After six years,Riverdalehas finally come to an end. What a rollercoaster of a show that was! It was a wild ride from the start all the way to the end. All with enough twists and turns to make people disoriented after the ride. Once the ride is over, you might be left with that feeling of wanting more. So you relive that thrill (like this show) all over again. Or it leaves you feeling queasy and needing a few minutes to bring yourself back to Earth. And this showhas had plenty of momentsthat left us with that feeling. So, how do we describe the finale ofRiverdale? Was it as exhilarating and strange as the rest of the show? Was it over before it even started? Were we left with more questions than answers?
The ending ofRiverdaleis actually very bittersweet. After all of its craziness, the show’s finale is a bit on the cliche side of going through the lives of everybody we have come to know through the perspective of one of the main characters. And yet, it makes sense for this series. After alien abductions, serial killers, supernatural entities, andgoing back in time to the 1950s,Riverdaledeserved to end with somewhat of a happy ending. Let’s deep dive into the finale of this teen drama.
Everyone Dies in the End
You would think Riverdale has taken enough lives? All joking aside, the finale is not as chaotic as some fans expected. Oddly enough, it was not totally anticlimactic either. It starts with an 86-year-old Betty reading Jughead’s obituary, keying in that she is the last remaining student from her class/year who is still alive. His ghost appears to her and offers her a chance to relive the last day at Riverdale High since she was sick with the mumps.
We thenlearn about the lives of the charactersand how some of them have passed on. Pop Tate ended up dying in his sleep after his senior year. Polly gave birth to her twin children and had a happy life with her family. Reggie played professional basketball for Kansas State before playing for the Lakers. Afterward, he became a coach for Riverdale High and had two sons. One of them runs the Mantle Motors.
Nana Rose lived through several reincarnations. Fangs got married to Midge and left for a summer tour. However, his tour bus crashed into the Rocky Mountains four weeks into his tour. Midge ended up raising their daughter alone. Archie’s mother fell in love with a woman named Brooke and opened up her own dress shop. Alice divorced Hal and became a stewardess. She married one of the passengers she saved when the pilot had a heart attack, and she successfully landed the plane.
Clay and Kevinattended different universities and more than likely had a long-distance relationship before settling down in Harlem above the Apollo Theater. Clay became a professor at Columbia University, and Kevin started an off-broadway theater company. Sadly, Kevin passed away at 82, with Clay following suit a few weeks later.
Cheryl and Toni moved west and stayed in Oakland Hills, where they both became artists. Cheryl had an incredibly successful painting career, with her work shown in various galleries and museums around the globe. Toni promoted activism in her beautiful artwork. They had a son and named him Dale after Riverdale. The couple passed away peacefully. In the extended version of the finale, Julian enlisted in the military and died at 28 in Vietnam. Tom Keller and Frank Andrews were murdered by a hustler they picked up at some point.
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Who Ends Up With Whom?
With all the complications with the main love square (Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead) and other love interests, fans have had theories about who would end up with whom. Will it be Bughead and Varchie? Barchie and Jeronica? Do they all end up together as a quad? Do they go their separate ways? The four were indeed ina romantic quad relationshipduring their senior year. But in the end, none of the core four ended up with each other.
Archie told Betty that it would always be the two of them—that whole “boy and girl next door” romance trope. But Betty knew that they were never meant to be. And maybe that was for the best. Jughead, Veronica, Betty, and Archie went their separate ways sometime after graduating high school. Jughead moved to New York City and started his own magazine called Jughead’s Madhouse Magazine. He did not marry or have children, and he passed away.
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Archie traveled west to build some highways but intended to return to Riverdale. However, he went to California and became a professional construction worker as well as an amateur writer. He settled down with somebody and had a family before he died. His body was buried next to his father’s back in Riverdale.
Veronica also went westback to Los Angeles and became a movie producer. She even won two Oscars for her movies. She died, and her body was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Betty was not only the last person in her Riverdale class to pass away, but she lived longer than the rest of the core four. Like Jughead, Betty also started up her own magazine called She Says Magazine. She also did not marry, but she adopted a daughter named Clara.
Clara had a child named Alice, which makes Betty a grandmother. She ended up dying at 86 years old in the back of Alice’s car as it pulled into Pop’s parking lot. The end scene is very bittersweet as it is the core four reuniting in Pop’s diner at the ripe age of 17. Possibly hinting that this diner is more than just their safe haven, but also their metaphorical and literal heaven.
