Will The Final Two Episodes of Riverdale Revisit Previous Seasons?

After seven seasons, Riverdale is rapidly coming to an end. The fan favorite The CW series has just two episodes remaining to wrap things up and to say that fans have some questions about not only how the series will do that, but where the series will land is a bit of an understatement. One of the major questions fans have is if the series will return its characters to the present day after dropping them in 1955 at the end of Season 6. It’s something that seems a little up in the air, but as we get ever closer to the end of the series, there’s another question that fans are starting to ask: will Riverdale revisit previous seasons in the final two episodes?

There are two things that seem to indicate that Riverdale will, in some capacity, revisit previous seasons as it draws to a close. The first is the series finale synopsis. Released earlier this month, the synopsis for “Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: Goodbye, Riverdale” reveals that we will catch up with an aged Betty in the present day and while that would suggest that the gang remains in the 1950s, there’s more to it. It also notes that she will call on a “special friend” to help her relieve her last day of senior year “with her friends as they were, their memories restored.”

While it is possible that the last day of senior year that older Betty wants to relieve is the one from the 1950s, the bit about “as they were, their memories restored” could also suggest that we’ll see them revisit Season 5. As fans will recall, Betty and her friends graduated high school in the third episode of Season 5 and while there were a lot of things in that episode that weren’t exactly happy or that would lend to nostalgia — Jellybean being exposed as the voyeur and prompting FP to move back to Toledo, Archie joining the army, and Cheryl breaking up with Toni to be specific — there is something specific in that episode that would make for an interesting sort of dovetail with the Season 7 premiere: the time capsule. Season 3’s “Chapter Seventy-Nine: Graduation” saw the students at Riverdale High bury a time capsule. It’s the same time capsule that Jughead digs up in the Season 7 premiere to try to get the group to remember their lives in the “present”. It would be an interesting thing for the finale to revisit that, especially since that episode also saw the gang departing Riverdale to start their lives, which would also make for an interesting nod to the show “departing” as well.

The second thing that suggests that the final two seasons will revisit previous seasons actually comes from Cinemablend‘s Laura Hurley who noticed something very interesting in the preview for the upcoming penultimate episode of the series, “Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six: The Golden Age of Television”: footage from the series pilot. In the preview, Tabitha Tate (presumably the “Angel” version of her and not the 1950s version) and shows him something on television. The brief, in-color clips that the audience sees of what Jughead is being shown comes from the beginning of the Riverdale pilot.

The pilot episode, “Chapter One: The River’s Edge”, was an eventful one as it not only introduced the characters and the mystery of Jason Blossom’s death, but it also introduced the idea of Jughead as a narrator for the series as he was beginning to write a novel. Jughead’s narration and role as the storyteller in the series has long been a topic of conversation among fans with many questioning how reliable Jughead is in that capacity. Others have also questioned if the entirety of Riverdale is really just Jughead’s novel being brought to life. It is not impossible that we will be delivered some sort of twist regarding Jughead’s role in the entire story in the upcoming penultimate episode and in a sense, if the episode is subtly tying back to the Riverdale pilot, one can also see how Season 7 may have been leading up to this. Jughead was the one person in the Season 7 pilot who remembered anything. The season has also followed Jughead as he embarked on a professional career as a comic book writer — while still in high school. One episode even saw him creating Sabrina the Teenage Witch. If the episode does reveal that Jughead has been the architect of this story the whole time, it might change how the season finale connects to previous seasons, but it would resolve one of the biggest fan questions of the series to date.

The Riverdale Series Finale Will Give Closure

However, the final two episodes shake out — and whether they connect to previous seasons or not — series star Mädchen Amick has confirmed that while they don’t exactly “get out of the 1950s”, there will be closure.

“You’ll experience the characters in different… dimensions [that will allow for] a lot of closures that are outside of the 1950s,” Amick said.

When is Riverdale‘s Series Finale?

In May, The CW announced the series finale dates for both Riverdale and Nancy Drew. Both shows will air their series finales on Wednesday, August 23rd. Nancy Drew‘s finale will air at 8/7c with Riverdale‘s airing at 9/8c.