‘Riverdale’: Easter Eggs and References in “The Midnight Club”

Tonight’s episode of Riverdale was the much-anticipated “flashback episode, “The Midnight Club.” Featuring the cast of Riverdale playing younger versions of their onscreen parents, the episode revealed that the bizarre and violent deaths plaguing Riverdale High are an apparent continuation of something that Alice Cooper witnessed when she was in high school.

Primarily an homage to The Breakfast Club, “The Midnight Club” uncovers some of the secrets that the prior generation of Riverdale residents have been hiding for years…

…and here’s some of the stuff we noticed.

Let’s Talk About Anthony Michael Hall

So let’s talk about Anthony Michael Hall, a staple of John Hughes movies and the only person appearing in this episode of Riverdale who also starred in The Breakfast Club.

(Why this couldn’t have been Mary Andrews’s flashback is anybody’s guess. That’s the way we would have gone.)

Hall plays Principal Featherhead here, which of course makes him the murder victim. He is, like The Breakfast Club‘s Dick Vernon, kind of an uncompromising hardass, and there is an implication that he is kind of lazy and overestimates his own abilities.

His introductory speech, including the assignment of the essays and things like “you will not talk — you will not move,” is almost verbatim what Vernon told the teens at the start of The Breakfast Club.

There is no janitor for him to play off of, and not enough time to really give Featherhead an arc, so that is basically where the similarities between his character and that of Paul Gleason’s in the movie end.

In The Breakfast Club, the movie begins with each of the teenagers arriving at detention, and Brian Johnson (Hall’s character) is driven in by his mother, with his annoying little sister in the car. Those two are played by Hall’s real-life mother and sister — which would seem irrelevant to Riverdale, except that Mark Consuelos’s real-life son was called in to play Hiram Lodge in the flashbacks.

The other parents are all played by their own on-screen children, but since Hiram does not have a son, it was necessary to introduce someone else to play Hiram, and Consuelos’s son does certainly look the part.

The timeline

While The Breakfast Club is a staple of ’80s cinema, that timeline would have messed with a lot of stuff for Riverdale.

Since Alice was pregnant with Betty’s brother in this flashback, it limits how old anything can be. They do not lay down a specific timeframe, but let’s consider some clues:

Alice jokes in her voiceover that “Everything smelled like Teen Spirit,” a reference to the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That song was released in 1991.

In one of the opening scenes, Sierra McCoy is writing “End Apartheid” on the bathroom mirror in lipstick. Apartheid ended in early 1994.

Given these two context clues and the ’80s-heavy soundtrack of the episode, it seems likely that the episode is intended to take place sometime between 1991 and 1994. That allows them to keep the ’80s aesthetic where appropriate.

Luckily for the show, Riverdale has a “timeless” aesthetic that does not ground much of its world in the contemporary. This means that sets like the Blue & Gold, the classrooms, and Pop’s did not have to be radically re-dressed for the flashback.

The Breakfast Club

We’ll start with Anthony Michael Hall, just because we have already talked about his presence. But it’s there. Next?

…Oh, yeah.

•  FP and Fred got in trouble for streaking, which is new, but the fact that the scene started in the Bulldogs locker room is worth a mention. First of all, Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez) got his Saturday detention in The Breakfast Club for taping a particularly hairy classmate’s buttcheeks together with athletic tape. So there’s that. Also worth noting, the Shermer High School team mascot is also the Bulldogs, so while that may not be an explicit reference here in “The Midnight Club,” it is a similarity between the two that runs through the life of the series.
• Alice Smith’s glove, worn during the first Saturday detention, feels like a callback to the fingerless glove worn by John Bender (Judd Nelson) in The Breakfast Club.
• During the scene where they are all in a circle making confessions, FP tells the group that his “old man” beats him. This is a callback to John Bender’s speech about “Christmas as the Bender Household” in The Breakfast Club, in which he recounts his abusive father and refers to him as “the old man.” This scene gave us the classic line “sounds like your old man and my old man should get together and go bowling.”
• Like every episode of Riverdale, this episode took its name from something else in popular culture, although in this case…just barely. There are several novels and a video game franchise that go by “The Midnight Club,” but it seems like a flimsy pretense to use “The Breakfast Club” without actually using it. Which is fine.
  

The Breakfast Club…Maybe?

There are some moments in the episode that feel like they are probably meant as a reference to The Breakfast Club, but we can’t be quite sure.

First of all, Penelope’s braces. Obviously, neither Cheryl nor actress Madelaine Petsch have braces, but Penelope does. The fact that she is the de facto “nerd” of the group, in that Riverdale is not as comfortable as The Breakfast Club in making fun of nerds and she is the well-behaved one who sucks up to authority, one could guess that she was given the braces as a nod to Hall’s character from the movie.

In a Rolling Stone feature looking back at the film’s 20th anniversary in 2005, writer/director John Hughes recalled that he wanted Hall to play the nerd in this movie, like Hall had done in Hughes’s previous movie, Sixteen Candles. However, in the time since Sixteen Candles, Hall had gotten his braces removed, and Hughes made him put them back on for the duration of filming The Breakfast Club.

