The seventh and final season of Riverdale came to a close this week, culminating one of the most unexpected television journeys in recent memory. Over the years, the show’s crop of Archie Comics-inspired characters were placed at the center of some bizarre and genre-bending stories, including a dip into the multiverse in the show’s later seasons. Now that the entirety of Riverdale is in the books — and the multiverse component reentered the fold — an argument can be made that it was one of the more effective world-colliding stories in recent memory. In fact, it might’ve been even better than the biggest multiverse story on the screen this year, DC’s recent The Flash movie.
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How Did Riverdale Handle the Multiverse?
While Riverdale always had a bent towards the unexplained, the show really began to embrace that possibility in the beginning of its sixth season. A five-episode arc dubbed “Rivervale” explored a Twilight Zone and Welcome to Night Vale-esque alternate version of the show’s titular town, in which the macabre and the supernatural become much more common. Across those episodes, the gang dealt with ghosts, immortal curses, the legend of La Llorona, and even had Archie Andrews (K.J. Apa) sacrificed by a coven of witches. While a lesser show might’ve stuck in Rivervale forever, Riverdale‘s landmark 100th episode threaded the needle, establishing that Rivervale and Riverdale were parallel universes bleeding into each other. Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse) became an accidental conduit for it all, turning himself into a living battery that could create stories to better separate the universes. Once Jughead succeeded, the second half of Season 6 dealt with the remnants of this multiversal bleed, briefly giving many of the characters superpowers and culminating in a literal battle between good and evil.
That battle eventually became impossible to win, leading the guardian angel Tabitha Tate (Erinn Westbrook) to push Riverdale‘s characters into a new universe/timeline beginning in 1955. That led Riverdale into the events of its seventh season, in which Jughead discovered he was the only one who could remember the future-past, until Angel Tabitha wiped his memories and set off to find another universe that could potentially be a safe home. In the series’ penultimate episode, Angel Tabitha returned to Riverdale and confirmed this was the only remaining safe universe in the entire multiverse — but that she could give the gang the ability to remember their future-past lives, if they chose to. Most of them agreed and were played literal episodes of Riverdale, only to amend the deal by having Angel Tabitha only leave them with a compilation of the “good parts.” She did just that, and the gang used the knowledge of their pasts to become writers, activists, and instruments of change, before dying in the decades that followed and going into the afterlife of “The Sweet Hereafter.”
How Did The Flash Handle the Multiverse?
Drawing some influence from DC’s comic storylines, namely Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint, The Flash movie took a largely-unique approach to hopping across universes. After Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) realizes he can use his super-speed powers to travel across longer distances of time, he decides to go back and prevent the random and senseless murder of his mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú). In doing so, Barry ends up in an alternate world alongside a younger, more precocious version of himself — and no other public superheroes, other than a different Bruce Wayne / Batman (Michael Keaton) than the one (played by Ben Affleck) he has partnered up with. Partnering up with the alternate Barry and Bruce, as well as Kara Zor-El / Supergirl (Sasha Calle), Barry tries to stop the Man of Steel invasion of General Zod (Michael Shannon) — and fails.
Barry discovers that the younger Barry, now older and corrupted into a “Dark Flash”, has used his super-speed to try to fix the outcome of that fight over and over again — and in the process, he has created a rift in the “Chronobowls” that visually represent the speedster’s view of time and space. Like Riverdale and Rivervale, Barry’s Chronobowl is beginning to bleed into others, which are populated with previous Superman (George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and even Nicolas Cage) and Batman (Adam West) portrayals. After briefly flittering across the screen, these other universes are restored when Dark Flash gets killed. Barry then runs back in time once more, largely resets the circumstances of his mother’s murder (but with one detail changed), and returns to the present day — only to find that things still aren’t exactly the same. In particular, the Batman of his new Earth is George Clooney’s take on the character from the infamous Batman & Robin movie.
Who Did a Better Multiverse Story?
Even beyond the most controversial element of The Flash‘s third act — the polarizing deepfake technology used to show Reeves, Reeve, and West onscreen, all of whom passed away years prior — an argument can be made that the film’s plot didn’t fully tap into the potential of a multiverse story. Because (outside of Cage) these Chronobowls contain long-dead actors, their worlds and their characters don’t factor too heavily into The Flash‘s actual conflict, outside of briefly showing up onscreen. The ramifications of their universes colliding, and either being permanently changed or wiped entirely from existence, have no emotional impact. Even in the shenanigans earlier in the film, Keaton’s Batman takes the confirmation of the multiverse in stride (and arguably knows way more about it than either Barry). Younger Barry arguably learns no substantial lesson from his time with his alternate self, becoming poisoned by revenge for decades before dying. While Barry arguably walks away from the film changed — at very least, he’s aware of what time travel is capable of, and has better processed his mom’s death — he still changes the timeline once again, and the end result is played for laughs.
Sure, Riverdale occasionally used its parallel universes for camp and for laughs — but it managed to tell a surprisingly profound story in the process. The 100th episode, and Jughead’s Grant Morrison-y role as the narrative force saving both realities, helped ground the surreal spectacle in character, as opposed to plot. The penultimate episode, and Angel Tabitha helping the gang process their future-past lives, did the same. The actual act of bridging Riverdale‘s two canons is relatively simple, involving a small color TV and the opening notes of the show’s pilot episode, but the spectacle came from the characters. The tension came from watching each protagonist decide whether or not to learn the “truth” — one of the most heart-wrenching moments of the episode was watching Kevin Keller (Casey Cott) initially refuse to, after learning that his 1950s boyfriend, Clay Walker (Karl Walcott), doesn’t exist in the present day. Everything that unfolded from the gang learning the “truth” — and their choice to only remember the good moments — was not only a sentimental way to start to close out Riverdale the show, it provided a sense of emotional catharsis for the characters we’ve watched go through hell and back for seven seasons. Instead of the multiverse being the entire gimmick to sell a piece of media (which, arguably, was the case for The Flash), Riverdale leaned into what makes it really work as a narrative device — the surreal emotion of discovering who you could’ve been, or almost were.
The Flash is now streaming exclusively on Max. Riverdale‘s seventh and final season will stream on Netflix at a later date.
