Here’s How Every Character Dies In The ‘Riverdale’ Series Finale

In the series finale of Riverdale, titled “Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: Goodbye, Riverdale,” everyone dies. Seriously.

Spoilers past this point, but the final episode of The CW goes the surprising route of taking the last ten minutes of the Six Feet Under finale, and expanding it to nearly 50 minutes; albeit in a much more positive, hopeful light than the HBO series.

In case you don’t know what any of this means, in the HBO show, set mostly in a funeral parlor, the final montage of the series shows every character individually growing old and dying. It’s a gutting, harrowing end to a series that never shied away from a gut punch. And while Riverdale doesn’t go quite as Grand Guignol, we do get to find out the final fates of characters we’ve known and loved for seven seasons in an emotionally charged manner that will guarantee there’s not a dry eye in the house.

In the episode, Betty is now 86 years old. On her deathbed, and the eve of one final trip back to Riverdale, she’s visited by an angelic version of Jughead (Cole Sprouse), who brings her back to a day she missed towards the end of Senior Year at Riverdale High.

A little more explanation here, in case you’ve tuned out of the show… Thanks to circumstances too complicated to explain, the characters have been sent back in time to the 1950s, and are once again teens in school. However, due to some shenanigans in the penultimate episode where they binge-watched Riverdale (yes, really), they now have complete memories of their time in the 1950s this season, as well as their memories of the previous six seasons of the show.

The conceit here is that as Angel Jughead shows the now young-again Betty (Lili Reinhart) around the day she missed, she begins to remember things from 66 years earlier – including how all of her friends passed away.

With that in mind, here are the final fates of every character in the Riverdale series finale: how they lived, how they died, and some that never died at all.

[NOTE: This list includes information from the extended version of the Riverdale series finale that will be available on streaming, on Thursday, August 24.]

1. Mary Andrews

   The first character we discover the final fate of is Mary Andrews (Molly Ringwald). In the ’50s, this version of Mary is a widower, taking care of her son Archie (KJ Apa) and working at the local dress shop. We find out that not only did she buy the dress shop, but she was reunited with Brooke Rivers (Luvia Peterson). In the main continuity of Riverdale, Brooke was Mary’s former roommate at Sarah Florence. They later came back together when Archie was interested in joining the Naval Academy, got married, and then divorced. Good news: this second go-around, they stay together “until the very end.”

2. Alice

   After divorcing Hal (Lochlyn Munro), Alice has finally achieved her dream of being an airline stewardess and traveling the world — sort of. She’s working on a local flight from Riverdale to Poughkeepsie, doling out peanuts… But she’s happy. That is, until one day when the pilot has a heart attack mid-flight, and Alice saves everyone by landing the plane. A thankful passenger invites her to dinner, they get married, and she ends up traveling the world. As Angel Jughead tells Betty, “She offered to send you postcards from every place you went–” with Betty finishing, “until one day the postcards stopped coming.”

3. Polly

   Though we don’t explicitly find out how Polly died, one of Riverdale‘s more troubled characters still has a happy ending. Despite them having a different father, she once again gives birth to twins Juniper and Dagwood. She also gives up burlesque dancing under the pseudonym Polly Amorous, but was still very happy.

4. Fangs & Midge

   The first real gut-punch in the episode, where you realize we’re about to find out how all these characters die, happens right after Betty gets her yearbook signed by Fangs (Drew Ray Tanner). With a little help from Josie McCoy (Ashleigh Murray), Fangs became a minor hit rock star, with a #8 single titled “Pixie Girl.” Thanks to his success, Midge’s (Abby Ross) parents allow them to get married. Unfortunately, Fangs dies four weeks later after a tire on his tour bus blows and the bus goes off a bridge.

   That’s the bad news. The good news is that his gold record, we’re told, will hang in the school’s music room for as long as Riverdale High is around. And thanks to his success, Midge and their daughter were taken care of for the rest of their lives. For Midge in particular, that’s a big step up from where we left her in the “present,” impaled on the back of the Riverdale High stage after the school musical.

5. Kevin & Clay

   After high school, Kevin Keller (Casey Cott) and Clay Walker (Karl Walcott) get an apartment together in New York City (seemingly above the Apollo Theater??) with the approval of their parents, who tell them to be careful. Kevin goes to NYU for musical theater writing, Clay goes to Columbia for literature. Ultimately, Kevin starts an Off-Broadway theater company, while Clay becomes a tenured professor at Columbia.

   …And the two stay together until the end of their days. We’re told that Kevin was 82 when he went to sleep and never woke up. Clay died a few weeks later while feeding pigeons on a bench in the park.

6. Reggie

   Season 7 Reggie Mantle (Charles Melton) has been all about basketball, and that’s exactly what his life became. After graduating, he went to play for Kansas State, then was recruited by the Lakers. During the summers he would work at his family farm until his folks died, and he ultimately had to sell the place. However, Reggie moved back to Riverdale, got married, had two sons who work at the Mantle Motors used car lot in the “present,” and taught basketball at Riverdale High. He was buried* in his hometown of Duck Creek, next to his wife and parents.

