‘Riverdale’ Ending Explained: Wait, Were They Dead The Whole Time?

After seven seasons and 137 episodes, Riverdale aired its series finale, appropriately titled “Chapter One-Hundred Thirty-Seven: Goodbye, Riverdale,” tonight on The CW. But even for TV’s wildest series, you might not have seen that ending coming… Particularly after it left some things ambiguous in terms of the final fates of the characters.

Wondering exactly what happened at the end of Riverdale? Need the Riverdale series finale ending, explained? Good news: that’s literally the title and purpose of this article. So no need to waste too much time, let’s get to it. Here’s what happened in Riverdale Season 7, Episode 20, and what those final, closing moments mean for the show — including a breakdown of Jughead’s (Cole Sprouse) final speech on the series… And which Jughead was delivering it.

Riverdale Season 7 Plot Summary:

Okay, actually a little bit of preamble here first as I’m sure some folks reading this probably tuned out during Season 3 and are idly wondering, “hey, did Betty and Archie get together, or what?” If that is you, strap in there, folks, and get ready for a wild ride.

The short version is that thanks to the machinations of an evil sorcerer in Season 6, the town of Riverdale was destroyed by a comet. Not the rest of the Earth, just Riverdale. At the last second, Tabitha Tate (Erinn Westbrook), who is able to manipulate time and is kind of an angel, shunted everyone in town back to 1955 to keep them safe. Not only that, but the characters, who had previously grown to adulthood, were now teenagers again and living through their Junior Year of Riverdale High — where we first met them way back in Season 1.

While Tabitha was off “untangling the timelines” in order to return them safely to 2023, she wiped everyone’s memories and gave Jughead the mission to “bend towards justice.” Basically, if they could make Riverdale — and the world — a better place, then the circumstances that led to that classic Riverdale darkness, which in turn allowed that evil sorcerer to take over the town, would never happen.

Good news: it worked. In the penultimate episode of the series, “The Golden Age of Television,” Tabitha returned to reveal they were able to shore up the timeline by introducing concepts of tolerance and inclusivity decades before they would have appeared otherwise. According to Tabitha, that positivity will only grow and be better — but there’s a catch. She was able to shore up the timeline, but in order to do that she made this idyllic 1950s version of Riverdale the main timeline, and eliminated all of the others. Meaning, they all can never return to 2023.

Instead, she offered her friends a choice to remember their pasts in the, er, future. Jughead and Betty (Lili Reinhart) chose to remember everything – the good and the bad. Everyone else chose to remember just the good times. How did they remember this? Why, by binge-watching Riverdale, of course. No, this is not a joke. Really. They watched Riverdale, on Riverdale. This show, man. Nothing like it.

That brings us to the Riverdale series finale, “Goodbye, Riverdale.”

Riverdale Season 7, Episode 20, “Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: Goodbye, Riverdale” Plot Summary:

In the series finale, we jump forward 67 years from the last episode. Betty is now 86 years old and on her deathbed. She’s reading an obituary in the newspaper that we later find out is for Jughead, who recently died at age 84. Why is Jughead somehow now two years younger than Betty? Why are you worrying about that? Forget it! Ignore it! Move on!

Anyway, she tells her granddaughter Alice that she’d like to visit Riverdale one last time. That night, she’s visited by an angel version of Jughead, dressed like he was way back in the first season of the series. He offers to take her to one day of her choice, and she decides to go back to the end of Senior Year, when she was out with the mumps. Because of that, she never got her yearbook signed by her friends, and always regretted it.

So they travel back to that day, and Old Betty gets to revisit high school in her younger, seventeen-year-old body (aka Lili Reinhart’s 26-year-old body). Over the course of the day we find out exactly how everyone — and we mean, everyone — died, as well as that over the course of Senior Year, with their memories returned, Betty, Jughead, Archie (KJ Apa) and Veronica (Camila Mendes) formed a polycule and all dated each other. Sorry, person who was reading this to find out if Betty and Archie got together!