The placement of Alice and Fred’s heart-to-heart (and then sex) in the Blue & Gold office is framed in such a way that it resembles the heart-to-heart between Richard Vernon and janitor Carl (John Kapelos) in The Breakfast Club.

The line that the Midnight Club “didn’t so much as smile” when they passed each other in the halls feels like it might be a subversion of The Breakfast Club. About halfway through the film, popular girl Claire (Molly Ringwald) admits that if one of the unpopular kids she had befriended during Saturday detention approached her in the hallways while she was with her popular friends, she would pretend she didn’t know them so as not to lose social standing. This led to a particularly unpleasant exchange where Claire was forced to examine her privilege.

When all of the characters are in costume for the game, FP Jones wears a crown (of course) and a heavy fur overcoat/cape that feels Viking-inspired. It is possible (though unlikely) that this could be a nod to a dream sequence cut from The Breakfast Club, in which Allison imagines the students as various characters, with football star Andrew as a Viking.

Brand Confusion

Oh, Riverdale. Where would we be without your deliciously obvious fake brand names?

From the show that brought you the American Excess card comes…

Fibes magazine, who apparently have named Veronica to their hot 20 under 20. That’s right, folks. Not Forbes. Fibes. Soak that one in.

This episode also introduced us to the Game Lad, a ’90s portable video game console that the kids found confiscated in Mrs. Crabapple’s drawer. Not to be confused, surely, with Nintendo’s wildly popular Game Boy, which debuted in 1989.

Continuity nods

There are a lot of little winks and nods to Riverdale continuity in this episode, and we couldn’t possibly catch them all. 

That said, some things worth mentioning: 

• Sierra McCoy and Tom Keller are dating. When we see them say their tearful good-bye at the end, it appears that he is going off to join the military. Given that his wife is a career military woman, it is likely that they did not get back together when he returned to Riverdale because he met his wife while deployed.
• Fred Andrews built his life around staying in Riverdale to take care of his ailing father — something Archie did last season after Fred was shot.
•  The Fredheads, Fred Andrews’s band, makes an appearance in this episode.
• FP Jones wearing his G&G cosplay crown looks more like the Jughead crown from the comics than Jughead’s beanie does.
• First of all, Hiram is a drug dealer. Second, Fizzle Rocks are basically narcotic Pop Rocks, as opposed to Jingle Jangle being Pixie sticks. Well played, Riverdale. One might even say…sweet.

TWINCEST IS CANON

So…yeah. Remember how the whole first season, people kept thinking that Cheryl and Jason were somehow romantically involved?

They weren’t, as established several times since, but it seems as though the Blossom Family might have tried to make them create a perfect red-haired heir anyway? It’s hard to say, but it is certainly stated here that Penelope is not originally a Blossom; she was adopted, and then forced into a quasi-incestuous relationship with her adoptive brother Clifford.

Fun fact: Claudius is nowhere to be seen. Just saying.

FP’s Cast

Why was FP’s arm in a cast? It seems likely it was just a nod to the season one finale, in which football star Archie was walking around with a cast after having broken his hand on ice trying to punch through the frozen river to save Cheryl.

Either way, it has a nice little reference to It on it, with someone having written “loser” on his cast and someone else changing it to “lover.”

Stephen King, of course, has a history with Riverdale showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who wrote The Stand for Marvel Comics before moving to Archie.

Things That Run in the Family

It is hard not to notice that KJ Apa’s up-and-over pompadour of hair is reminiscent of how Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) used to wear his hair on Beverly Hills 90210.

Apparently at some point, Betty learned how to extract information from coroners, like her mom did in the first season.

In the same way that Archie has seemed destined to become Fred at times, we see that Penelope and Hermione have basically become their mothers over the years. 

Pop Culture References

At one point, Penelope straight-up quotes (and then name-drops) Heathers.

Given that Archie Comics doesn’t have a Mrs. Crabapple that we know of, we have to wonder whether that is a reference to Edna Krabappel from The Simpsons.

The soundtrack to the episode is full of songs that have been used in plenty of movies that were designed to evoke the feeling of the ’80s, including:

Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” which most notably appeared on soundtracks for, among other things, The OC, One Tree Hill, and Napoleon Dynamite; Take On Me (Family Guy, Ready Player One); “True” from Spandau Ballet (Spaced); and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (Grosse Pointe Blank).

True To Life

While there appears to be some kind of strange reason that the game makes people crazed, Sierra’s hysterical thing about how it turns normal people into monsters, etc. etc., feels very much like the kind of wild paranoia that happened with certain parents’ groups when Dungeons and Dragons first gained popularity.

There Are No Words

Really, Riverdale? You’re gonna do poor Trevor Stines like that?

Stines, who played murder victim Jason Blossom, has shown up on camera dozens of times during Riverdale‘s run, but has not yet had an opportunity to speak a line of dialogue.

Finally we get to see him return to play Clifford Blossom — but they still don’t let him say anyhing.

Come on, guys! He isn’t dead this time! There was no reason he could not simply reciprocate what Penelope said to him!