Riverdale Showrunner Explains Fan Favorite Character’s Absence in Season 7

In Riverdale‘s current seventh (and final) season, the familiar characters of the long running The CW series have been transported not only back to high school, but back in time to the 1950s following a catastrophic encounter with Bailey’s Comet in the Season 6 finale. But while almost everyone has turned up in 1955, there’s one fan favorite character that has been missing from the season thus far: Reggie Mantle. Played by Charles Melton, Reggie hasn’t yet shown up in the past, leaving fans to wonder when — or if — they’ll be seeing him. Now, series showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa explains the character’s absence and hints we will be seeing Reggie again before it’s all said and done.

Speaking with TVLine, Aguirre-Sacasa explained that there’s a two-pronged reason viewers haven’t seen Reggie thus far in the final season. It’s part a schedule conflict on the part of Melton and part that the series has a story planned for Reggie later in the season.

“It was a little bit of both,” Aguirre-Sacasa said when asked if it was a schedule or a story matter that has left Reggie out of Season 7 thus far. “But even before that came up, we had talked about saving Reggie and giving him a big entrance a little bit later in the season for a big Hoosiers story and School Ties story that we’re telling later with the basketball team. Even before the scheduling conflict came up, we were thinking, ‘Ooh, we might hold Reggie a little bit before his return.’”

Why did Riverdale send everyone to 1955 for the final season?

During the Season 7 premiere, it was revealed that Cheryl Blossom’s attempt to save Riverdale against Bailey’s Comet had failed and the comet was the apocalyptic event it had been predicted to be. However, Tabitha Tate pays Jughead a visit in the 1950s to explain that she managed to shunt everyone off into an alternative timeline and while she’s trying to figure out how to right things, they must try to ensure that the timeline they are on “bend towards justice” if there is any hope of surviving. Aguirre-Sacasa previously told ComicBook.com that it’s the biggest challenge the Riverdale characters have ever faced, but on top of that, going back to the past lets the series tell some special and meaningful stories in its final run.

“I think for us in the writers room, I think we believe in our characters. We believe in our characters, and I think we believe in the inherent goodness of our characters. And they’ve gone to dark places, they’ve all gone to dark places. But by the end of season six, we were like, ‘There’s very few characters on our show who haven’t killed at least one person, and many have killed more than one person.’ But I think for us, and especially since it’s our last season, I think we believe in our characters,” Aguirre-Sacasa said. “And I think we believe in our characters doing the right thing, not just for themselves, but for their friends and for their town. So, we did set up that challenge and we did want to position them as young people kind of rebelling against the generation before them and the generations before them, to set Riverdale on a path to being on the right side of history, in storylines very personal and against the much larger canvas of America, if you will, kind of thing. But you’ve hit the nail on the head. That is exactly the stakes of this season. 100 percent.”

He added, “I mean, listen, when we were finishing season six, we looked at … I mean, a lot of this, we looked at stuff, Betty was an FBI agent, and Jughead was a struggling writer and a teacher, and Archie was sort of like a construction worker. And we really looked at … And we were looking at, ‘Okay, well, what would season seven look like if we continued with the kids in their mid to late twenties?’ And Betty becomes a therapist, and Archie sort of is tracking down his uncle’s son and being a father figure. And it was like when we got word, it was like, ‘Okay, we have one more go around with these characters. What are the most special and meaningful stories we can tell with them?’ And that’s kind of how we ended up where we ended up.”

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on The CW.