Riverdale season 5, episode 10 review: Who needs logic in Riverdale?

Riverdale season 5’s midseason finale increased the tension tenfold and pulled down all the logic as Hiram Lodge accelerated his plan to destroy the town, but could it bring about a worthy close to the first chapter in this revival season?

Riverdale has been enjoying a renewed sense of purpose ever since it shattered its own status quo through the trusty old time-jump technique. Seven years into the future and the veteran TV show is free from much of the recurring storylines – and, by extension, the issues that came with them – that ultimately hindered its progression.

Archie Andrews finally feels like a main character in his own show, with his desire to save his hometown serving as the ultimate tribute to his father’s love of Riverdale. Jughead Jones and Betty Cooper are enjoying some new and interesting dynamics with other characters while the show continues to set the stage for their much-anticipated romantic reunion further down the line. And Veronica Lodge has been reinvigorated because she’s not tied to her stale father (though it does seem like that feud is slowly making a comeback).

Now we find ourselves here: The reboot’s midseason finale, in which some of those storylines reach at least something of a crescendo before setting the stage for the back half of the season. Did it pull it off or did some of those stories begin to fall apart (like they have many times before on this show)? Let’s find out what went down in the Riverdale season 5 midseason finale “Chapter Eighty-Six: The Pincushion Man”.

What happened in Riverdale season 5, episode 10?

Where to even begin? That’s how absolute bonkers Riverdale‘s midseason finale was, that a writer as used to the show’s outlandish antics as you can get has no clue how to sum up the events that went down. Riverdale is used to going big instead of going home, but this week it went big before it went home to ensure that it remains in our minds during its spring hiatus.

Hiram Lodge’s evil scheme to obtain the Blossom land so that he can dig for some palladium resulted in him having Reggie burn the Blossoms’ maple groves. Of course, he also didn’t like the fact that there was a parent teacher conference taking place in Riverdale High so he engineered a breakout of his own prison and sent the criminals into the high school to destroy it and all over town too because why the heck not?!

Elsewhere, Veronica unsuccessfully tried to get Chadwick to sign the divorce papers and found out that he had fraudulently claimed her business was responsible for some dodgy dealings (after one last night of passion, that is), Archie was offered the chance to be awarded a medal of honor for his final mission in the army and ended up discovering that his general was dirty and Jughead Jones decided to ingest Maple Mushrooms so that he could write a story and ended up vividly making out with figments of his imagination all while seeing aliens. All in a Wednesday in Riverdale.

When in Riverdale…

There comes a time when you have to have a conversation with yourself and ask yourself if you’re really enjoying what you watch. In spite of what others say about it, does it thrill you, engage with you, baffle you and, at times, completely destroy you? Does it make you feel something? If that answer is yes, then you know you’ve found a show worth sticking with.

For the longest time, it was hard to figure out where Riverdale stood. A show that has always been pretty “out-there”, its first season was still relatively grounded when you look at what came next. And it got so used to baffling and bewildering its fans that the most cynical of viewers might have started watching it on autopilot, expecting the logic-defying shocks instead of feeling them because the show had played its off-the-wall card one too many times.

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That’s what made the fifth season so darn compelling. By resetting its status quo, it stripped things back a little and found some of that small town heart it had in the beginning. So when it went all wacky in “The Pincushion Man” and started defying logic all over again, it had this writer having that very conversation with himself. And you know what? The answer was: Yes.

Even for a show as crazy as Riverdale, “The Pincushion Man” was ambitiously bonkers. Very little of what happened in it actually made sense but if you pull away that need for logic, there is an oddly rare kind of brilliance about it. Alice’s BTW I was ordained as a minister online so that I can marry my murderous son to his murderous boyfriend who once pretended to be my murderous son shtick is kind of side-splitting when you think about it, as was Cheryl’s inexplicable fleeting decision to consider sacrificing Minerva. And the fact that the Blossoms prayed for wind and got what sounded like an apocalyptic one to put out the fire (instead of, uh, running out of the house to safety) was deliciously logic-defying.

I think part of what made this work was both the fact it came after a few episodes that actually contained some real emotional logic and that it was the midseason finale. We expect high intensity and thrills at this point in the season and we certainly got that (albeit in a very exaggerated Riverdale kind of way). It’s a contrast between how brilliantly Riverdale can handle both the serious and the exaggerated in short term bursts but it’s imperative that it doesn’t stray too far into either territory.

This was a reminder of that. A wonderful, hilarious and downright ridiculous reminder of that.

Riverdale Ramblings

• This is Riverdale‘s last episode before its midseason hiatus. It will be replaced on The CW’s schedule by Kung Fu before it returns to screens on July 7.
• I’m not normally one for Riverdale‘s meta “we’re Riverdale and anything can happen here” excuse for senseless storytelling but this episode was so damn off-the-wall in all the right, wrong and in-between ways that I just went along for the ride. It was a strange experience but I had a lot of fun.
• It was great to see Archie take a stand against his former Army general. I just hope we don’t see him dragged into another legal battle because the constant need to make small town Archie something other than small town Archie (which he is so good at) is quite frustrating.
• Jughead and Tabitha have great chemistry. I was surprised at their decision to remain friends considering where it seemed like their story was going. If they do venture down the romantic route at some point, though, I’m also looking forward to seeing them explore that possibility.
• Cheryl Blossom’s brief verbal slaying of Hiram Lodge and Reggie had big “YAS QUEEN” energy.
• I will say that the show relies on Alice being off-screen too much to throw her into whatever convenience suits the narrative. A Farmie? Yeah that’ll do. An FBI informant? Sure thing. Ordained minister ready to marry her son to a psychopath who almost killed her family? Yeah why not. The moments are fun in the story, but long-term, it’s harming her character.
• So what did happen to Jughead? How did he escape the cuffs? Are aliens real? Honestly, who knows anymore.
• It is important that the show regains that partial seriousness it had after the time-jump when it returns. That said, I’m going to be kind to this one because it made me feel things that wacky Riverdale normally doesn’t and provided me with an hour of escapism that truly brought a smile to my face.

What did you think of Riverdale season 5, episode 10? Are you looking forward to Riverdale season 5’s return? Let us know in the comments below!