Riverdale returned from midseason hiatus tonight, and it brought a highly anticipated character into the fold.
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Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Riverdale, “The Blackboard Jungle”, below!
Tonight’s episode saw Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) being met with a surprising revelation, as her sister Polly (Tiera Skovbye) officially had her twin babies. After Betty realized that Polly was hiding this information from their parents, Betty devised another plan to help make things better.
She reached out to Jughead’s social worker, attempting to find information on her long-lost brother, who Alice (Madchen Amick) and Hal (Lochlyn Munro) gave up when they were in high school. Betty discovered that her brother lived two towns over under the name Charles Smith, and Betty and Alice eventually decided to visit him.
They met with Charles, who clearly exhibited animosity towards his parents for giving him up. He then revealed that he doesn’t go by Charles, he goes by Chic.
So, who is Chic Cooper? Sure, the fandom has been tossing his name around since the Season One finale, but what could his comic past have to do with his time on Riverdale?
Well, not a lot, honestly. Both Chic and Polly debuted within the pages of Little Archie, and have appeared pretty sporadically throughout the pages of Archie Comics. The reasoning behind their frequent disappearances is explained in a slightly ridiculous way, with Polly being a reporter and Chic being a secret agent for the government.
Judging by what we already know about Chic — particularly, his hard life growing up in Centerville — it seems like Riverdale will be making some leaps with his little comic canon. But there certainly is something interesting in the fact that Chic was officially introduced in the same episode as an actual secret agent.
Maybe the two are connected? Maybe Chic is hiding more than he’s letting on? Denton seemed to hint as much during a recent interview with ComicBook.com.
“You know, you put Chic in a family situation and that’s already just a whirlwind for him to have to deal with growing up in such a different way from everybody in this incredible town,” Denton said. “Then you attach him to these relationships of everyone outside of that. You’d never know where to exactly pin it. You never know what … He’s got a whole lot of mystery going on and there’s darkness and there’s lightness and it’s all mixed in and people got to sort of tip-toe a bit…”
Either way, Riverdale fans will have to stay tuned to find out.
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
