Riverdale Ended Exactly the Way It Should Have

Last week, Riverdale ended after seven seasons on The CW and as is often the case with the endings of series with devoted and passionate fanbases, not everyone has been happy with how things shook out for Archie, Betty, Jughead, Veronica, and the rest of the folks in the Town With Pep. For some, the sticking point comes down to some of the relationship choices — in particular when it comes to the endgames for the core four — while for others, it is the final moments of the episode and where the story left everyone that hasn’t quite settled. But while everyone is certainly allowed to feel what they feel when it comes to a beloved television series, it is also worth stepping back and looking at Riverdale and its finale in a larger context and realizing that, ultimately, the beloved series ended exactly the way it needed to, making “Goodbye, Riverdale” one of the most authentic finales to a comic book inspired series we’ve seen to date.

Warning: spoilers for the series finale of Riverdale will make up a good part of this article so turn back now if you haven’t seen how things work out unless you really want to know.

In “Goodbye, Riverdale”, viewers catch up with an 86-year-old Betty in the present day, lying in her bed at her granddaughter Alice’s house, reading the newspaper and seeing the obituary for Jughead Jones, who himself recently passed. Jughead’s passing leaves Betty as the last of her classmates and makes her nostalgic for her hometown, wanting to see it one more time as her own time on Earth draws to a close. She falls asleep sometime later while looking at her high school yearbook and is visited by Angel Jughead, who takes her back to a day from their past — specifically, the final day of senior year, a day that Betty missed in real life due to illness — so she can have one more moment with everyone in their prime.

As Betty makes her way through that day, the fates of each of the characters is revealed to the audience as Jughead jogs Betty’s memory and there are some pretty major revelations, the biggest perhaps being that rather than pair off, Archie, Betty, Jughead, and Veronica all chose to be in a “quad” relationship and function as a polyamorous unit during their final high school years. It’s also revealed that in the end, none of them really stayed together. Veronica went off to Hollywood, Archie ended up in California where he married and started a family, Jughead went on to found “Jughead’s Madhouse Magazine”, and Betty had her own successful publishing career as well — and neither she nor Jughead ever married. Betty instead adopted a daughter and did things independently with no regrets. After her time in that final day, back in the present, Betty gets that final trip to Riverdale, but dies peacefully in her sleep in the car. The episode then ends with Betty rejoining all of her friends at Pop’s in the Sweet Hereafter, forever seventeen, always living in that high school life, just as they are — “It’s where we’ve always been, in this diner, in this town,” Angel Jughead says, before telling the audience that if they happen to see the Pop’s sign some night at the end of the long journey “that every one of us is on” they can stop there and always be among friends.

There are two aspects of this entire finale that are absolutely perfect when you consider that Riverdale is, in fact, a comic book series, and it comes down to what Jughead says in his closing words. You see, in Archie Comics — what Riverdale is based on — Archie, Veronica, Jughead, Betty and everyone are all eternally young. Their stories are almost always set in the world of high school or young adulthood, leaving these characters timeless in a sense as the stories explore the trials and travails of this set of characters. Additionally, with few exceptions, you can always find the Archie Comics characters within that same environment. It’s part of what makes Archie Comics so iconic and so beloved, some 80 plus years after their debut: while the stories and the values and the world changes, Archie Comics has its constants. You can go back to them, to these characters, as they are at any time and always “be among friends”. The universality and relatability of Archie Comics — and how people can see themselves in them no matter what generation they come from — is something that Archie Comics Senior Director of Editorial Jamie L. Rotante spoke with ComicBook.com about back in 2021.

“I think what’s interesting is when Archie was first created, he was referred to as an everyman,” she explained. “I think that’s so important because obviously you have legacies of superhero characters, but they exist in sort of fantastical planes and they’re often superhuman. They have this sort of way of dealing with things because they have power, they have strength, and they’re above everyone else. Archie’s different because he’s a teenager who can be clumsy, who can be lovestruck. He’s a little bit of everyone. So, to see a reflection of your own self going through things as they’re happening, a little idealized at times, obviously… We always say Riverdale is a place for everyone. Riverdale represents the best of the world as much as we can. There’s something about seeing characters that are just regular teenagers, kids, adults working through life that I think is what makes it so relatable to so many people.”

But while that certainly helps to put the final moments of the episode into perspective, what about the relationship aspect of it? That, too, ties back to being authentic to the comic books from which Riverdale takes its inspiration. One of the hallmarks of Archie Comics is that there really is no definitive choice in terms of who Archie ends up with. In the comics, the romantic relationships and entanglements are always shifting — it’s the nature of stories that don’t really have a set end to always be exploring different things. If you keep that in mind, there really is no other way that Riverdale could end and honestly, having the core four choose to not choose at all sort of works in that framework as well. It’s arguably a bit more out there than perhaps what would be found on the page of the comics, but thematically it fits in because there was never really a genuine choice to be made.

By leaning into the idea of remaining forever one place in time and by not firmly defining certain aspects of its story, Riverdale leaned into its comics roots in a way that we don’t often see in comic book inspired television. Given how wildly different from the comics Riverdale has always been, it’s a bit of a pleasant surprise that in the end it chose to truly honor its inspiration source this way as well, by giving viewers a wealth of highly entertaining and through-provoking tales and then, as the best stories do, leave them a little space: to revisit, to reimagine, to keep coming back. Would it have been nice to have seen some happily ever after for whatever your chosen “ship” was? Absolutely. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have in my heart of hearts a couple of outcomes I wish I had seen, but in the end, Riverdale delivered a truly iconic and truly comic book ending and it was pitch perfect for this wild ride of a show.

Riverdale‘s series finale is now streaming on cwtv.com and The CW app.