Gentleman left underwater too long. The Drew Crew reviews the security footage of the Historical Society to see who else has used that secret door, when they see the exact nature of Bess and Addy’s relationship.

Eventually George gets it out of Bess that the reason she’s trying to keep Addy at arm’s length is because she’s afraid Addy won’t want more. George, who knows the value of not wasting time all too well, tells Bess that she has to take the chance and ask for a second date. And that Addy would be a fool to say no.

Though Bess might be a bit distracted in the coming days, because the rest of the footage reveals that Historical Hannah knew about the secret door to the monster tunnel all along.

---

Legacies 406: “You’re a Long Way From Home”

Written by Valerie Anne

This week’s episode opens with the Super Squad being brutally murdered by the Tribrid because she’s a force to be reckoned with. As soon as Hope starts murdering her friends I know it must be some kind of nightmare scenario, and even though it DID turn out to be the simulation box, it didn’t make it hurt any less to watch Hope snap sweet Josie’s neck.

Finch and Cleo are trying to help the Squad find Hope, but Hope is managing to uno reverse their spells in her quest to learn more about Triad. Cleo knows there’s a weapon that can kill Hope but she’s hesitant to tell everyone, especially before she has what I assume will be an ancient White Oak stake. (I don’t want Hope to do anything she’ll regret when she turns her humanity back on, which I hope she does before Cleo permakills her, but I’m enjoying Chaotic Neutral Hope while she lasts.)

Josie is freaking out and Finch tries to calm her down but Josie feels guilty about her dad getting hurt while she was…relaxing with Finch so she snaps at her girlfriend. Finch realizes this isn’t the time to dicuss this so she gets out of the way for now.

All the while Lizzie is busy trying to find a way to save her dad, which I feel like personally is a waste of time, especially when Hope’s humanity is at…stake. She finds a spell that could steal life force from someone to put it back in her dad, but ultimately can’t go through with it. Later, Josie feels guilty that she found herself a little disappointed Lizzie hadn’t killed someone to save Alaric. And now dad is still in a coma, Hope is seeming farther (and further) away, and Lizzie’s in the therapy box. Josie has never felt so…on her own.

Finch points out that she’s never NOT been. Josie has had Lizzie since birth and they’ve both lived at the school their dad runs their whole lives. But now Finch is here to have her back so Josie can just be in her feelings, sit in the helplessness for a minute, have a breakdown if she needs to. Just…be.

---

Hightown 205: “Dot Dot Dot”

Written by Natalie

This week’s Hightown saves its most explosive stories for other characters — Daisy, Frankie, Jorge, Renee and Ray, most notably — but it gives its most relatable story for Jackie Quiñones. And, boy, is it painfully relatable.

Jackie wakes up and reaches across the bed to find the space next to her empty. When she spots Leslie across the room, with far too many clothes on, Jackie tries to lure her back into bed. She praises Leslie’s oral performance from the night before, astounded that it was her first time. Leslie chalks her success up to beginner’s luck and asks if it was a big deal that Jackie let her go down on her.

“Um, I mean, not really….well…kind of,” Jackie admits. “You really wanna have this conversation? The butch conversation?”

And I very much do what them to have that conversation but, instead, Jackie pulls Leslie into a kiss. Eventually, Leslie has to leave for court and Jackie watches her go with a broad smile on her face. Jackie Quiñones, the lesbian lothario of P-Town, is ridiculously in love with a straight girl. Been there, Jackie…been there.

Later, Jackie suits back up for the Fisheries Service and joins an operation with Ed to catch the Scrodfather unloading an illegally caught great white shark. While making the trip up to a processing plant in Brooklyn, Jackie exchanges texts with Leslie and can’t hide how positively giddy she is about it. Ed notices Jackie’s cheshire grin and tells her that he’s glad to see her happy again. When they arrive in Brooklyn, all that’s left to do is wait on the truck so Jackie entertains herself with texts from Leslie.

Jackie: ughhhh ron’s so annoying this sux.
Leslie: anything i can do to help
Jackie: Yes! Send pics! 🙏 🤪
(Jackie sits up straight in her seat as her phone shows that Leslie’s responding back)
Leslie: *sends topless pic*
Jackie: OMG I love you so much

Listen, I get how an “I love you” can slip out after someone sends you (consensual) nudes. The hormones take over — oxytocin makes you feel connected to the sender, dopamine floods your system, impacting your impulse control — and suddenly, you’re professing love that you may not even feel or, in Jackie’s case, do feel but definitely would not admit to under normal circumstances. Been there, Jackie…been there. As soon as Jackie clicked send, I screamed, “OOOH, NOOO!”

