Riverdale: Who Killed Jason Blossom (This Week)? - Body Double Edition
Each week, the mystery at the center of Riverdale, The CW’s dark take on the Archie Comics [...]
Each week, the mystery at the center of Riverdale, The CW's dark take on the Archie Comics mythology, deepens — and each week, we've been looking at the list of suspects and updating our virtual murder board to ask some tough questions about the iconic characters populating the town.
This week was an interesting one: we learned a lot more about Jason's own backstory, potentially opening up some new motives for his murder, although a lot of that speculation would lead back to familiar suspects, particularly the Cooper family.
Of course, as we tend to discuss each week, in most well-constructed murder mysteries, the killer should be someone who was there the whole time, and so a late (even as relatively early as episode 3, still the first act of a 13-episode season) could be something the writers don't want to do.
All that said, let's take some theories for a spin and see how they feel…and if you've got one we haven't touched on yet, let us know in the comments below.
THE COOPERS
The Cooper family have, so far, been the most obvious suspects we've been looking at in these pieces.
Alice Cooper, who seems volatile and unstable and who also believes Jason "ruined" her daughter, already seemed like a good suspect.
The fact that she owns the newspaper gives her a way to deflect suspicion away from herself by controlling the narrative about the murder..and while that seems like a pretty hypothetical thing, it's worth noting that last week, she more or less acknowledged that her professional interest in this case only started once it was a murder investigation. It's not implausible to read into that the idea that Alice was happy to let the public believe Jason's death was an accidental drowning, but when he appeared on shore she realized she needed to get out ahead of the message.
prevnextTHE PLAYBOOK
There are a couple of big takeaways from the playbook/score book that was seen in tonight's episode.
First of all, it means there are plenty of girls at Riverdale (and, presumably, their loved ones as well) who have plenty of reason to hate Jason and the rest of the football players.
Second — and this is why, despite being a clever addition if it were to happen, the playbook is unlikely to turn up new clues — it seems to muddy the waters of Jason's relationship with Polly Cooper quite a bit.
According to the playbook, Jason "counted" his time with Polly in the twisted game of sexy scorekeeping that the team was doing, which certainly seems to indicate that maybe he wasn't taking it as seriously as she was…but the other side of that is, many of the players' names were repeated in the scorebook, as though the people who were playing were documenting all of their conquests. Jason…just had Polly. He had apparently either not been intimate with anyone else, or at least not written it down.
We didn't see the whole book, obviously, and so there's a possibility he could have had additional "points" on prior pages to the final one it was opened to, but it seemed worth mentioning, as we speculate that names like "Justina" and "Fiona" might be of interest to us since they've clearly got reason to be angry, that they might not have much of a reason to be angry AT JASON. And since Jason is, as far as we know, the only player yet to have been targeted, that might indicate that the playbook is a bit of a dead end as far as the murder investigation goes.
prevnextPOLLY COOPER
Even though she's technically a part of both the Cooper family and the list of girls in the score book, Polly deserves a little bit of a look. In the pilot, Betty described Jason and Polly's relationship to Veronica: "It meant everything to her, and nothing to him," she said…and that seems to be true, given that we now see Jason was using his relationship with Polly to score points in a demeaning game of slut-shaming in his locker room.
Given the fact that we've seen a volatile, controlling streak in both Betty and Alice Cooper at this point, it's plausible that the abuse and neglect at play could have pushed Polly to the limit. If so…do the Coopers know? Could that be why she's not only shipped away somewhere, but seemingly cut off from Betty as well?
MISS GRUNDY
This is an evergreen theory at this point: While we know that she didn't pull the trigger on July 4, that doesn't tell us much since we now know that Jason was killed almost a week later, and we don't know who was doing what on July 11.
The fact that Grundy was having an affair with a teenage student at the same time and place that Cheryl and Jason staged his "escape" could make him potentially vulnerable if he saw Grundy or Grundy saw him on that day and she perceived him as a threat; we've already seen her get desperate and manipulative when she felt cornered, but in the case of Jason Blossom…well, it's difficult to imagine anybody growing up in the Blossom household and being as easily manipulated as Archie Andrews, let's just call it like it is.
prevnextA FOOTBALL PLAYER
We've talked about Reggie being suspicious before, and obviously we know from this episode that Chuck Clayton is a pretty awful human being.
But another thing we learned this week is that the football program at Riverdale turns a blind eye toward some very bad behavior. Is this the kind of culture where two players going off together, and one turning up dead, could be overlooked?
It's really hard to say: in both real life and from what little we saw in Riverdale, it tends to be that corrupt systems like this are more dangerous to those outside of the system than inside, and that Jason would have been afforded more empathy and protection even from the dirtiest program than somebody who didn't play on the team.
Of course, he was also apparently a star, and you can never discount the allure of a life-changing opportunity to be the team star and/or get the scholarship that comes with that, etc. etc., in these situations. Even with all the other dirty dealings and terrible secrets in Riverdale, could it be that the thing that got Jason killed was really…mundane? Seems like a stretch, but it's not impossible.
prev