What do you do when it seems like there are no original ideas? For Riverdale‘s Jughead, the answer is you come up with one, drawing on your real-life experiences but giving them a dark turn. The CW has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive clip from tonight’s episode of Riverdale, “Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Two: Tales in a Jugular Vein,” the fifth episode of the series’ seventh and final season and in it, Jughead takes on writing an issue for Pep with a very tight deadline — he just must come up with the right idea first. You can check out the clip in the video player above.
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As you can see in the clip, while Jughead is given some general ideas to work with none of them really click for him and that’s when he gets the idea to come up with unexpected horror stories from the teen perspective. Of course, while this sounds like an interesting take on things from the sound of things in the episode’s official synopsis, Jughead may run up against a bit of bad timing with Principal Featherhead taking aim at comic books and their perceived negative influence. You can check out the episode synopsis for yourself below.
CORRUPTING THE YOUTH OF AMERICA — Principal Featherhead (guest star William MacDonald) takes aim at the negative influence comic books have over kids, just as Jughead (Cole Sprouse) is tasked by Pep Comics to write four tales for a new issue. KJ Apa, Lili Reinhart, Cole Sprouse and Madelaine Petsch also star. Jeff Woolnough directed the episode written by Greg Murray.
The idea of morality and societal norms — particularly those in the 1950s — has been an interesting aspect of Riverdale thus far in Season 7 and while Principal Featherhead, along with the school’s child psychologist, aren’t necessarily villains per se, they are making things more complicated for the teen characters. According to series showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, society itself is one of the “villains” of the season — and these characters symbolize it.
“Usually, when we talk about the season, when we’re planning the season, we usually have a big bad or a villain that all of the kids are at some point or other engaging with and fighting against. And in season six, it was Percival Pickens who was an intergalactic time-traveling sorcerer. But when we were talking about this season, we really felt like the villain or what they were fighting against society was the 1950s,” he told ComicBook.com previously. “And that the conflict that all of our characters to some extent or other were caught up in was, how do we live honest, authentic lives that are individualistic and that allows us to be exactly who we want to be in a society that represses that and that demands conformity and that punishes anyone who falls outside of the carefully constructed mores of the 1950s, the institutions of the ’50s celebrated, which is to say via traditional American family, traditional American gender roles, traditional … a social order that has since been exploded and broken down and rebuilt time and time again since that time? So, it felt like the villain, if there was one, were the 1950s. And by the way, we have characters that symbolize that… but the big conflict was with society at large and them sort of bristling against that.”
Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on The CW. “Tales in a Jugular Vein” debuts April 26th.
