Riverdale’s Jughead Mystery Deepens in “Quiz Show” Flash Forward

As Riverdale‘s fourth season moves steadily forward, the series’ use of flash forwards continue to reveal more and more about Jughead’s ominous fate when the series gets to Spring Break. We’ve seen Betty helping to identify his dead body. We’ve seen Jughead’s friends arrested for his murder. Last week, we saw Betty cleaning out Jughead’s room at Stonewall Prep but it’s the flash forward at the end of Wednesday’s “Quiz Show” that has sort of turned everything we thought we knew on its head.

Spoilers for Wednesday’s episode of Riverdale, “Quiz Show”, below.

At the end of “Quiz Show”, things took a grim turn for Betty. After working hard to be able to defeat Stonewall Prep at the Quiz Show and managed to score a place at Yale, it all turns to dust when the list of questions and answers for the Quiz Show that Alice left her – but Betty didn’t use – were found in her Green Room. It ends up getting Alice fired and Betty expelled as well as the title being given to Stonewall anyway. Upset about how things shook out for Betty, Jughead confronts Brett and challenges him to a duel.

We then flash forward to four weeks later and find a distraught Betty meeting with Archie at Pop’s. She tells him that Jughead is never coming back and she doesn’t know how to handle it. It’s a somewhat ambiguous scene, but it seems to suggest that whatever is going on, Jughead may be faking his death but for some reason hasn’t come back. If Jughead is faking his death, the obvious question is why. That itself also begs the question of why he would allow his friends to be arrested for it, though it’s possible that maybe what started as a faking ended up the real deal.

In other words? Riverdale is managing to keep us guessing yet again. It’s something that’s largely become the core mystery this season, something that showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa touched on last summer.

“Next season is the kids’ senior year. It’s their last year in high school, and we really want to locate their stories in the high school world,” Aguirre-Sacasa said. “We started talking about what the big mystery could be, and we said it would be great if we kind of kept it in the high school kind of world. The other thing that we wanted to do is, this year Archie and Veronica weren’t that involved in the Gargoyle King mystery — it was more Betty and Jughead. We loved the core four together in the finale. We wanted to do something that tied them all together for the core mystery and for a big secret, and it felt like having them all around that bonfire, minus Jughead, would be a way to tie them all together so that when we get to the central mystery of what happened that night and what led to the events of burning their clothes, it would be all of our foursome and not the kids split off again.”

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