Jackie’s message is delivered and read. Bubbles pop up, indicating that Leslie’s about to respond, but then they disappear…and Leslie never returns to the conversation. The longer Jackie goes without a response, the more frantic she gets. She texts. She calls. She freaks out. At some point, she calls Leslie a bitch. She pleads for Leslie to just call her back and let her explain. Of course, Leslie doesn’t and when she can’t fix her misstep, she takes her frustration out on Ed…damaging her relationship with the only person she’s been able to depend on in her life.

---

All American 404: “A Bird in the Hand”

Written by Natalie

This week, Coop slinks back into the studio just in time to hear Layla’s new artist in the booth performing one of her songs. It stings to hear someone else performing her work so Coop lashes out, accusing Layla of stealing songs just like her father did. Layla refuses to be disrespected in her own studio so she reminds Coop what actually happen: she invested all her time and money into creating tracks that Coop never finished. She’s funneling the tracks to a new artist in hopes of recouping some of her investment. All Coop can hear is someone else delivering the rhymes she wrote and tells Layla, “good luck with your replacement Coop.”

Later, Coop bemoans Layla’s “business as usual” attitude but Patience is more sympathetic. She understands that Layla is just trying to make the best out of a bad situation. Shocked that her girlfriend isn’t on her side, Coop reminds her of when something similar happened between her and JP (aka Layla’s dad). Patience corrects the record: JP pushed her out of the process but Layla would include her, but for Coop’s own pronouncement that she was done with music. She reminds Coop that Layla’s career is on the line too and it’s unfair to expect Layla to give up.

Coop returns to an empty studio later and runs into Asher. They commiserate about their shared fate — both having recently had their dreams snatched away — and each offer advice to the other. He reminds her that if someone else is performing her song that’s just proof that she wrote a damn good song. Asher’s words get through to Coop and later, she apologizes to Layla for her behavior. Coop encourages Layla to use her music but pushes her to allow her new artist to freestyle their own lyrics: using Coop’s experiences takes away from the song’s authenticity. Later, when Layla gets her artist back in the booth, the song pops with the new freestyle lyrics and it’s clear: Coop might not be able to perform anymore but she’s still got an ear for the business.

---

New Amsterdam 409: “In a Strange Land”

Written by Natalie

When Casey started questioning the how and why behind the creation of a fifth resident slot at the hospital, Lauren should’ve seen that as a sign. If Casey could figure it out, it’d only be a little while before one of her colleagues could piece it together or, worse, Leyla discovered how she earned her New Amsterdam residency. Once Casey figured it out, Lauren Bloom should’ve gone home and told her girlfriend the truth. Maybe, ultimately, it wouldn’t have changed anything but it would’ve given Lauren her best shot at salvaging her relationship.

Of course, Lauren didn’t do any of that. Instead, the couple return to work: with Dr. Bloom managing the ED through a mass casualty event, without her head nurse (Casey) to help her, and Dr. Shinwari joining Dr. Reynolds for a general surgery rotation. A fire at a midtown church sends its residents — mostly undocumented immigrants who were seeking sanctuary there — streaming into New Amsterdam. But the threat the immigrants face isn’t just from their injuries: ICE is camped outside the hospital, waiting for the immigrants to come out so they can be detained.

One of the immigrants has labored breathing but refuses to allow Layla to take off the bandages that are restricting their breathing. Thankfully, one of the ED’s nurses, Kai Brunstetter, intervenes, introducing themselves by revealing their pronouns. They ask if taking off their binder makes them feel unsafe and exposed and the patient nods. Kai explains that between the smoke from the fire and binder, their lungs are struggling so they have to take the binder off. The patient agrees and he introduces himself as Temi.

As Kai and Leyla undo the binder, they notice some discharge on the bandages and send him to Dr. Sharpe in Oncology for a mammogram. Kai accompanies him to the appointment and admits that the screening is “like stepping back into a body that isn’t mine” but insists that its necessary. Temi, clearly carrying the emotional scars of his youth, refuses the mammogram but Helen finds an alternative, an ultrasound on a transducer table. When they find a lump, Sharpe explains that they’ll need to perform a lumpectomy but Temi insists on a double mastectomy. Sharpe explains the difference between a mastectomy and top surgery but Temi acknowledges, “this might be my only chance.”

Temi wakes up from his surgery happy about his new body but Sharpe has bad news: his cancer has spread and he’ll need daily treatment for six weeks to avoid it killing him. But, Temi laments, if the cancer doesn’t kill him, ICE detention or deportation will.

Meanwhile, Dr. Shinwari returns to Reynolds’ side to help save a burn victim. Throughout the treatment, she can’t help but reflect on how lucky she is…how she could’ve easily been one of these immigrants, seeking treatment instead of giving it. In surgery, their patient has a setback and Leyla recognizes it right away, impressing Reynolds. The newly minted Chief of General Surgery is so impressed he offers her a slot in his department when she finishes her residency.

