‘Riverdale’: What Did “The Raid” Just Reveal About The Farm?

Tonight’s episode of Riverdale saw Betty make her big move to attempt to infiltrate The Farm, the cult that has made major inroads into not just Riverdale, but every aspect of Betty’s life. However, it’s what Betty finds out as part of her infiltration that not only ties back to The CW series’ first season but raises a whole new crop of questions about what The Farm is up to — and what they are capable of.

Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Riverdale, “The Raid”, below.

Betty wires Cheryl up so that she can find out more about The Farm, but after a few sessions with The Farm’s mysterious leader Edgar Evernever, the connection gets bad and, Edgar leads Cheryl into another room. Next time that Cheryl sees Betty, she tells her that she’s not spying for her anymore but she’s going to continue going to The Farm. In effort to try to free her family from The Farm, Betty manages to steal the confession tapes of her mother, sister, and Cheryl. If they have nothing over the women, surely, they can just leave.

Except it’s not a matter of can’t leave, it’s a matter of don’t want to and for one very specific reason: Cheryl tells Betty that Edgar took her to see her long-dead brother, Jason. And, not just see him, but talk to him and interact with him, the implication being that he was truly there with her. Confused and somewhat horrified, Betty ends up meeting with her mother to find out if a reunification with a dead relative — specifically her son, Charles — was why Alice stayed with the cult and, indeed it was.

Now, if you’ve been keeping up with Riverdale then you know that both Jason Blossom and Charles are quite dead. Jason was shot in the head and thrown into Sweetwater River by his own father in Riverdale‘s first season while Charles was murdered by Chic, the imposter who took on Charles’ identity after the killing. If The Farm is really making it possible for Alice and Cheryl can speak to and see their lost loved ones, it’s not only safe to presume that they are probably doing the same for their other followers but that there is Definitely Something Weird Going On. It spawns two major questions the first, are these people really seeing their dead loved ones and the second, can The Farm raise the dead?

If The Farm is somehow involved with raising the dead in some fashion it kind of ties back to the strange bonfire meeting Betty witnessed in the Season 3 premiere. In that episode, Betty saw her mother, sister, and various Farm members standing around a fire in the backyard in some sort of ceremony. As part of it, Polly’s twin children were dropped into the flames, only for them to levitate above it. Nothing else that explicitly supernatural or occult has been seen with The Farm since then, though there has been plenty of mentions of crystals which themselves have a sort of New Age and mystical vibe.

If The Farm really is dealing in the supernatural, it also wouldn’t be too much of a shock to find out that they are also involved, somehow, with the darker side of things in Riverdale — the Gargoyle King and the havoc Gryphons and Gargoyles has been wreaking on Riverdale. The idea that The Farm has been manipulating everything thus far this season in Riverdale is a chilling one, but it’s also just the right shot in the arm to make fans wonder exactly what is going on with the creepy cult — and just how far Betty will have to go to stop them.

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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