   *To be clear, he was not buried alive. This is Riverdale, but we’re past the wild murder town of the first six seasons.

7. Veronica

   One of the big emotional motivators of the final episode is Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes) making the decision to move to Los Angeles and become a movie producer… And that’s exactly what she does. After calling up her old friend Peter Roth (actual former head of Warner Bros. TV, Peter Roth), she gets a job at a movie studio, quickly works her way up, and becomes a major power player in Hollywood. We see that she produced not just a movie version of W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet,” but at least two sequels. Kudos to DuBois, get that money! And Angel Jughead tells us she won two Oscars, “created some of the most iconic movies of our time,” and was ultimately buried* in the Hollywood Forever cemetery.

   *Again, not buried alive. I cannot stress enough that everyone gets pretty normal endings here, with one exception.

8. Cheryl & Toni

   After their public art show in the episode, Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch) and Toni Topaz (Vanessa Morgan) stay together as “artists and activists” and settle in the Oakland Hills. Cheryl, we’re told, became an artist of some renown, with her paintings shown in museums across the country, and at least one in Europe. They also had a son together, Dale, “named after Riverdale, of course.” This — if you didn’t get it — was a not-so-sneaky reference to Morgan’s real-life son River, who is not named after Riverdale, and was previously not included as Toni’s baby in Season 6 (they used another baby/doll, depending on the scene). River makes his first on-screen appearance here in this episode as Dale.

   Anyway, back to the deaths. As Angel Jughead tells Betty, Cheryl and Toni died, “Peacefully. After living full, gorgeous, sexy lives.” Okay, cool it, Angel Jughead.

9. Julian Blossom

   As revealed in a scene deleted from the broadcast version, Julian Blossom (Nicholas Barasch) was a “bit of a lost soul” after high school. He enlisted in the army and died at age 28 fighting in Vietnam.

10. Nana Rose

    Also in the extended version of the episode, we discover that Nana Rose Blossom (Barbara Wallace)… Never died. Or rather, she did die, multiple times, but was reincarnated. A lot. Spinoff, anyone?

11. Principal Weatherbee & Mrs. Thornton

    Though we don’t find out how they died, again in the extended version of the episode it’s revealed that Principal Weatherbee (Peter Bryant) and Mrs. Thornton (Frances Flanagan) got married. Maybe they died of getting married? I don’t know.

12. Frank Andrews & Tom Keller

    Remember earlier when we mentioned that there is one non-normal ending? This is that one. After the reveal in the season’s penultimate episode that the two most homophobic characters in the ’50s, Frank Andrews (Ryan Robbins) and Tom Keller (Martin Cummins), were actually hooking up on the DL, we discover their final fates — once again, in the extended version of the episode. Turns out some unspecified amount of years later they picked up a hustler to hook up with, and were stabbed to death in a hotel room. That hustler’s name? Chic (Hart Denton).

13. Archie

    At the end of a party at Cheryl’s, Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) professes his love for Betty, but she shoots him down by telling him his entire future. As teased earlier in the episode, Archie joins Eisenhower’s public works project and makes it out to California. There, he meets a “sweet, strong girl who makes you laugh.” He settles in Modesto, has a family, and becomes a professional construction worker and amateur writer. “And you are so, so content,” Betty tells him. “And happy. And when you die, you ask to be buried here, in Riverdale. Next to your father.”

14. Pop Tate

    Pop Tate (Alvin Sanders) was actually the first to go, we discover, not Fangs. Betty and Jughead visit his grave, where we find out he died in his sleep on September 30, 1956 — towards the beginning of the teens’ second take on Senior Year.

15. Jughead

    Though we get a hint of this towards the beginning of the episode thanks to a quickly glimpsed obituary the older version of Betty is reading, we find out Jughead Jones’s ultimate fate while the Angel Jughead and Betty talk at Pop’s grave. Jughead lived to age 84*. He went on to create a comics magazine called Jughead’s Madhouse Magazine, a riff on both MAD Magazine and Jughead’s Mad House, a real title Archie Comics used to publish. We also find out he never got married or had kids. When asked if he ever had regrets about “not getting circled,” the Angel Jughead looks at Betty and says “Sometimes,” so interpret that how you will.

    *Jughead and Betty are the same age, right? Yet somehow Jughead dies at age 84 in 2023, and Betty is reading his obit when she’s 86. Trust Riverdale to get in one last bit of timeline nonsense, right before the end.

16. Betty

    The final death in the episode is saved for Betty Cooper. She briefly wakes up as her granddaughter Alice, and Alice’s unnamed boyfriend/husband/chauffeur pull into modern-day Riverdale. But by the time they’ve made it to Pop’s Diner, now long-abandoned, she has died in her sleep in the back of the car. We leave Betty in the show’s version of Heaven, called The Sweet Hereafter, headed into Pop’s where all her friends are waiting for her — forever seventeen.