“I see how why they created a fifth slot for you,” Reynolds muses, much to Leyla’s dismay. He recalls the last time the hospital added a fifth resident, it was because of a family’s large donation to New Amsterdam. Leyla starts putting the pieces together and my heart (and hers) sinks.

---

A Million Little Things 407: “Stay”

Written by Natalie

So, apparently, when Shanice said goodbye to Katherine, she really meant goodbye. It feels like a waste — there was so much potential there and so much chemistry — but at least Shanice’s absence hasn’t meant that Katherine’s retreated back into the closet. Quite the contrary, actually: our girl is single and ready to mingle.

Katherine enlists her assistant, Carter, to help her get ready for her first date. He’s giddy about her joining him in the alphabet mafia and imagines her “leaning into moto style”…which, as someone who’s a sucker for a girl in a moto jacket, I wholeheartedly agree. Katherine admits that she doesn’t know what to wear, much less what to talk about and Carter reminds her that “this is a first date, not confession.” She laments having to go on this awkward first date rather than having something develop organically like with Shanice but Carter pushes her to try.

“This is your first pancake, the one that’s never cooked correctly, but prepares the griddle for the others,” Carter advises. He hands her a sexy black dress and encourages her to eat that pancake…which might be taking this metaphor a step too far.

The date starts out great but, slowly, the wheels start to come off. Katherine admits that it’s her first date with a woman but her date, Heather, assures her that it’s definitely not hers. A little undone by Heather’s flirtation, Katherine rambles a bit and Heather puts her hand over Katherine’s to reassure her that everything’s fine. They’re staring in each other’s eyes when the bartender comes over to refill their glasses and Katherine pulls away.

“Um… do you want to split an order of guac? It says they put in pomegranate. I’m… I’m curious,” Katherine stammers.

“Clearly,” Heather answers back, every hint of flirtation gone from her voice, and it’s obvious what’s about to happen. Heather excuses herself to go to the restroom but never returns, leaving Katherine alone at the bar. At least she was kind enough to pay the tab before she ghosted Katherine.

Back at the office, Katherine drowns her sorrows and tries to figure out where she went wrong. Carter urges her to look at the date as a win, since she was confident enough to put herself out there. Coming out is difficult, no matter when it happens, Carter points out, reflecting on his own coming out story. His tale causes Katherine to reflect on the gay girl she knew in high school — a coming out that she did not handle well — and later, Katherine slides into her Insta DMs.

---

Riverdale 601: “Welcome to Rivervale”

Written by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Welcome back to Riverdale, where everyone is HORNY. Veronica and Reggie are horny for power as the town’s new power couple. Alice is horny for Uncle Frank, who shoots down her advances because he is capital-D Damaged, but who isn’t in this town? Betty and Archie are horny to make a baby. I know they’ve known each other their whole lives, so they’re not technically U-Hauling their relationship, but they are kinda U-Hauling their relationship. Betty says at one point “I’ve been dreaming about starting a family with you since sixth grade,” to which I simply have to ask — what? But seriously, these horndogs are going AT IT this episode. Me personally? Horny for the fact that Betty beats Archie in an axe throwing competition. Tabitha and Jughead are decidedly not horny, even though they’ve recently moved in together. It’s hard to be horny when your home is cursed with endless bug infestations. And Cheryl Blossom is horny for doing blood sacrifices in the woods.

Yes, you did indeed read that correctly. And I’m sure if you are a watcher of Riverdale, there’s little I could say or do to shock you. But the writers have taken Riverdale’s absurdity a step further, because you see, we’re no longer in Riverdale at all. This season, we’re in Rivervale, a shadowtown, a different dimension entirely. The players are the same, but the rules are different. We bid adieu to any semblance of reality, and you know what? I love this for Riverdale. Throw continuity and coherency out the damn door and let’s get weird. I don’t necessarily want Riverdale to become Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Sabrina will be making an appearance in Rivervale), but I do think there’s a happy medium. Riverdale has long moved past its roots as a teen drama (I mean, they’re not even teens anymore), and going full Twilight Zone meets Brothers Grimm? Hot! Jughead serves as a full-on Rod Serling, breaking the fourth wall and taking viewers through the fresh horrors that plague Rivervale. The format is working. These writers know how to blow up a concept entirely and then rebuild something even wilder than what came before.

In Rivervale, Cheryl has declared Thornhill a sovereign nation and also has a small army of bow and arrow wielding girls at her disposal. Over the course of the episode, characters need favors from her, and she hands them out with, of course, a price tag. They must bear witness at an unspecified ritual on her grounds. It’s a classic folklore premise, a beautiful witch promising a cure for people’s ailments and then coming to collect.

