Did Riverdale Just Confirm Jughead’s Fate in “Halloween”?

During the Season 3 finale of Riverdale Archie, Jughead, Veronica, and Betty all managed to survive Penelope Blossom’s murderous game only for a flash forward to hint at a dark fate for Jughead. The brief scene showed Archie, Betty, and Veronica in their underwear, covered in blood, standing around a fire where they burned Jughead’s blood-soaked beanie. It instantly had fans concerned that Jughead might meet his end sometime in Season 4 and another flash forward tonight may have just confirmed the beloved character’s dark fate.

Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Riverdale, “Chapter Sixty-One: Halloween,” below.

For most of tonight’s episode, Jughead had a decidedly terrible Halloween. After being told about the mysterious — and presumably fatal — previous disappearances of four other students at Stonewall Prep, Jughead ends up drugged and trapped in a coffin with no way to get out or call for help. It certainly wasn’t the Halloween he had planned, but he wakes up the next day in Chipping’s office. The whole experience was a hazing prank. When he talks to Betty about it later, he tells her that if he were to ever truly go missing, he is confident that she would be the one to find him.

And then we get a flash forward. It’s the Riverdale coroner’s office and a distraught-looking F.P. and Betty pull back a sheet to reveal Jughead’s corpse. Yes, you read that correctly: Jughead’s corpse.

Now, this is Riverdale. It’s a show with so many twists and turns that few things are ever truly as they appear to be. It is entirely possible that there are things that happen immediately before the flash forward that would reveal Jughead is fine and this is all an elaborate ruse. It’s also possible that the scene is exactly what it appears to be and Jughead really is dead in the show’s near future. What is certain is that what happens in the near future is part of the season’s central mystery.

“Next season is the kids’ senior year. It’s their last year in high school, and we really want to locate their stories in the high school world,” Aguirre-Sacasa said this summer. “We started talking about what the big mystery could be, and we said it would be great if we kind of kept it in the high school kind of world. The other thing that we wanted to do is, this year Archie and Veronica weren’t that involved in the Gargoyle King mystery — it was more Betty and Jughead. We loved the core four together in the finale. We wanted to do something that tied them all together for the core mystery and for a big secret, and it felt like having them all around that bonfire, minus Jughead, would be a way to tie them all together so that when we get to the central mystery of what happened that night and what led to the events of burning their clothes, it would be all of our foursome and not the kids split off again.”

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