Riverdale – Chapter Sixty-Six: Tangerine

By: Courtney Groom

Jughead (Cole Sprouse) is reading his submitted chapters for the Baxter Brothers contest and DuPont (Malcolm Stewart) tells him he thinks the Baxter Brothers found their newest ghostwriter. Jughead won! Mr. DuPont gives Jughead the contract and tells him to read carefully before signing.

Jughead still feels something isn’t quite right with the Baxter Brothers novels so he asks Charles (Wyatt Smith) if he can use FBI resources to track down their grandfather. Jughead says it’s something he should’ve done months ago but now he has the contract he can’t sign until he knows the truth about his Grandfather.

That night Alice (Madchen Amick) wakes up Betty (Lili Reinhart), telling her something happened with Polly (Tiera Skovbye) at Shady Grove. She mutilated a nurse, almost clawing her face off. Betty, Charles, FP (Skeet Ulrich) and Alice are in the kitchen as Charles shows her security footage from Shady Grove. Although we don’t see the footage, we hear it sounds pretty gruesome. Charles is asking for Betty and will only talk to her alone. Betty agrees to go find out what happened until Alice mentions one more piece of crucial information. The nurse Polly attacked was named Betty.

At Shady Grove Betty comes into Polly’s room to see her strapped down to her bed. She is freaking out, telling Betty she’s the only one she can trust and wants to know what’s going on. Betty asks her to tell her what’s happening on and why she attacked a nurse named Betty. Polly tells her can’t remember any of what they’re saying and is begging Betty to believe her. The last thing she remembers was being in a rec room and then chained to the bed.

Jughead gets a call from Charles, who tells him he found his Grandfather. He tells Jughead that Forsythe has a P.O. box in Seaside that he checks once a month when he comes in from the forest.

Betty is back at her house and is talking to Alice saying she actually believes Polly. She realizes that doctors at Shady Grove said Polly received a phone call about an hour or so before the incident. Just then, the phone rings and Alice pick it up. Alice walks back into the kitchen and grabs a knife from the drawer. Betty is asking her mom what she is doing, until she holds up the knife ready to slice Betty. Betty says she is acting like she is hypnotized and then looks at the phone. Before Alice does any damage, Betty snaps her fingers. Alice goes back to normal, asking Betty why she is holding a knife. She asks if the phone rang or did she imagine it. Betty tells her it rang and she answered, but whoever called must have said something that triggered her into a trance. Betty says they need Charles to trace that phone call as it is probably the same caller who rang Polly.

Betty meets with Charles at his office and he tells her their hunch was right. The calls received by Polly and Alice came from the same place: Shankshaw Prison. Betty says something must have been said on those calls that made Alice and Polly enter a trance-like state, as if they were hypnotized. Betty wonders who do they know that uses auditory cues and hypnotism to control its members. And you guessed it – The Farm. Edgar may be dead, but Evelyn (Zoe De Grand Maison) is not.

Back with Jughead in the woods, he finds a converted bus in the middle of the night and a man comes out with a gun telling Jughead he’s trespassing on private property. Jughead asks him not to shoot and explains who he is as Forsythe (Timothy Webber) lets him in.

Forsythe tells Jughead whatever FP said about him is probably true. Jughead says he’s not there to talk about that but one of Forsythe’s old classmates, Francis DuPont. Jughead says he thinks Forsythe wrote the original Baxter Brothers book and not DuPont. He thinks he stole his idea and then published it under his name to which Forsythe says his facts are a little mixed up.

At Thistlehouse Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch) is sitting on the couch with Jason’s corpse on one side and the Julian doll on the other. Cheryl says the day has finally come; she’s ending their collective misery. Cheryl set up “Chernobyl-grade roach bombs” throughout Thistlehouse to catch whoever is trying to make Cheryl think she is crazy. And who else is it but her own mother Penelope Blossom (Nathalie Boltt)! She passes out.

Penelope wakes up tied to a chair with Cheryl, Toni (Vanessa Morgan), Nana Rose (Barbara Wallace), Jason and Julian sitting in front of her. Cheryl asks Penelope if she remembers when she was a little girl and she used to read her Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Penelope would ask Cheryl if she thought she was Alice and Cheryl would say, “No, Mother, I’m the Red Queen.” Cheryl says she’s going to do to Penelope what the Red Queen did to Alice, she is putting her on trial. The charges are as follows: Prolonged gaslighting in hopes of driving her cuckoo-bananas, attempted murder of Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead and actual murder of her father, Clifford Blossom, Claudius Blossom and Hal Cooper.