It’s difficult to choose a favorite Cheryl line from this episode (A couple I wrote down: “My spies tell me that Archie Andrews is trying to steal my maple thunder”; “Tell me, what demons torment you Tab Tab?”). The Rivervale aesthetic and tone absolutely plays to Madelaine Petsch’s strengths. And this exchange between Cheryl and Betty had me, simply, dead:

Cheryl: Cousin, howfore did you get into my house?
Betty: A bobby pin.

Betty and her bobby pins. She’s, dare I say, horny for snooping!

On the subject of quotes, Veronica says she has always wanted to “make it” on a bed of cash. MAKE IT? WHAT YEAR IS IT? (Temporality, temperature, and geography have always been more fluid than fixed on Riverdale, but that seems especially true in Rivervale.)

Cheryl does finally come to collect. She convinces the whole town to participate in a human sacrifice. Specifically, in the killing of Archie Andrews, who she ties to a post and crowns with a set of antlers before using a knife to cut out his heart. It’s like a CW-ified Yellowjackets!!!!!! See, I thought I was going to have to reach to bring up Yellowjackets in basically everything I write about television for the foreseeable future, but Riverdale really came through with the haunting animal imagery and friends violently turning on each other and ritualistic killing. Anyway, Archie’s dead now? Not entirely sure what to do with that information. Because under the new rules of Rivervale, he could easily come back to life anytime.

Quiz: What “Riverdale” Subplot Are You?

Every single Riverdale subplot lives in my mind rent-free, and while that is helpful when it comes to writing weekly recaps of the show, it is also my cross to bear. There have been five seasons now, and if you have been on this wild journey, then you know that no show does soap-opera-noir-gothic-horror-camp-absurdity quite like Riverdale. Take a walk down memory lane and find out which subplot speaks to your truest self.

---

Autostraddle March Madness: Canon vs. Fanon — Elite 8

Ever wonder where the phrase “March Madness” comes from? Famed broadcaster Brent Musburger made March Madness part of the broader lexicon when he used it to reference the NCAA tournament in the 1980s, but the phrase actually dates back to 1939. According to the lore, Henry Porter coached the Athens (IL) High School Warriors to a second place finish in the annual statewide high school basketball tournament. Describing the fans’ excitement about the tournament, Porter wrote, a “little March madness may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel.” The sentiment resonates right now: if ever there was a moment where we all needed something to keep society on an even keel, it’s this one.

That “contributing to sanity” part, though? After the excitement of of the weekend’s games, I’m not sure March Madness is doing much for my sanity.

All three women’s games this weekend — the semifinals on Friday, the finals last night — were phenomenal (mediocre refereeing notwithstanding). South Carolina came within inches of beating Stanford, the tournament’s overall #1 seed. It was heartbreaking to watch Aliyah Boston and the Gamecocks fall just short of their season-long goal. Then, in the nightcap, basketball fans had a fairytale realized: David slew Goliath, as Arizona — an undersized, underappreciated team that had never been to the Final Four before — came in and defeated perennial powerhouse, UCONN. The Wildcats’ defense suffocated the Huskies and ensured that no one would overlook them ever again.

And then the Finals? ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME?! The Cardinal had beaten the Wildcats twice already this season — both times by double digits — but this time, Arizona just would not give up. Everytime Stanford went on a run, Arizona would answer: ramping up their defensive pressure and turning their defense into offense. In the end though, Stanford’s defense collapsed on Arizona’s Aari McDonald and dared anyone else to beat them… and the Wildcats just couldn’t do it.

𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐖𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋 👑🌲#GoStanford pic.twitter.com/h08aAU0s3y

— Stanford WBB 🌲🏀 (@StanfordWBB) April 5, 2021

Also? There was a men’s semi-final that was very exciting. Not as exciting as Morgan William’s buzzer beater to end UCONN’s 111-game win streak in 2017 or Arike Ogunbowale’s back-to-back buzzer beaters in 2018, but you know, it was nice.

But now that those women are done (for now), we should get back to the business of selecting our final four competitors? Here’s how your Sweet 16 votes winnowed our field:

Since we’re getting down to our final eight choices, we’ll break down the match-ups in their respective regions: Canon and Fanon.

---

On the Canon side, we had our closest match-up of the Sweet 16 between Cosima and Delphine and Brittany and Santana in the Classic sub-region. At one point, the girls from GLEE stormed ahead by a few hundred votes but then Orphan Black fans came back to give them the lead. It’s the second close match-up that Cosima and Delphine have survived, as they narrowly defeated Tara and Willow in the Round of 32… perhaps, they’re the Arizona Wildcats of our March Madness?

