10 Riverdale Moments That Prove It Was The Most Unhinged TV Show Of All Time

Ultimately, Riverdale is an absolute fever dream. If I hadn’t watched it myself, I would think someone was trying to prank me by telling me all the unhinged things that happened. These ten really capture the absurdity of Riverdale.

10 Archie & The Prison Fight Club

In the grand scheme of Riverdale, Archie getting framed and thrown in juvenile detention isn’t that surprising a storyline. Hiram Lodge is a deeply twisted fellow, and his evil knows no bounds. That being said, it was absolutely unhinged that Archie was then forced to compete in a prison Fight Club where Riverdale’s elites bet on the outcome.

Archie wasn’t a prison; it was a juvenile detention center filled with mostly mildly delinquent kids. Still, apparently, every rich person was completely chill watching teenagers beat each other nearly to death. If this wasn’t already ridiculous, our plucky ginger lead solves the problem by making a passionate speech about “the epic highs and lows of high school football.”

9 Every Musical Episode Of Riverdale

Riverdale brought us an entertaining, mildly cringy, and completely ridiculous musical episode every season. They became a staple of the show, and fans either loved or hated it. However, one part of the tradition that I never see people discuss is the fact that they chose musicals that most high schools would deem completely inappropriate.

In what world would a school approve of Heathers the Musical or American Psycho? They’re both about killing sprees. Maybe Carrie The Musical would pass the vibe check, but that’s a big maybe. However, Next to Normal involved topics like suicide and drug abuse. At least the Hedwig episode acknowledged that a principal wouldn’t approve of the musical.

On top of that, the musical episodes include outlandish storylines. We have the Black Hood murderer, Cheryl being sent to conversion camp, a serial killer convention, The Farm cult, Polly’s death, a Serpent threesome in school, and Archie the Musical. Ultimately, Riverdale’s musical episodes are simultaneously the best and the worst that the show has to offer.

8 Everyone Joins An Organ-Harvesting Cult

What do you get when you combine a town filled with non-stop trauma, a grandiose religious leader, and the black market? Riverdale season 3’s organ-harvesting cult. I cannot think of a single other teen drama where they’d write a storyline this unhinged. Pretty Little Liars included some out-there storylines, and they wouldn’t have even gone there.

Amusingly, The Farm somehow managed to rope in most of the high school and the town. Despite this, Edgar managed to hide the fact that he was cutting open members and harvesting their organs to sell on the black market. Add in the fact that Penelope Blossom was one of Edgar’s buyers, and you have a completely insane storyline that somehow fits perfectly.

7 The Riverdale Cast Is Transported To The 1950s

At the end of Riverdale season 6, a deadly comet is plummeting towards Riverdale, and the entire town will be destroyed. Luckily, by this point, they’d already dove head first into fantasy, with superheroes, an interdimensional villain, and guardian angels. To save everyone, Tabitha transports the entire town back to 1955. Only in Riverdale would this work.

Consequently, the last season of Riverdale takes place in the past. Betty becomes a publisher of the feminist magazine The Teenage Mystique. Jughead writes a humor magazine. Veronica becomes an Oscar-winning producer. Archie becomes a construction worker and poet. All four of them become a polyamorous quad, which feels appropriate considering how often they’ve mixed and matched pairs.

Archie joining the military is, once again, not that surprising in the context of Riverdale. After joining a fight club, fighting a bear (which I’ll talk about later), becoming a boxer, and opening a community center with a boxing ring, the military seems like a logical next step. However, this storyline led to possibly one of the most bizarre Riverdale scenes.

Archie dreams he’s fighting in the trenches of World War I. Except, instead of the battlefield, he fights on a high school football field with the River Vixens cheering him on. Right before he wakes up, Archie sees Hiram Lodge holding a gun up to his head. This football war scene feels like a bad drug trip, but somehow it works.

5 Betty & Jughead Have An Evil Half-Brother

Betty and Jughead were an unexpected couple, but they somehow managed to work for a while. However, in true Riverdale fashion, they had to make their relationship profoundly awkward by introducing that they have a mutual half-brother. FP and Alice Cooper have a baby together named Charles.