We also discover that while mostly everyone lived happy, fulfilling lives, they did it separate from each other. Betty became a feminist magazine publisher, Jughead created a humor magazine, Veronica became a Hollywood producer, and Archie became a construction worker. Meanwhile, Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch) and Toni (Vanessa Morgan) stayed together and became activists. Kevin (Casey Cott) and Clay (Karl Walcott) also stayed together and lived happy lives in New York City. Reggie (Charles Melton) played professional basketball. And Fangs (Drew Ray Tanner) died in a bus crash four weeks later, survived by Midge (Abby Ross) and his daughter.

There are a couple more endings we get along the way — Alice (Mädchen Amick) got married and traveled the world, Pop Tate (Alvin Sanders) died in his sleep, Nana Rose (Barbara Wallace) got reincarnated a bunch — but those are the main ones. Which brings us to the end of the episode, aka the part you might be wondering about.

Riverdale Series Finale Ending Explained:

…and here’s where things potentially become confusing. Old Betty, along with her granddaughter Alice and Alice’s… Boyfriend? Husband? Taxi driver? pull up at Pop’s Diner, which is long since closed. There, they discover that Betty passed away in her sleep in the back of the car.

That’s when the younger version of Betty steps out of the car, into the neon lights of Pop’s. It’s the ’50s again, she’s got her classic ponytail and is dressed very similarly to how we met her in Season 1.

Who is there to welcome her into Pop’s? None other than Jason Blossom (Trevor Stines), aka the guy whose murder kicked off the events of the first season. Inside the diner, all her friends are there waiting for her. Toni and Cheryl are at a booth together. Pop Tate is working the counter. Reggie and Julian (Nicholas Barasch) are playing pinball. Even Dilton Doiley (Daniel Yang) and Ben Button (Moses Thiessen) are there. Betty says hi to everyone (even a few extras) and then heads over to the booth where she’s greeted by Archie, Veronica and Jughead. They’ve got a milkshake waiting for her — strawberry, her favorite. Everyone smiles and laughs, while outside there’s another Jughead, the Angel Jughead who was guiding Betty.

Here’s what Angel Jughead says as we go through a montage of everyone having a great time in Pop’s:

“We’ll leave them here, I think. Where they’re forever Juniors. Forever seventeen. Always grabbing a burger, or a shake. Always going to, or coming from, some dance, talking about school, the big game, who’s dating who, homework… Whatever movie’s playing at the Babylonium. You know, the moments that make up a life. It’s where they’ve— We’re we’ve, always been. In this diner. In this town. In the Sweet Hereafter. So if you happen to see that neon sign, some lonely night, at the end of that long journey… That journey that every one of us is on. Pull over. Come on in. Take a seat. And know that you’ll always be among friends. And that Riverdale will always be your home. Until then, have a good night.”

Jughead Jones (Angel Version), Riverdale

This Jughead walks away from Pop’s into the darkness, as we hear the familiar clacking of Jughead’s typewriter keys. The screen cuts to black, and we hear the typewriter’s carriage ding, singling the finishing of a line, a page, a story. Then the iconic Riverdale logo flashes on screen for the first time this season. The end.

…So, what’s going on here? Were they dead the whole time? Has this been a story told from Heaven? Why were there two Jugheads??

Full caveat here, this is just my interpretation of events, because there are definitely bits between the lines you can fill in yourself however you want. But this ending is very similar to (sorry to bring this up) the ending of Lost. In that show, they weren’t dead the whole time, despite what some viewers may tell you. However, in the final scenes of that series the denizens of the island all greeted each other in a sort of purgatory/heaven before they moved on.