In the Sci-Fi/Fantasy sub-region, Waverly and Nicole easily dispatched Alex and Maggie in the Sweet 16. I was a bit surprised by the ease of the victory — after all, Alex made her way to the March Madness finals two years ago — but given that Wynonna Earp may be completing its run, perhaps I should have expected the fervent response. It’s worth noting that the past two winners of this competition have been part of shows that were also concluding. Is that a good omen for Waverly and Nicole in this competition?

#1. Waverly and Nicole – Wynonna Earp vs. #5. Cosima and Delphine – Orphan Black

In the Grown sub-region, Callie and Arizona easily fended off a challenge from Kat and Adena in the Sweet 16 and moved onto the Elite 8. The Calzona fandom came out strong in the third round of competition and they’ll need all that strength when they meet Juliantina in the Elite 8. The pair from Amar a Muerte dominated through the Baby Gay sub-region but have they met their match in the longest running lesbian couple on television? We’ll see.

#3. Callie and Arizona – Grey’s Anatomy vs. #8. Juliana and Valentina – Amar a Muerte

---

Over on the Fanon side of the bracket, I’d picked Buffy and Faith to win the Classic sub-region in our Challonge competition but when all the votes were counted, it was Xena and Gabrielle who came out victorious. They’ll meet the great ship, Supercorp, in the Elite 8. The Supergirl /Once Upon a Time match-up was one of the most anticipated match-ups of the entire tournament… and while it was closer than some of our other match-ups in the Sweet 16, the fandom still gave Supercorp a 400-vote margin over Snow Queen.

#2. Lena and Kara – Supergirl vs. #6. Xena and Gabrielle – Xena: Warrior Princess

Betty and Veronica continued their dominance in the Baby Gay sub-region, edging out Spencer and Aria by 300 votes. But our favorite Riverdale ship may have met their match in Eve and Villanelle. The pair from Killing Eve easily made their way through the Grown sub-region, even scoring an overwhelming win over Alex and Olivia in the sub-region’s finals. It was amazing to see a ship that kicked off in 2000 and still has a fervent following be dispatched so easily.

#1. Betty and Veronica – Riverdale vs. #2. Eve and Villanelle – Killing Eve

---

As always, the clock’s set: you’ve got 48 hours to cast your ballot in this round of Autostraddle March Madness. We’ll be back on Wednesday to unveil the couples that have made it to the Final Four!

Oops! We could not locate your form.

Autostraddle March Madness: Canon vs. Fanon – Sweet 16

Tonight, the NCAA women’s tournament kicks off their Final Four on ESPN. Stanford and South Carolina will tip off first. It’s tough to know who will come out on top, these teams are so well-matched.

South Carolina’s playing their best basketball of the year at exactly the right moment, with Aliyah Boston anchoring their offense in the post. Their defense has been stellar all tournament long — they held Texas scoreless in the fourth quarter in the Elite 8 — and can bring their brand of physicality to tonight’s game, I give the Gamecocks the edge.

But don’t count out the Cardinal: they play true team basketball and, on any given night, anyone can step up and lead them to victory. They’re no slouches on defense either, ranking second in the country in FG percentage defense, so we could be in for a defensive slugfest tonight. The thing I like about Stanford is their ability to shoot the ball from three, averaging 38.3% from long range this season. If they can get going from behind the arc, Stanford could win this thing handily.

I’m truly torn: my head’s with Stanford, my heart’s with South Carolina. We’ll see what happens.

The nightcap’s going to be a fun match-up as well: UCONN vs. Arizona. It’s hard not to think the Huskies have the advantage going in: they are, after all, perennial national championship contenders and that have been on this stage 21 times before (compared to just once for Arizona). But I like an underdog…and this Arizona team’s coming into this game with a chip on their shoulder and absolutely nothing to lose. I like what the Wildcats can do from three and, if they can draw the UCONN posts into some foul trouble, we might have and upset on our hands.

But while we get excited for the women’s games tonight, we’ve got our own bit of March Madness business to handle. Over the last 48 hours, you’ve cast your ballots and winnowed the 32 remaining couples down to 16. Here’s how things look for the CANON VS. FANON Sweet 16:

---

In the Classic sub-region, the canon battle between Tara and Willow and Cosima and Delphine was one of the closest contests of the tournament thus far. The lead volleyed back and forth multiple times over the past 48 hours but ultimately the couple from Orphan Black pulled it own.

Meanwhile, Brittany and Santana coasted to a relatively easy win against the L Word powerhouse, Shane and Carmen. The win isn’t entirely unexpected — we do love Brittana around these parts after all — but the announcement of GLAAD’s upcoming tribute to Naya Rivera and news of her final role in the upcoming animated Batman movie….well, that’s enough to provoke a lot of nostalgia for even the non-GLEEks among us.

