In the Riverdale recap, The Black Hood returns as Betty finds out some disturbing information about her brother and Archie is revisited with an enemy from his past…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
The revelation that the Black Hood is still very much alive and killing people capped off a musical episode of Riverdale a week ago and that’s exactly where we pick up this week.
The Black Hood’s return meant Midge’s untimely death and the entire town is mourning her loss while several others are acting out in rage.
Cheryl Blossom, who suddenly cared a great deal about Midge despite the fact that I can’t ever remember them interacting, is out for blood with Sheriff Keller, who is seemingly always a step behind the criminals in this town.
Archie is worried for his father’s safety after the Black Hood threatened to go back and finish all the people who escaped him previously but he’s got other problems to deal with this week from his own past discrepancies.
As for Betty, she’s always been the object of affection for the Black Hood and that will go even deeper this week as she also discovers a deep dark secret that her ‘brother’ Chic has been hiding this entire time.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘Riverdale’ titled ‘Chapter Thirty-Two: Prisoners’…
Funeral for a Friend
Midge’s death has left everybody in town rocked, especially considering almost everybody was convinced that the Black Hood was dead.
One person who never quite believed it was Archie Andrews and he’s teetering on the brink of crossing back over to ‘Death Wish Archie’, who went on a vendetta to serve vigilante justice to the man responsible for shooting his father. Veronica is concerned that Archie will break bad again but they end up with a whole other kind of problem to deal with this week.
Cheryl Blossom is enraged that another of her schoolmates has been cut down, this time one of her own River Vixens, and she’s out for blood. Cheryl lashes out at Sheriff Keller, who admittedly has been less effective than the cops on Scooby-Doo who always seem to let the meddling kids do the detecting for them. The same can be said for Sheriff Keller, who failed to solve Jason Blossom’s murder and now he’s come up short yet again where the Black Hood is involved.
Hermoine Lodge even plays on Cheryl’s emotional state and convinces her to pen a scathing editorial that leads to the deputy mayor putting Sheriff Keller on leave. Now his only hope to regain his job is if Fred Andrews becomes mayor because otherwise he’s going to be looking for a security job somewhere else.
As for Betty and Jughead, they immediately turn their attention to Chic, who just so happened to show up the night of the musical and seems to give everybody some seriously creepy vibes anytime he’s around.
Jughead wonders if perhaps Chic is a copycat killer while Archie isn’t convinced that Sheriff Keller just killed the wrong man to begin with when he shot former janitor Joseph Svenson. Jughead and Betty decided to do a little detective work after remembering that Chic may have spent time at the Sisters of the Quiet Mercy convent at the same time Svenson was the custodian.
Sure enough after Betty blackmails a nun to give up the information by promising to expose their gay conversion therapy practices, they find out that her brother did spend two years overlapped with Svenson when he was the janitor. Unfortunately that’s when Betty gets an even more shocking revelation as the nun shows her a photo of her brother — Charles Smith — because this kid is definitely not the Chic Cooper who has been living in their house for months.
Make Your Bones
Archie promises Veronica that he won’t crossover to the dark side again in his attempts to bring down the Black Hood but he’s still concerned for his father’s safety. He tries to convince Fred to go to Chicago until this whole thing blows over, but he refuses of course.
Archie then decides to take one more sweep at the old house where Svenson grew up and saw his family butchered when he was a child. Before Archie can even step inside, however, he’s jumped by three men wearing hoods over their faces.
No, this wasn’t the Band of the Black Hood but instead it’s the return of Nick St. Clair — the over privileged, date raping scumbag who Archie gave a beating to in the hospital after finding out he nearly assaulted Veronica.
Nick and his friends thump Archie before kidnapping him and making a call to Veronica. He demands that she hand over $1 million dollars so he can prove to his gangster father than he’s worthy of the family business.
When Veronica asks her father for the cash, Hiram refuses because it would send the wrong message to the underworld, after all Archie isn’t even family. He also won’t allow Veronica to go to the cops because it would bring undue attention to her family’s less than scrupulous business practices.
So Veronica takes matters into her own hands by looting the family safe, but when she comes up short of the $1 million in ransom money, Nick has another idea for how she can pay him off. Nick demands his night with Veronica after they got so rudely interrupted the last time she fought off his overly aggressive advances.
