In the ‘Riverdale’ recap, Archie’s loyalties to the Lodge family are tested while Betty and her mother attempt to cover up a murder…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
‘Riverdale’ has done an admirable job of covering up several mysteries since the show started but dropping an FBI agent in our laps to keep an eye on Archie Andrews was always a bit of a stretch.
In the latest episode, we finally discover that FBI Agent Adams isn’t working for the government at all — to nobody’s surprise — but ‘Riverdale’ still managed to slip in one head turner by revealing who sent him after Archie in the first place and why it had to happen.
Elsewhere this week, Betty and Alice Cooper do a poor job of covering up a murder that happened at their house and it nearly backfires on the as the family continues to deal with the fallout of welcoming Chic back into their lives.
And Veronica does her best to broker a peace treaty between her father and the Southside Serpents to stop an escalating war brewing between the two factions but it’s safe to say these rivals won’t be breaking bread any time soon.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘Riverdale’ titled ‘Chapter Twenty-Six: The Tell-Tale Heart’…
Hand of the Dead Body
Following the shocking conclusion of last week’s episode when Betty returned home from a night spent with Jughead to discover her mother cleaning up the blood pouring out of a dead body laying on their dining room floor.
Of course, Alice is stunned to see Betty standing there looking down at her handiwork but she doesn’t want her daughter involved in this at all. While Betty wants to call the cops, Alice insists that the authorities would only muddy the waters of what actually happened and it would probably end with Chic in handcuffs.
When Hal calls insisting on dropping by to pick up some toiletries, Betty is forced to help her mother clean up all the blood and dump the dead body in an abandoned water drain on the edge of town. Chic is no help as he just sits there like ‘Rain Man’ just teetering on the brink of breaking — or at least that’s the way it seems.
Hal arrives at the house and while he smells a strong scent of bleach in the air, the tension with his wife and daughter quickly override any suspicions he has about what’s happening.
The next day, Betty is wrought with guilt over what unfolded and things get even worse at school when she hears about a dead body being discovered by the cops — and while it’s actually Papa Poutine, the Canadian gangster likely killed by Hiram Lodge — it still sends her running to the bathroom to vomit.
Strangely enough, it’s Cheryl Blossom who offers to comfort Betty in her time of need, but she brushes her off and instead runs back to the drain pipe where the body was dumped.
Now I’m no master criminal but I’m assuming it’s a bad idea to go back to deal with the body of the person your mother just murdered and start rifling through his clothes, but that’s exactly what Betty does before finally finding his phone when it starts ringing. Betty takes the phone and starts researching the man who died in her dining room the night before.
Meanwhile, Hal is having his own extracurricular activity outside of the Cooper house with an ongoing affair with Penelope Blossom. While she’s acting as a madam in town, Penelope tells Cheryl that her attraction to Hal is very real and so is what they have together. Cheryl doesn’t like the idea of her mother breaking up a family so she comes clean to Betty about what’s happening with Hal and Penelope.
So when Betty comes home to find Hal raging on Chic, claiming that he stole his father’s antique watch while still wondering why the whole house smells of bleach, she confronts him with the affair to keep him quiet. Hal leaves the house without finding his watch or discovering what actually happened the previous night out of fear that Betty will expose him to Alice.
As for Chic, he deals with all of this by creepily sitting by the fire one night and going through an old family album where he cuts Hal out of one of the family pictures in a very Mark Wahlberg ‘Fear’ sort of way. It’s clear by now that Chic is one twist short of a Slinky but we’re still not sure what he has in store for the Cooper family.
Finally, Betty ends up coming clean to Jughead about the dead body and what unfolded at her house the previous night. By this time, Betty discovered that the person who was killed was actually a drug dealer, which means Chic probably owed him money and this situation just escalated. Thankfully, Jughead is able to help her get rid of his car after it’s been sitting out on the street for the past two days while calling in some extra help to ensure the body isn’t discovered.
That’s when F.P. Jones enters the picture while offering to help Alice and Betty with this clean up, seeing as he has experience with this sort of problem.
He moves the body and buries it, covered in lye, and within a week the entire corpse will disappear like it never happened. With that, F.P. closes the loop on this dead drug dealer while clasping hands with Alice to remind her that Serpents always take care of their own. It’s only a matter of time now before Alice and F.P. are back together again, right?
The dead body has been dealt with but you have to wonder how much longer until the Coopers are forced to confront what’s actually been happening since Chic first arrived in their lives.