Canon: #3. Brittany and Santana – GLEE vs. #5. Cosima and Delphine – Orphan Black

Over on the fanon side of the bracket, things shook out a little differently: both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess easily fended off challenges in the Round of 32. Apparently, GLEE nostalgia doesn’t extend to everyone.

Fanon: #4. Buffy and Faith – Buffy the Vampire Slayer vs. #6. Xena and Gabrielle – Xena: Warrior Princess

---

The canon side of the GROWN sub-region offered some of the toughest choices in this tournament: Emma and Nico or Kat and Adena and Petra and JR or Callie and Arizona? I thought it interesting that voters went with the “older” couples in both cases: Emma and Nico got together on Vida during its second season in 2019, while Kat and Adena connected during The Bold Type‘s first season in 2017. Callie Torres first met Arizona Robbins in the bathroom at Joe’s during Grey’s fifth season (2009), while Petra didn’t hire JR to defend her until until 2018. We’ll see if that trend holds in this final match of the sub-region.

Canon: #3. Callie and Arizona – Grey’s Anatomy vs. #4. Kat and Adena – The Bold Type

Our other most competitive match-up of the second round came in the Grown fanon sub-region. After battling back and forth, Alex and Olivia edged out Callie and Addison. Admittedly, I’m surprised that the Callie Torres love didn’t carry over from canon to fanon, but I’m chalking it up to the inescapable advertising for the Benson and Stabler Law and Order reunion. Personally, if Alex Cabot isn’t involved, I am not interested.

The Special Victims Unit team will meet Eve and Villanelle in their Sweet 16 match-up. The Killing Eve pair easily dispatched a challenge from the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling to make it to the third round.

Fanon: #1. Alex and Olivia – Law and Order: Special Victims Unit vs. #2. Eve and Villanelle – Killing Eve

---

In the battle of the former March Madness champions in the Baby Gay region, Juliana and Valentina of Amar a Muerte came out on top. The fandom is definitely proving themselves stronger than their #8 seeding. They’ll face Emily and Sue from Dickinson in the Sweet 16, who pulled off what I’d consider to be a bit of an upset by dispatching Casey and Izzie. I guess that long wait between Atypical seasons — the show just started shooting its fourth and final season — took some wind out of the sails of the fandom.

Canon: #6. Emily and Sue – Dickinson vs. #8. Juliana and Valentina – Amar a Muerte

Over on the fanon side of the bracket, Betty and Veronica of Riverdale continued their dominance, despite an incredibly strong showing by Maya and Riley of Girl Meets World. The battle between the top two Pretty Little Liars fanon ships was closer than I’d anticipate with Spencer and Aria eeking out a victory. That makes for an interesting match-up in the sub-region’s finals: which fanon couple from a murderous town will reign supreme? Who’s your money on: Riverdale or Rosewood?

Fanon: #1. Betty and Veronica – Riverdale vs. #2. Spencer and Aria – Pretty Little Liars

---

It’s been all chalk — that is, all the higher seeds have won — and the trend continued during the Round of 32 in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category.Wynonna Earp‘s Waverly and Nicole easily defeated AvaLance from Legends of Tomorrow. With each round, WayHaught seems to be picking up strength so I like the couple’s chances as we head into the final rounds of this tournament. Standing in their way, though, will be the equally strong pairing of Alex Danvers and Maggie Sawyer, who advanced to the Sweet 16 despite a formidable challenge from Nomi and Amanita from Sense8.

Canon: #1. Waverly and Nicole – Wynonna Earp vs. #2. Maggie and Alex – Supergirl

Let’s be honest: we all knew it was going to end here. No matter how many great couples there were in the fanon portion of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy sub-region, this final match-up felt inevitable: Emma and Regina vs. Lena and Kara. Swan Queen vs. SuperCorp. Both easily dispatched their opponents in the last round, ultimately earning almost the exact same vote totals. This will be the match to watch in the Sweet 16.

Fanon: #1. Emma and Regina – Once Upon a Time vs. #2. Lena and Kara – Supergirl

---

On Riverdale, Cheryl Blossom Lives in Her Own Lesbian Gothic Fairytale Now

It’s the season five midseason finale Riverdale recap, and every character is just in a show of their own! Five different scary stories to tell in the dark make up “The Pincushion Man,” and I am left wondering what the hell is going on in this cursed town!!!!!

---

Cheryl Blossom’s Lesbian Gothic Fairytale

After briefly turning against Hiram last episode, Reggie returns with his tail between his legs, eager to prove his worth. Hiram Lodge’s latest scheme? Mining for palladium. And the Blossom maple groves are supposedly full of it.

