Riverdale Review: Chapter Three: Body Double (Season 1 Episode 3)

Once again, Archie is a little boring while Betty and Veronica tackle a more interesting storyline on Riverdale Season 1 Episode 3, “Chapter Three: Body Double.”

From the very beginning, Archie’s whole “You don’t understand my music, Dad!” issue has seemed a little dated, but thankfully, it’s coming to an end.

On Episode 3, they try to shake it up by having him collaborate with Josie and the Pussycats, but it’s still not the most interesting storyline, and frankly, Josie and the Pussycats aren’t proving to be that interesting themselves.

Trust me, I want to like them. They were one of the things I was really looking forward to seeing more of after Episode 1. But the show just isn’t giving them much to do so far, besides show up once an episode to perform a snippet of a song.

Josie gives a speech to Archie about the hate mail her mom got for being elected mayor and how the band has to claw their way to places Archie could get to on his own easily because he is a straight white male. It is an excellent speech.

But it would be more interesting if we actually got to see the band dealing with those struggles, rather than just talking about them. It is awesome to see Josie put Archie in his place, but I want more for her and her band.

It is early on and there’s plenty of time in the season for character development, but right now, it’s still a little unclear how the band is going to fit into the show on a regular basis without turning them into a means to an end for Archie’s musical ambitions.

Meanwhile, Betty and Veronica’s Episode 3 storyline tackles slut-shaming, sexual harassment and the high school “boys will be boys”/“it’s just locker room talk” mentality.

This plot is definitely the closest the show has gotten to Veronica Mars so far, and while Betty and Veronica’s hot tub humiliation plan is maybe just a little over-the-top, at least it’s a far more entertaining ride than Archie’s story.

Most of the conversations between the young women on this episode are about the group of football players who kept a playbook of their sexual dalliances, but sometimes not passing the Bechdel Test is okay if your conversation about boys is about how you are going to take them down.

While all of this is happening, Betty’s dark side gets even darker, once again triggered by her sister, Polly — just like her bloody fist clench in Episode 1 and her threat to Cheryl in Episode 2.

Seeing glimpses of Betty’s darker side was interesting in the first two episodes, but this seems like a full-blown personality shift, and Veronica is clearly worried about it.

Betty got very dark very fast, so it will be interesting to see just how far she’ll go and how Veronica, Archie and Jughead will react. If she keeps progressing at this rate, she may end up actually hurting someone by the end of the season, if not sooner.

The biggest development on the “who murdered Jason?” front in “Chapter Three: Body Double” is the revelation that Jason was planning to fake his own death, with Cheryl’s help, and skip town — which explains Cheryl’s “he was supposed to come back” comment from Episode 2.

Not much time is dedicated to the mystery in the rest of the episode, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Although Jason’s murder is a huge part of the show, Riverdale can push the murder storyline to the periphery for one episode without making the hour feel wasted.

Jughead’s discovery that the Adventure Scout leader fired that gunshot on the Fourth of July is a little anticlimactic, but at least it pushes Betty’s suspicions towards Miss Grundy, and her digging could lead to her finding out about the affair between Archie and Grundy — whether Jughead tells her or Archie tells her himself.

Judging from next week’s preview, we’re about to find out that Miss Grundy may be shady beyond seducing-an-underage-student reasons.

The more people find out about the affair, the more likely it is that it comes to an end — for one reason or another. The student-teacher relationship is definitely one of the show’s weakest links, so the sooner it ends, the better.

OTHER THOUGHTS:

• Cute (obligatory) Stranger Things shout-out with Cheryl’s #JusticeForEthel comment, a reference to #JusticeForBarb.
• Are Josie and the Pussycats going to perform in every single episode? As enjoyable as that would be, there’s no way there are enough town events for that to believably happen, right?
• So Alice Cooper saw Hermione Lodge working at the Taste of Riverdale event, but I’m still holding out hope that Alice sees Hermione in her waitress uniform at Pop’s and makes a comment about it. Come on, it’s the perfect chance to get a little meta Twin Peaks joke in there.
• Besides the obvious reasons to yell at the TV about the Archie/Grundy affair, they’re just so careless about it! In Episode 2, it was bad enough that she was getting all cozy with Archie in her classroom in private; in this episode, they’re standing two inches apart from each other in her classroom with the door open. They are not great at this whole secret relationship thing.

What did you think of “Chapter Three: Body Double”? Share with us in the comments below!

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Riverdale airs Thursdays at 9/8c on the CW.

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