'Riverdale': Breaking Down the Ending of "Labor Day"

Riverdale's third season kicked off tonight and resolving some questions, such as Archie's fate after he was falsely charged with murder at the end of Season 2, while opening a Pandora's box of others with the episode's stunning final moments.

Spoilers for tonight's Season 3 premiere of Riverdale, "Labor Day", below.

The ending of tonight's episode was a wild one, to say the least. Jughead (Cole Sprouse) followed game map for a Dungeons & Dragons-like game called Griffins & Gargoyles left at his house by Dilton Doiley only to discover a terrifying scene. He finds a group of boys seemingly naked, bound, apparently dead or dying, and positioned ritualistically around a terrifying demonic figure. If that wasn't freaky enough, we then cut to Betty (Lili Reinhart) walk outside her house to witness her mom Alice (Madchen Amick) and her sister Polly (Tiera Skovbye) as well as other members of The Farm holding Polly's twins over a raging bonfire, only to drop them into the flames and the twins suddenly float above them.

Oh, and about those dead bodies in the woods? They had symbols carved into their backs. The same symbols seen on the Riverdale sign Archie's prison bus passed on his way to the Leopold and Loeb Juvenile Detention Center. The detention center itself is a chilling Easter egg of sorts a nod to the grad school play showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa wrote in which Archie interacts with 1920s celebrity kidnappers and murderers Nathan Leopold and Robert Loeb.

If you screamed something along the lines of "what the..." at your television, trust us, you're not alone. If last season was all about the serial killer Black Hood mystery, then this season we are firmly in creepy cult territory. The idea is one that Riverdale has teased from even the very first season. During the first season, it was mentioned as the destination Polly and Jason had planned to run away to before Jason was murdered. In the second season, The Farm is where Polly goes to when she realizes that the Black Hood is targeting sinners. However, The Farm begins to take a weird turn when Polly talks about how she's been taught forgiveness by them and mentions in the finale that someone from the Farm "healed" her after Jason's death.

That figure? Edgar Evernever. He's mentioned a few times tonight and while we haven't met him just yet, his hold over two of the three Cooper women is clear early on. Alice has taken to a more New Age approach to thing, her very appearance taking on a more relaxed look while she seems to do anything Edgar says or suggests, though things have clearly escalated from hugs and crystals and meditation in a hurry, something that Aguirre-Sacasa teased earlier this year.

"We're going to meet the farm's leader, Edgar Evernever but, equally important, we're going to meet his daughter, Evelyn Evernever, who is an Archie character that we're sort of reinventing for this storyline," Aguirre-Sacasa added. "There's almost a banality to the cult and a sort of generic-ism that gets sinister pretty quickly."

It's possible that sinister escalation might connect to Jughead's disturbing find. After all, Griffins & Gargoyles is Dungeons & Dragons-esque and that game has received a lot of negative attention over the years from some Christian groups for so-called promotion of devil worship among other things, but it's certain that it has a link to Riverdale's past -- specifically that of the parents.

"The murder victims in the present were playing a game called Griffins & Gargoyles, which is, of course, the Riverdale version of Dungeons & Dragons," Aguirre-Sacasa said. "Our kids discover that when their parents were in high school they also were playing this game, and there was a similar murder that happened in the past."

Whatever is going on between the murders and the ritual in the Cooper's backyard, things are about to get very dark in Riverdale. Again.

What do you think is going on with the cult and the murders and all of the wild things in the last moments of tonight's episode? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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