Cheryl and Minerva skip through the maple groves, and frankly, it’s a tease! We’re made to believe for all of five seconds that Cheryl could just have a nice day with her new art girlfriend, frollicking in some maple groves. Cheryl tells Minerva that they’re going to “harvest our sweet, sweet sap,” and it’s not a euphemism! They’re literally gonna harvest some sap. But turns out the maple trees are running dry, which Nana Rose attributes to the family curse. She claims that Cheryl cannot be happy because then there will not be any maple. Kinda fucked up, Nana! Let Cheryl be happy!

Cheryl is very unhappy, because Reggie has Nana sign over all the maple groves. She figures they’re cursed so might as well sell them Hiram’s way. But Cheryl informs Hiram and Reggie that the contract is null because she had Nana Rose legally declared senile years ago. My favorite part of this is that Cheryl just walks into Hiram’s office with zero introduction and then marches out? Does he leave all of his home’s doors unlocked? Is there no security at all? Isn’t he, like, an organized crime leader?

Reggie’s next plan is to just burn the maple grove down. And he’s nearly successful in taking down all the trees as well as Thornhill, but at the very last moment, Penelope Blossom returns home. Because there has been a prison break! More specifically, Hiram has orchestrated a prison break at his own for-profit prison in order to further his goals of terrorizing Riverdale. So Penelope returns to the Blossom ancestral manor to warn Cheryl that a blaze has been set upon their maple groves and is encroaching upon Thornhill. Nana Rose says it’s the curse at work again, and she suggests that the only way to break it is by “sacrificing the interloper,” as in Minerva, and Cheryl and Penelope look at her like they will absolutely do exactly that, but she gets out of there before anything can happen.

Next, the Blossom women turn to prayer. It’s a whole occult moment as they call upon a higher power to CHANGE THE DIRECTION OF THE WIND? And it works?! While all of this is unfolding, there’s dramatic organ music, red and black silk and lace, candlelit shadows. It’s aesthetically delightful and narratively nonsensical, and even though I do hope that Cheryl can one day just chill out, her V.C. Andrews-ass life is admittedly very entertaining.

Archie Andrews’ War Drama

This is without a doubt the most boring plotline. As a reminder, Archie Andrews is a military recruiter at a low-income high school now, which is fucked-up, but I’m sure he’ll be onto a new hobby/career path any day now. His old commanding officer shows up to tell Archie that he’s nominating him for a war medal, which Archie thinks is weird because his last mission in the military was pretty disastrous and deadly. A call from a reporter confirms that his CO is being investigated for sending Archie’s men on a dirty mission. Archie seeks guidance from reformed mercenary Uncle Frank, who says it sounds like his CO might be using the medal to further a cover-up. Blah blah blah.

Things pick up steam a bit post-prison break when a bunch of inmates show up to destroy the high school. You see, Hiram is not too happy that Riverdale High is hosting a parent-teacher conference, because if there’s one thing Hiram hates, it’s teenagers living their lives. Perhaps some TV villains would merely sabotage the evening by, idk, setting a small fire at the school or messing with the plumbing or something. But NO, Hiram has paid the escaped inmates of his prison to violently attack the high school. Archie and Uncle Frank have to defend the high school from these attackers. It’s just like war! Or something! Archie also stands up to his former CO. Good for him?

Veronica Lodge’s Divorce-Horror Story

Surprise, surprise: Chadwick does not want to sign divorce papers. Veronica decides to fly back to New York after he blackmails her with pictures of her kissing Archie. But she also admits that she wants closure. On the night that their helicopter went down, Veronica had wished that Chad would die. They fought at a party, she secretly wished him dead, and then they almost died in the accident. She felt guilty, so she stayed with him despite the obvious flaws in their marriage. Now that she’s seeking a divorce, he’s getting in the way, but so is her guilt. It’s like Marriage Story but with more generational wealth and helicopter crashes (I have not seen Marriage Story).

Chad attempts to turn up the charm as soon as she arrives in New York. He’s layering it on real thick, staging a romantic candlelit dinner with Chinese takeout, playing their wedding song, reminiscing on the good ol’ days. There is, of course, a catch. He has no intention of signing the divorce papers at all. And he’s armed with much more leverage than the blackmail photos. He made some bad investments and used Veronica’s jewelry shop to do some shady business deals in an attempt to recoup his losses. Yes, to the surprise of literally no one, Chadwick Gekko is an evil finance bro with a big ego and little to no actual skills. Now he’s effectively holding Veronica hostage.

Jughead Jones’ Writer’s Block Shroom Trip

Jughead’s agent lets him know that “Pop Culture Weekly” (lol) wants to run an excerpt from his latest project. They usually reserve this honor for authors like Stephen King—to which Jughead says “screw you, Stephen King.” But Jughead hasn’t really been writing so much as thinking about writing. His “alien abduction as metaphor for trauma” premise isn’t exactly fun, sexy fodder for a glossy mag. So he decides to do what he did the last time he experienced writer’s block: psychedelic mushrooms.

