‘Riverdale’ Finale: Betty, Jughead, Archie, And Veronica All F**k Each Other

For seven seasons, fans of The CW’s Riverdale have desperately wanted to know which ‘ship is endgame. Would Betty (Lili Reinhart) and Archie (KJ Apa), aka Barchie, end up together? Maybe Veronica (Camila Mendes) and Archie, aka Varchie? Perhaps we’d see the return of Betty and Jughead (Cole Sprouse), aka Bughead, after a few seasons away. And what about the last-second pairing of Jughead and Veronica, aka Jeronica?

True to Riverdale form, the show came up with an elegant, completely unpredictable solution to who would end up with whom: they all fuck each other, for the entirety of Senior Year of high school.

Seriously.

In the final episode of the series, titled “Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: Goodbye, Riverdale,” we flash forward in time to 2023, where a now 86-year-old Betty is on her deathbed. On the eve of one last trip to Riverdale, she’s taken back in time by an angelic version of Jughead to revisit a day she missed towards the end of Senior Year. Though Reinhart is playing Betty, the conceit is that she has the mind of the much older Betty, and it’s only as the episode unfolds that she begins to remember what happened 67 years prior.

There’s probably a little more explanation necessary before we get to the whole “fucking each other” thing, particularly if you’ve tuned out of Riverdale for a while and were just curious if the ‘ship you were mildly invested in during Season 2 ended up together. Here’s the short version… Thanks to some weirdness involving an evil sorcerer, a comet, and an angel version of Tabitha Tate (Erinn Westbrook), the cast was sent back to the 1950s and were once again teenagers, Juniors in high school. The only twist was they were devoid of the memories of their previous lives.

In the episode prior, Angel Tabitha returned and gave them all their memories back by — again, not joking — having them binge-watch Riverdale. Though there was some rigmarole about only Betty and Jughead remembering everything, good and bad, while the rest of the cast only remembers the good things, that doesn’t really play into this episode.

What is important here is that these versions of the characters, now in their second run through high school, also remember their entire adult lives, all their experiences, and all their relationships. So as Betty starts to recall in this episode, they realize that instead of making a choice, they can all be with each other, and formed a polycule. A polycule, if you’re not hip with the lingo, is a series of interconnected, non-monogamous relationships, which is what the Core Four form here.

To be clear, that does not mean that the four of them all lumped together orgy style after the school’s sock hop; though it’s possible that happened at some point because *gestures wildly* Riverdale. But instead, as Betty confesses to Reggie (Charles Melton) later in the episode, while the public-facing relationships for all of Senior Year were Betty and Archie, and Jughead and Veronica, that’s not how things played out. The four of them would often go on double dates together, and while Barchie and Jeronica would often go home in their assigned couples, sometimes Archie would go back to the Pembrooke with Veronica, Betty and Jughead would hook up in Jughead’s train car, or “more often than you’d think” Betty and Veronica would spend the night together. Whither Jughead and Archie going to crown-town, you might ask? I guess we’ll never know.

Reggie, of course, is bummed out that they didn’t ask him, but he was busy with basketball so it’s probably okay in the long run.

Ultimately, the episode has the four of them living very separate lives after high school: Archie moves to California and becomes a construction worker and “amateur writer”; Jughead stays in New York and launches Jughead’s Madhouse Magazine, a popular comic/humor magazine for kids and teens; Veronica becomes a power-player in Hollywood; and Betty becomes a noted feminist publisher and magazine editor. Of the four of them, only Archie gets married, but to someone else who is never named, and we never meet; while Betty adopts a child, but never gets married.

To delve into this a little further, this isn’t simply one last shock swerve Riverdale is throwing the way of viewers, though it does serve that function as well. More subtly, it’s a final subversion of the institution that is Archie Comics. The show started as a way of twisting everything we knew about the pure innocence of the source material by injecting it with darkness, sex, violence, and what have you. It was never really about that — the show was taking a lens to America itself and pointing out how that innocent 1950s era as perpetually depicted in Archie Comics never really existed in the first place. But what we have here is the last turn that both pays homage to Archie Comics and the duality of attempting to end a never-ending story on television.

Baked into the premise of the comics — and viewers assumed, the show — is that Archie would make a choice: Betty, or Veronica? We know intrinsically that will never happen in the comics because it’s a forever-story. But on TV? With a definitive ending? Of course, it would… Right? Instead, what writer/director Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did with this final episode was give us something that directly contradicts what we expect from what is ostensibly a “teen show” and instead turns it into something that continues the lack of choice from the comics, while showing how the characters have grown in maturity and confidence since Season 1. They don’t need to make a choice since that’s not what’s important to their fulfillment in life. They all love each other, so why not love each other?

Yes, it’s surprising sex stuff from a show that loves to throw in surprising sex stuff; The OC never went polycule, for example. But it also is the show making a bold, wild choice even as the characters realize they don’t have to. There’s the added information that none of them end up together in the “real” world. But in this time, in this place that they exist in TV history, the real endgame was each other all along. Certainly not what fans expected when they would regularly tweet “#bugvarchie endgame” but it’s something that both feels wildly out of left field, and also natural for a show like Riverdale, which has purposefully gone in the other direction from every choice you’d ever expect.

Is it a choice that’s satisfying for fans? Probably not. But is it a choice that is satisfying for the characters? Yes. While the show started as a murder mystery powered by plot, this final season has been all about character. There was still a murder mystery present, but the point of Season 7 has been: can we take these heavily damaged characters and get them to a point in their lives where they’re mostly happy? Not living idyllic, perfect lives, because that’s not how the real world works. But mostly happy? And that’s what they get here. On their second go-around as teens, the characters realize they don’t need that teen angst because they ultimately all like each other. And, as proven time and again throughout seven seasons: they love sex. So why not bring those two ideas together, and form a polycule?

Ultimately, could Riverdale have ended any other way? Would a wedding that pissed off one fanbase while thrilling another have been more satisfying than seeing the characters we viewers love, love each other, and be devoted to each other? You can get a “choice” on literally any other show. This is Riverdale. Like it or not, Riverdale loves you in every way it can. And that’s satisfying, as Betty notes, physically, and emotionally.