Spoilers ahead for “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” tonight’s midseason finale of Riverdale.
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Months after he watched the Black Hood shoot his father at Pop’s Diner, Archie Andrews stood on a bridge over Sweet Water River and watched the self-styled vigilante shot to death by Sheriff Keller in tonight’s midseason finale of Riverdale.
Moments later, Keller unmasked the now-dead Black Hood to reveal the face of Joseph Svenson, a Riverdale High janitor. Ironically, it was Svenson whose life they were attempting to save from the Black Hood.
Svenson was introduced to the audience three weeks ago, appearing as a kind of creepy figure lurking around the high school and a potential choice for Josie McCoy’s anonymous stalker. That may have been a misdirect to make him seem less like an obvious Black Hood suspect as the midseason finale neared.
Last week, the audience learned that Svenson’s family had been murdered when he was a child, and that the killer was killed by a lynch mob. This week, Nana Blossom revealed herself to have been part of that lynch mob, along with Betty Cooper’s grandfather. It turns out Svenson had apparently implicated the wrong man in his family’s death, leading to the town’s “primal sin.”
Given some evidence earlier in the season that there may be more than one Black Hood, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that there is more to it than just one damaged individual acting in the interest of a warped sense of justice. Could the “second” Black Hood also be the one seen spying on Archie and Veronica in the episode’s final moments?
You can hear the issue — and others — discussed at some length in the latest episode of Archie Digest: A Riverdale Podcast, embedded below.
Riverdale airs on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. New episodes will be back on January 17.
