‘Riverdale’: Jughead’s Ice Cold Voicemail Is Only Part of the Story

It was the voicemail heard ’round the world — or at least, all around the Riverdale fandom, as one highly anticipated/dreaded part of the show’s lore was finally revealed on last night’s (August 11) midseason premiere. That’s right, we finally got a chance to hear the message Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse) left for his ex-girlfriend Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) one fateful night, two years earlier. But while some viewers may have heard that final sentence of the message in particular and quickly expired with one last, sobbing gasp of “…bughead bones,” the voicemail is really only the beginning of a longer story.

“Jughead’s big mystery is him wrestling with and unpacking the repressed trauma, what happened during those seven years,” Riverdale showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa told Decider about the episode. “That’s his quest, this back half of the season, is to solve the mystery of those seven years, solve the mystery of what led to him leaving that horrific message for Betty, and dig out of the rock bottom he’s in. We’ve seen Jughead on the threshold of death, but I don’t think we’ve seen him as rock bottom before as we have in this episode. And he’s still got ways to fall before he starts crawling back out.”

But we’re putting the cart before the horse here. Like Betty and Jughead themselves would do, let’s lay out all the information that got us to this point, and it goes all the way back to the very first episode of Riverdale.

Okay, maybe that’s a little over the top. Instead, let’s start with the Season 4 musical episode, “Wicked Little Town,” where Archie (KJ Apa) and Betty made out after a particularly passionate rendition of “Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. That — and a post-kiss rendezvous at the town’s sex bunker that involved not a lot of sex, and a little bit of hand-holding — stayed secret from Jughead until after graduation. When Betty did finally tell him (Archie had already told his girlfriend Veronica, played by Camila Mendes), it caused a rift in the otherwise unshakeable Betty/Jughead relationship (called Bughead by fans) that only widened as the summer waned on. Though the couple never officially broke up as far as we know, a silent goodbye when Betty headed off to college, and Jughead’s weeks spent wandering the town until he headed off as well, left little to the imagination: Bughead was done.

Cut to one year later, and Jughead was alone at Pop’s Diner, waiting for three friends who never showed up. Four years after that, Jughead released a book titled “The Outcasts” that was not so loosely based on his life growing up in Riverdale, and Betty never showed up at his book release party. And that’s when he left the following voicemail:

“Betty, where the hell are you? You said you were going to come to my release party, but you bailed? Of course you bailed. You’ve just been blowing me off for years. Why should you even expect anything different? You know, I see you, Betty, I see what I should have seen seven years ago. You pretend to be nice, but you’re only looking for weak spots. And when you find them, you press on them like a bruise. Like when you hooked up with Archie. You know you found the one person who would hurt both me and Veronica, and you just went there. You’re a cold, fake, duplicitous bitch, and once people read my book, everyone is going to see that.”

We’ll come back to this in a moment.

We also know that Jughead had a rough time in New York before and after the book release, and something unequivocally terrible happened to him — so bad, in fact, that he has repressed the memories and is most likely hallucinating aliens. Seven years after the “teens” graduated high school, they all reunited in Riverdale, and Betty and Jughead briefly talked about the voicemail in question, with Jughead apologizing. And that brings us up to this week’s episode (with a few omissions that may become relevant later, like how Betty and Archie were boning in the same house Jughead has been crashing in, without his knowledge), where Betty revealed the voicemail, and Jughead jug-headed back to New York to figure out what trauma he’s repressed.

The big question is whether Jughead — and furthermore, Bughead — can ever come back after that voicemail. Even Aguirre-Sacasa calls it “horrific,” so there’s not much of a debate about whether it’s bad or not. The voicemail is undoubtedly bad, and calling a woman a “bitch” is pretty much crossing the line, regardless of context.

On the other hand, we as viewers have a perspective Jughead doesn’t. Unless there’s some sort of retcon of Betty’s motivations, she was not trying to hook up with Archie to hurt Jughead; they hooked up with each other because they both felt lost in their relationships, and wanted something simpler, the feelings they had for each other as kids. We’re definitely wading into murky waters here, but at least based on the information the show has given us, Betty kissing Archie was less about Jughead, and more about Betty, herself.

The reason I said earlier this goes all the way back to the beginning of Riverdale, though, is that the pilot episode started with Betty pining after Archie, and in Season 1 Jughead gave a whole speech about her really wanting him, and Jughead being in second place. In Season 2, Betty kissed Archie in a moment of weakness, before getting back together with Jughead, something that at the time sent him spiraling. And same in Season 4 — and potentially, given the secret friends with benefits thing that was happening this year, in Season 5 as well. So though it’s not entirely Betty’s responsibility, there is a wound on Jughead’s heart that due in part to her actions, has been reopened time and again.

But when it comes to this voicemail, there’s so much that we don’t yet know, information that we won’t find out until a few episodes down the road. Why did nobody show up to Pop’s a year after graduation? Why didn’t Betty show up to Jughead’s book release party, and more importantly, why did he expect that she would show up? The two seem relatively cordial after the Season 5 time jump, though nowhere near as close as they were back in high school, so what exactly went down during those seven years? Given we, as viewers, don’t have that information, it’s impossible to tell how much of Jughead’s voicemail is warranted — or not.

And we will get that info, or at least more of it, as Aguirre-Sacasa teased over at EW: “In an episode that focuses on Jughead, we’re going to unpack what the last few years were for him. We’re going to see how Betty and Jughead’s relationship continued after high school and how it devolved into what we found when they moved back to Riverdale.”

Back to the voicemail, there’s also something to be said for how Cole Sprouse delivers the lines. We don’t get to see him say them (yet… perhaps that’s coming in the flashback to his New York days), but this is clearly someone emotionally and physically exhausted who lets a small problem — Betty didn’t come to his release party — snowball into verbally spewing every hurt he’s held internally for five years, all in one voice message. It’s been pent up, clearly, and there are things mentioned that may not be relevant to the situation at hand. But who among us can say we haven’t left a message, or sent an e-mail, that started minor and then went way too far? A message that later we were very, very embarrassed to leave, but at the time was unavoidable given our mental state? None of us, I’d venture.

Add in that we know Jughead has a problem with drugs and alcohol, and you can see how bottled up feelings and the contents of a bottle can add up to a thirty second message he’d come to regret.

So again, this is the middle of a story, not the end. What comes next, both as Jughead pieces together his missing time in New York, and how Betty and Jughead deal with it going forward, will form how we as viewers judge both characters, and their relationship; both as a friendship, and as a potential rekindled romance. Will Bughead rise again? Or is Bughead, in fact, bones? We’re going to have to keep watching to find out.

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

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