Charles starts dating a troubled guy named Chic. Chic pretends to kill Charles, but in reality, Charles joins the FBI. Meanwhile, Charles’s boyfriend, Chic, pretends to be him when meeting the Coopers. Later, it’s revealed that Chic is a fraud, but Alice knew that, as she had been working with the real Charles to help take down The Farm.

Jughead and Betty meet the real Charles, and they’re skeptical. It turns out this feeling is well-founded. Charles has the “serial killer gene,” and he acts on it. Charles kills the two students who wanted to kill Jughead, and he ends up in jail. Throughout all of this, Charles and Chic remain in a relationship. If all of that doesn’t make your head spin, I don’t know what will.

4 Edgar Evernever Goes Evel Knievel

Edgar Evernever was integral to The Farm storyline, but his ending was so batshit crazy that it earned its own spot on this list. Apparently, in stealing people’s vital organs and ordering pizzas, Edgar Evernever was building a rocket so that he could escape the FBI.

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The beauty of Riverdale is that it never bothers to explain how he managed to build a rocket that big without anyone noticing. To add to the sheer lunacy of the situation, Edgar planned to ride the rocket away wearing a star-spangled jumpsuit reminiscent of Evel Knievel.

Because this is Riverdale, they never explained what he thought he would do with the rocket. One fan, u/Locke108, hilariously suggested on Reddit that he had multiple rockets set up so that he could take one after another to Canada. It’s equally probable that he was trying to go to outerspace. Only in Riverdale would these be equally possible answers.

3 The Riverdale Cast Gets Supernatural Powers

By Riverdale season 6, the show had jumped the shark in the best way possible. A bomb explosion caused everyone to develop superpowers. The writers took the time to pick powers that matched each Riverdale character.

Archie, the survivor, became indestructible. Betty can normally tell if someone is a serial killer just by looking in their eyes, so reading auras is a natural extension. Jughead, the intuitive detective, can read minds. Veronica is always presented as the temptress, so her poison kiss makes sense. And, of course, Cheryl Bombshell has pyrokinesis.

Luckily, instead of fearing the campiness of Riverdale getting superheroes, they fully embrace how weird the storyline is. The best part of them doing this absolutely unhinged storyline is that it feels reminiscent of the Archie’s Weird Mysteries comics.

2 Archie’s Bear Attack

By far, the most discussed unhinged storyline on Riverdale is Archie getting attacked by a bear in season 3. Archie goes on the run from Riverdale’s mafia with his dog Vegas and becomes a Canadian park ranger at just 17-years-old. This would be strange enough, but then Archie is informed of a bear sighting but still decides to walk Vegas.

When he comes face-to-face with the animal, Archie fights a bear and survives. His injury causes him to hallucinate his friends, though. Writing about the storyline, I feel like I’m describing the story of a weird fan fiction, not a network television show. Only on Riverdale could they put out something this bizarre and improbable.

1 Cheryl Keeps Her Brother’s Corpse In The House

The Archie bear fight might be the most discussed Riverdale storyline, but the one that sticks out to me as the most unbelievable is Cheryl keeping her brother’s corpse in the Blossom Chapel. Poor Jason can never rest in peace with the number of times his corpse is dug up. Cheryl and Jason’s relationship always had a slightly incestuous tone, and this storyline only makes it worse.

Cheryl would go down to the basement and have one-sided conversations with her brother’s decaying corpse. She put makeup on the corpse and sewed his bullet hole shut. She changes his clothes and does the crossword with him. Shockingly, the corpse is well-preserved and doesn’t stink up the entire Blossom house.

The already gross storyline gets worse when a rat comes out of his chest. I’m truly horrified that Cheryl keeps Jason’s body in her basement, but it also feels like the most Riverdale decision ever. The show has always had horror undertones, and Cheryl was never the most stable person. It just makes sense that she would be involved in the most wonderfully unhinged Riverdale storyline.