Let’s Go To War
After figuring out that Tall Boy lopped the head off the General Pickens statue at the behest of Hiram Lodge, F.P. wants to return the property to the town to prove that the Southside Serpents had nothing to do with it in the first place. Unfortunately, Jughead already took it upon himself to send the head to Hiram as a message, which he believes is a declaration of war by the Southside against him.
Veronica decides to intervene to stop the oncoming battle between her father and the Southside Serpents by offering to broker a meeting between the two sides where they can hopefully hash out their differences.
Jughead manages to throw a wrinkle into the proceedings when he confronts Mayor McCoy after figuring out that the Drive-In Theater, Southside High School and the trailer parker where he lives are all properties owned by the city. That makes him wonder if Mayor McCoy wasn’t paid off by the Lodge family to close all three and then sell the properties to her benefactor?
That leads Mayor McCoy to threaten the Lodge’s to expose them if her job is threatened.
Once F.P finally sits down with Hiram, the two sides seem to come to an agreement. Hiram will pay off the city of the back rent owed by the people living in the trailer park but in return he wants to squash the expose that Jughead plans on running that connects him to corruption in the mayor’s office.
F.P. shoots down the deal and now the two sides remain at odds.
As for Veronica, she’s starting to have second thoughts about her father’s business, especially after hearing about Papa Poutine being murdered. Still, she’s trying to handle things as a dutiful daughter while attempting to prevent anymore bloodshed.
To achieve this goal, Veronica pays a visit to Mayor McCoy and warns her that if she doesn’t step down quietly, her father is not only going to drum her out of office but he’s going to do so with a scandal by exposing her affair with Sheriff Keller. Remember earlier in the season, Mayor McCoy got busted doing the dirty with Sheriff Keller when the Riverdale high kids were following him to see if the good cop was actually the Black Hood killer.
Mayor McCoy opts to leave her post gracefully and doesn’t say a word about Hiram Lodge or his generous donations to her re-election campaign. Hiram questions Veronica about what unfolded but she smiles and promises that she had nothing to do with how this entire situation played out.
Welcome to the Family
Archie is still trying to walk the line between his loyalty to the Lodge family and the FBI agent that’s needling him for information. Archie refused to give up anything on Papa Poutine’s murder last week and he does the same thing again in the latest episode with Agent Adams still pressing him to give up the goods.
To try and coax Archie to turn rat, Agent Adams even hands him an envelope full of cash as payment after acting as his informant for the past few weeks. It is true informants can be paid for information but the amount of money that Archie gets seems like a lot.
Regardless, Archie doesn’t stay in Adams’ good graces for very long after he tries to pin Papa Poutine’s murder on another associate after talking to Hiram about the murder. Hiram denies having anything to do with the killing and Archie seems to believe him, which is why he feeds information to Agent Adams about another gangster that had it out for Papa Poutine.
It all comes crashing down on Archie when he returns home one day to find Agent Adams sitting at the kitchen table with his father. It seems the FBI is interested in Fred Andrews’ construction employing some illegal workers over the years and now they are going to be forced to go through several years worth of records to prove what was legal and illegal. Fred cops to the fact that he may have employed some of these folks and this might land him into serious hot water.
That leads to Agent Adams giving Archie one more chance to prove himself by handing over a bug to plant in Hiram’s office so the FBI can spy on him, while hopefully gaining some information that could put him away once and for all. Archie agrees but when it comes time to finally do the deed, he ends up coming clean to Hiram about everything that’s unfolded while asking for his help in dealing with this FBI agent.
Hiram thanks Archie for his honest and promises to get back to him within 24 hours.
The next day, Archie gets a knock on the front door as the Lodge’s personal driver is there to pick him up for a clandestine meeting with ‘the boss’. Archie grows more and more suspicious when the driver goes past the apartment building where the Lodge family resides and then gets scared when he finds out that this is a private meeting in a more secluded location.
When Archie finally arrives, he exits the car and walks to a cliff overlooking a steep embankment where he finally meets the boss — it’s Hermoine Lodge.
She tells Archie that Agent Adams is one of her capos and he was sent after him to prove whether or not the boy her daughter loves so much could actually be trusted. Archie passed the test with flying colors and now she officially welcomes him into the family.
‘Riverdale’ will return with a new episode on Wednesday night, March 7 at 8pm ET on the CW.