Forsythe is telling Jughead about what really happened, saying he always loved detective stories so he came up with this notion to write a book about teenage detectives. Forsythe says he was burning out at Stonewall so he quit and the only thing he had to show for it all is one Baxter Brothers story. He didn’t know what to do with it, but Francis said he did — so Francis offered to buy it from him for five thousand dollars.

Forsythe admits when he saw how popular Baxter Brothers became over the years he grew bitter, started drinking and took his anger out on the world and on his son. Jughead tells Forsythe Mr. DuPont asked him to be the next ghostwriter and all this time he thought that Mr. DuPont was killing people in order to keep the secret that he stole the book from him. Forsythe tells Jughead to seize the opportunities he’s being given and sign the contract.

Back in Riverdale Betty visits Evelyn at Shawshank Prison. She tells Evelyn she knows about hypnotic trigger she put on her family to attack her and asks what the trigger word is. Evelyn admits when she delivers the activation, the receiver turns into her — they become Betty. Betty asks why Polly attacked a nurse named Betty and why her mom came after her. Evelyn explains that when triggered, they become Betty, they try to kill Dark Betty. Evelyn tells Betty it was Edgar’s idea and the trigger word is “tangerine” repeated three times in a row. Evelyn starts to say tangerine, but before she says it a third time Betty has left.

Betty is with Charles and asks him what would happen if she heard the trigger word three times. Would she be activated and want to kill herself? Charles says there’s only one way to find out. He says the word three times, but nothing happens.

Penelope is still tied to the chair. She says it’s clear that no matter what she says that Cheryl is just looking for a good reason to kill her. Cheryl tells her she’s looking for a reason to spare her life. Penelope says she wanted to destroy her happiness with Jason because how could she live knowing that she is happy with her dead son. Cheryl tells her, in that case, she is guilty of the worst crime of all: being hateful to her rotten core. Instead of killing her mother, Cheryl takes her down to the secret bunker where she must live the rest of her rotten life. Cheryl tells Penelope she needs time in solitude to seek penance for her crimes and cruelty.

Meanwhile in Pops we see FP and Archie (KJ Apa) just got back from being the vigilantes of the night. A hooded man walks into the diner and starts attacking the boys. Before leaving, he takes out a gun and shoots FP.

Jughead visits FP in the hospital to tell him he found Grandpa. FP asks what he did that for and Jughead says Mr. DuPont offered him the Baxter Brothers contract and he wanted to find out the truth before signing. And for what it’s worth, he found out that Forsythe feels bad about the way he treated FP. He knows what he did to him and Grandma and he knows that he was a bad father. FP agrees to ask Forsythe to come by the hospital, but when Jughead returns to the bus he’s gone.

Back at Thistlehouse Cheryl tells Toni that it may be time to bury Jason. Toni asks Cheryl if she’s sure and Cheryl says yes. There’s been so much pain and poison in the house and Jason, more than any of them, deserves the peace her mother spent years denying her.

After signing the Baxter Brothers contract Jughead gets a letter saying to meet at the North Woods ASAP. When Jughead gets there he notices torches in a circle as Donna (Sarah Desjardins) and Bret (Sean Depner) greet him, as well as two other students all in caps. Bret hands him a rock, saying it’s an initiation. Donna puts a skull down and Jughead breaks it with the rock. In it is a pin. Bret welcomes Jughead to the Quill and Skull Society.

Archie, Veronica (Camila Mendes), Jughead, Betty, Cheryl and Toni are at Sweetwater River. Cheryl says they were all there last time she was at the river, when she tried to take her own life, and it’s only fitting that they’re there now as she gives Jason at long last the funeral he deserves. Cheryl takes a stick from a burning fire and lights Jason’s corpse, which is laying in a boat. Archie and Jughead shove it out to the river as Cheryl cries into Toni’s arms.

In a flash forward to four weeks later Archie is checking an unconscious and bloodied Jughead, telling Betty and Veronica that he’s dead. Archie asks Betty what she did. Betty’s hands are covered in blood and she’s holding a rock.