That’s exactly what happens here. As established in previous seasons of Riverdale, as well as Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Heaven — called The Sweet Hereafter on the shows — is a place of happiness. Everyone kind of has their own, though they’re tied together. Here, we could be seeing Betty’s happy place, as she spends a large chunk of the episode lamenting that she wishes she stayed in better touch with her friends, and that if only they could stay young and beautiful forever. However, given how everyone has already died and greets her at this version of Pop’s, the more generous interpretation is they’re all in The Sweet Hereafter together, spending eternity with the people who meant the most to their lives, for at least two lifetimes.

That’s exactly what Angel Jughead is implying with his speech, though the way it’s phrased leaves it, again, up to the viewer, whether the story continues or not. That’s the other part of things here… Fans have often wondered about Jughead’s narration throughout the series. Is this a big book he’s writing? Is it Archie Comics? Was he writing Riverdale? Instead, though it doesn’t quite gibe with where we picked up with the narration in Season 1, the takeaway is that this omniscent, narrator version of Jughead is doing all of that: he’s telling the forever story of Archie Comics/Riverdale/these character’s lives. The show is over. The character’s lives are over. But it’s not really over, because Archie Comics is never over. Betty, Jughead, Archie, Veronica and the rest are icons, ideas that will live far beyond the series. And his implication is that if you ever want to revisit them — through watching the show again, through reading the books, or more esoterically when you, the viewer die and enter your own Sweet Hereafter — you can. They’re always there.

It’s a bit of meta-text at the end of a show that has lived and died on meta-text, commenting on the show ending and allowing the characters to end their own journies; while contextualizing what the show might mean to us, the viewers, as a seven year chunk of our own lives.

There’s one last question to answer, though:

Who Was Angel Jughead In The Riverdale Series Finale?

Over the course of Riverdale there have been multiple iterations of Jughead Jones. There’s the Season 1 Jughead we followed throughout the show, who was eventually shunted back to the 1950s. There’s a version of Jughead in the parallel universe of Rivervale who was eventually locked in the town’s bunker and forced to write stories about his friends for eternity. And there was also a Narrator Jughead from Rivervale, who was murdered and came back to life and then became the default version of Jughead in Rivervale once the other Jughead was locked in the bunker.

Pretty complicated stuff! So given the 1950s version of Jughead seemed to be sitting in the Pop’s booth at the end of the episode, laughing and having a good time with his friends, who was the Season 1 looking dude outside delivering that final monologue?

This is just a guess, but all of those, and none of those. Riverdale has played fast and loose with its mythology over the course of seven seasons, mostly floating on vibes rather than narrative sense. But over the course of this series finale we definitely get the feeling that Angel Jughead remembers some things from “his” life. He shows off a crown he drew on the bottom of one of the seats of the Babylonium movie theater. And when Betty asks him if he regrets never getting “circled,” aka married, Jughead pointedly looks at her and says, “Sometimes.”

So in some aspect, this is Jughead. An integrated version of Jughead, who has all the memories of his multiple lives. But he’s also clearly something else, which is not so sneakily intimated by a cherub in Old Betty’s room that lights up when he first appears.

There are two possibilities here: one is that this is the “real” Jughead guiding Betty, and the Jughead in Pop’s booth is part of Betty’s Sweet Hereafter. The second is that this is Raphael (Hamza Fouad), the previous Guardian Angel of Riverdale. In Season 6’s “Angels in America,” Raphael appeared as Jughead to Tabitha, and Sprouse plays these two characters similarly. However, the far more likely possibility is that this is Jughead, and he is the new Guardian Angel. Raphael passed that mantle to Tabitha, and in the second-to-last episode of the series the Angel Tabitha went away to… Wherever she was going. There’s an interpretation of events here where Jughead went back to Tabitha in The Sweet Hereafter, after he died, and took on the responsibility of being Riverdale’s Guardian Angel in her stead.

Is that what actually happened? Is this Jughead in his own Sweet Hereafter, living out eternity as a lonely narrator? Or is he something else? We may never know the real answer. Until then? Have a good night.