Riverdale season 2, episode 1 review: A Kiss Before Dying

Reviewing Wednesday night’s season 2 premiere of Riverdale.

Riverdale returned for season 2 on Wednesday night and immediately dove into the season 1 finale. Archie Andrews frantically drives his father Fred to the hospital, where doctors tend to and carry him into a separate room. The teased darkness from the trailers has already begun.

There’s a bizarre dream or vision. It looks like the same gunman from Pop’s in the background, just before Jughead tells Fred he doesn’t make it. Oh, the teases of Fred’s death have only just started.

Jughead, Veronica, Betty and their parents meet in the hospital, where Betty’s mother questions if the Southside Serpents have anything to do with Fred being shot. She’s already upset over Jughead’s relationship with her daughter, which looks like a potential story for the first episode and beyond, as long as they’re dating. With Jughead’s involvement in this gang only increasing, what if it leads Betty down another road?

Archie is questioned by the Sheriff and suddenly stalls when asked for more information, and tries asking who the shooter is. He tells Jughead, separately, it’s due to a frustrated member of the fired construction crew. Archie is covering for his father and potential enemies that are after them, which is interesting and may prove costly later on.

Hey, Cheryl is back, except with more cryptic controversy. She says of a fire (one of the last season 1 scenes) to Betty and Kevin, while her mother is badly hurt and brought into a hospital room. As things get even stranger, Archie snaps at Veronica to leave, but she refuses to go. He seemed bound to give in, with Veronica as his comfort zone and the one person that can get him to relax, as established with the shower and dog-walking scenes in the first 30 minutes. So both relationships seem fine, but with issues that can bring both of them down.

Archie begins the painstaking process of picking the potential shooter out of a line at the police station. Everyone at the hospital disperses, leaving Veronica questioning if her mother, Hermione if she’s behind the “hit” on Fred. Hermione gets defensive and scorns Veronica for asking such a thing. A potential cover-up for Hiram, here?

There’s another bizarre dream of Fred, this time with a bullet wound magically appearing in his abdomen at Pop’s. That leads to the real-life Pop’s Diner, as Jughead tries asking Pop about the incident. He says this person is no ordinary robber, though, as in the Angel of Death. Well, whoever is behind this murder attempt is being played up as a monster villain and someone even more dangerous than Clifford Blossom in season 1.

We’re back to Cheryl, who threatens to end her mother’s life if information on what happened to her father gets out. Well then.

Archie gets ready to tell Veronica something about the shooting, but is stalled. With Jughead and Betty around, Archie reluctantly explains he froze while the gun was held to his head and the assailant bolted with the wallet.

There’s another dream of Archie marrying Veronica. Fred is there … but so is Clifford and Jason Blossom … and the gunman. Then, Fred shockingly opens his eyes and is coherent, speaking and everything.

Jughead and Betty take a positive but dangerous step forward in their relationship. She supports him in the Serpents. So, Jughead goes into his house, only to see the Serpents with an innocent man that’s beaten and bludgeoned.

Wait, is that the fabled Hiram Lodge? Veronica goes him and finds him and Hermione at the dining room table. After giving her father a kiss (maybe an interpretation of the episode title), Veronica tells her parents that Fred is alive, to which she gives no reaction. The death part is next, though.

Remember Ms. Grundy from season 1? She appears and is back to romantic relationships with her students. Once the student leaves, a man breaks in and seemingly kills her. It looks like the same person that attacked Pop’s.

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Wow. Whoever the man-on-the-loose is, it’s not about Fred and his business, at least that’s what it looks like, for now. Instead, it’s someone targetting Archie and the ones he loves. It’s someone that wants to make Archie’s life miserable and hellful, which may be why he wasn’t shot at Pop’s. This person wants to see Archie suffer, but who is it?

This episode provided the dark tone teased in all the promos and trailers. While Fred staying alive was the lone happy part, this episode was filled with doubt, suspense, questions, and death. It lived up to the episode title, but not for the reasons expected. It wasn’t Cheryl’s kiss, Betty and Jughead’s or Archie and Veronica’s, but Ms. Grundy’s, the teacher-turned-lover of Archie in season 1. She left Riverdale for Greendale, after her student-teacher relationship was exposed. Given the promo for episode 2, she’s a goner.

Notes passed around in class

• Did you catch the new Reggie? He appeared for a brief scene in the hospital. Charles Melton was cast as the replacement, after Ross Butler left for season 2 of 13 Reasons Why.
• I’m enjoying the Archie-Veronica dynamic. She’s the one person that soothes and takes his mind off the hardships of life, which was seen throughout this episode, as Archie worried over his father’s fate.

• Something tells me Jughead will regret being a Serpent soon, if he doesn’t already.
• I was about to be disappointed with Archie’s hold-back over not doing enough to save his father and feeling embarrassed. It seemed like an anticlimactic reason, until you notice how the gunman didn’t just kill Archie on the spot in the flashback. The visual meant more than it seemed.
• As of now, it’s really anyone’s guess who this unknown gunman is that wants to make Archie’s life a living nightmare. It doesn’t look like Hiram, who will be a major player in season 2 for possibly other reasons. Is the man someone we were introduced to in season 1?
• The interpretations of “A Kiss Before Dying” were all over the place. An excellent job to depict it as multiple things, only for it to mean something unexpected, from a character that wasn’t seen since the first episodes of season 1.

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Riverdale returns on Wednesday, Oct. 18 at 8:00 p.m. ET on The CW.