Veronica agrees while Nick tells Archie that not only is he never getting out of here alive but he sets up a laptop so he can watch a live stream when he bones his girlfriend.
At the hotel, Veronica sweet talks Nick and tells him everything he could possibly want to hear while Archie goes into a full on rage and finds a way to bust loose of his captivity. Archie knocks out one of Nick’s goons before sprinting across town to the hotel where he believes Nick is accosting Veronica.
When he finally breaks down the door, Archie finds Veronica standing over Nick, who is passed out after she gave him a dose of his own medicine by giving him a roofie. She also decided to demand a $1 million ransom from his family and the St. Clair’s were all too willing to pay to get their son back.
At home, Veronica presents her family with the spoils of war while warning Hiram that Archie is waiting for him and she already informed him that her parents were unwilling to fund his freedom.
When Hiram goes into the study, he doesn’t find an angry Archie but instead one who is desperate to prove himself. Archie says it’s time he makes his bones with Mr. Lodge and that means killing somebody and he can’t think of anybody better than this awful Black Hood character. Hiram agrees to help Archie however he can as wraps a huge smile around his face once again because he knows he’s got this kid wrapped around his little finger.
Angel of Death
The revelation that Chic is not actually her brother sends Betty and Jughead running back to town where they arrive at home to tell Alice what happened. When they show up, Chic is in the kitchen alongside Alice and that’s when Betty and Jughead have to break the news. Chic is not her son and he never has been.
Chic lashes out by grabbing a knife, cutting Alice and threatening Jughead until Betty clocks him over the head and knocks him unconscious.
They end up tying Chic to a chair in the basement while attempting to wrestle answers out of him what really happened to ‘Charles Smith’ aka the lost Cooper child. Chic tells them that Charles actually showed up at the Cooper doorstep years ago but Alice refused to see him and he left broken and alone before overdosing on Jingle-Jangle, which killed him.
Alice is distraught because she remembers interacting with the boy in the photo and she now feels responsible for her own son’s death. While the family finally comes clean to Hal about everything that’s been happening — including the murder that took place when Alice and Chic killed a drug dealer and then covered it up — she still has business elsewhere.
Alice comes clean to F.P. Jones that Charles was their baby together but she never told him about it. Now Charles is dead and she feels it’s all her fault.
F.P. decides to go back to the Cooper house with her so they can settle things with Chic once and for all. Meanwhile, Betty and Jughead go to the flophouse where they found Chic and they meet a neighbor who remembers when there were two people living in that cramped, one bedroom apartment.
The neighbor recognizes the photo of Charles and calls him the nice while Chic was the bad guy and she even remembers hearing them fighting one night before finding bloody sheets in the garbage the next day (not that she reported that to the police or anything). After that, Chic was the only person living in the apartment.
Back at home, Betty is torn with what to do about Chic but she receives a pair of phone calls from the Black Hood once again taunting her about how they are so much alike and how the sinners in this town need to pay. The Black Hood even offers to get rid of Chic for her as he’s clearly been a plague to her entire family.
Betty finally decides that is the best course of action so she kidnaps Chic at gunpoint with the weapon she stole from Miss Grundy and takes him out to the middle of a snow covered graveyard. Betty is able to get Chic to confess to killing Charles in a fit of rage before she wants him that he might have a 70-percent chance of survival if he runs right now.
Chic is confused but then he spots the Black Hood coming near them. With each passing second, Chic’s chances to live through this get lower and lower until he finally makes a run for it. The Black Hood pauses for a second as he stares down Betty before turning and giving chase to track down Chic.
When she returns home, Betty tells her mother that Chic won’t be a problem for them anymore as he’s jumped on a bus bound for nowhere rather than explaining how she handed off her faux-brother to a serial killer. Betty then asks where her father is and Alice responds that Hal has gone looking for her.
The timing is rather coincidental given the circumstances so does that mean Hal Cooper is the Black Hood? It certainly seems possible given his misgivings about so many people in this town but then again he was the prime suspect in Jason Blossom’s murder a season ago until he eventually cleared his name. It seems a little too convenient that the Black Hood would be revealed this early with several episodes still left to go this season.
Riverdale will return with a brand new episode next Wednesday night at 8pm ET on the CW.