More specifically, maple mushrooms? He asks Tabitha, who he shares a kiss with at the very start of the episode, to basically babysit him while he trips, and she’s like “ha ha i think you should maybe not do this?” But he moves forward with it anyway, determined to embrace his inner traumas and then turn it into art? It sounds dicey!

His ex Jess shows up, which makes Tabitha finally agree to keep an eye on Jug while he does the mushrooms, because she figures that’s better than him welcoming his chaotic ex back into his life. Jug’s trip is all fun and games until he’s indeed confronted by the ghosts of girlfriends past. He hallucinates about both Betty and Jess, and it’s clear that he never got over Betty cheating on him and then slowly poisoning their relationship over the course of senior year. His relationship with Jess definitely sounds like it was very far from healthy, hinging on binge-drinking and drama. Jughead supposedly gets some writing down amid all these nightmarish hallucinations, but AT WHAT COST? Because also, Tabitha returns to the bunker to find that he has escaped the handcuffs she put him in in an attempt to get him to actually sit at his desk and write, leaving behind a bunch of blood. We’re made to believe that the mothmen got him once again.

Betty Cooper’s Dysfunctional Family Nightmare

I have saved the absolute most terrifying story for last, because wow is there a lot going on here! Betty’s sorta-boyfriend-sorta-boss (like seriously, what is their deal?) is in town, and things get very disturbing when he casually lets slip that he has been studying Betty and her family and WRITING HIS DISSERTATION about the Coopers because he is simply fascinated by the nurture vs. nature implications of Hal, Charles, Chic, and Betty and the supposed “serial killer gene” that runs in the fam. As a reminder, Chic is not actually related to them. He is Betty’s fake brother, but he is in a romantic relationship with Betty’s real brother Charles. And they are both serial killers.

To make things even creepier, Dagwood and Juniper, whose ninth birthday it is in this episode, have been exhibiting some worrisome behavior. They pushed a classmate down the stairs, and he got badly injured, and when Betty points out to the twins that he could have died, they barely react.

Glen should have, uh, maybe mentioned to Betty that he was writing a dissertation on her literal family before pursuing a personal relationship with her—to say the least!!!!! Also, as Betty points out, teen girls are literally dying in Riverdale, and all he seems to care about is his dissertation! Glen is bad.

But he still doesn’t deserve what ends up happening to him later in the episode. While some of the escaped inmates decided to get the hell out of town and others decided to do Hiram’s bidding, Charles and Chic thought this was the perfect time for a family reunion. They show up at the Cooper household with guns and generally threatening auras. “Let’s just get through whatever this is,” Alice tells Betty, as if this is merely an inconvenient situation where, like, a random uncle going through a midlife crisis shows up uninvited to a family birthday party with his third wife. And not, you know, two actual murderers crashing a children’s party!

Chic and Charles want to get married, right here right now. So the twins’ birthday party quickly becomes a gay wedding? Alice is conveniently already ordained, because she was intending on marrying them at the prison. I am! Losing it! Mid-wedding, Glen shows up, so then the party changes gears once again, as Chic and Charles propose a little game. There really is some Billy Loomis and Stu Macher energy to all these scenes—only instead of homoerotic undertones, it’s all right there at the surface. Chic and Charles introduce the Pincushion Man game, which consists of everyone taking a turn stabbing Glen. Fun stuff! Juniper’s first up as the youngest, and Betty interjects to say that hey maybe asking a nine-year-old to stab a man might cause some permanent damage. Charles agrees, because I guess even these two serial killers have some personal morality rules. In any case, I think Betty only marginally spared Juniper some trauma, because these twins have already been exposed to some very messed-up stuff at THEIR OWN BIRTHDAY PARTY. The kids are not alright!

Betty ends up pulling off a very good horror-action moment where she does indeed stab Glen to go along with Chic and Charles’ deranged game but not enough to kill him and then knifes Chic to death and shoots Charles. RIP to Betty’s fake brother and Betty’s real brother. Long live the serial killer gene.

This is without a doubt the worst and most upsetting family gathering that has ever happened on this show, and I’m including the time Cheryl tricked her family into thinking they had eaten……..a human being. Between the dark-fairytale-esque Blossom curse and the Cooper slasher movie vibes, this episode is indeed steeped in generational trauma and the horror of familial dysfunction. I honestly love when episodes of this show feel like a smashing together of several genres and distinct stories that play around with different aesthetics and vibes. Riverdale’s universe is always its most immersive at its most surreal and campy.