‘Riverdale’: Can Betty Save Her Mother and Sister From Edgar & The Farm? (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 4, Episode 3 of Riverdale, “Chapter Sixty: Dog Day Afternoon.”]
Riverdale contains normal teenage behavior, like getting into fights with classmates, alerting a roommate of a hookup with a tie on the door, and … defusing a bomb?
Yes, Betty (Lili Reinhart) defuses a bomb, while her brother, Charles (Wyatt Nash), the FBI agent, talks her through it. And at least four other agents stand by. That may be tied for the craziest thing to happen in “Dog Day Afternoon” as Betty and Charles work to track down Edgar (Chad Michael Murray) and his Farmies and free their mother and sister.
It all begins when an FBI agent goes undercover as a pizza delivery guy at the hotel where Edgar and his followers are camped out. Things go horribly wrong, and the agent is presumably killed, going by the gunshots. Edgar later calls Betty, using Alice’s (Mädchen Amick) phone with his list of demands: $250,000, passports for all of his followers, food, water, and a bus for transport. He suspected they had a mole, and Alice stepped forward after he started cutting people’s fingers off. Considering he was harvesting organs last season, this shouldn’t be that surprising.
But the governor refuses to negotiate with a cult leader, so it’s up to Betty to try to buy them some time. Charles talks her through asking Edgar for a gesture of good faith by releasing a hostage, but the cult leader has already done so. And into the FBI’s Riverdale HQ walks Polly (Tiera Skovbye), wearing a suicide vest. At this point, the FBI agents back away, and Charles talks Betty through defusing the bomb. (Let’s note that at no point does he offer to do it himself. Instead, when she begins asking him what they do, he tells her what to do.)
And it’s Betty who thinks to use her bobby pin to trigger the override on the dead man’s switch since Edgar removed the pin. So, congratulations, Betty, you just saved yourself, your sister, your brother, and an entire office of FBI agents who did nothing to help.
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Polly warns Betty that she can’t stop Edgar. She just has to do what he says. So, Betty turns to her friends to meet his demands. She gets Glamergé eggs from Veronica (Camila Mendes) for the money, passports from a guy Toni (Vanessa Morgan) knows, and a bus by telling her school’s receptionist she left a book on one. She brings everything to Edgar and the Farmies, and Evelyn (Zoé de Grand Maison) knocks her out from behind.
Betty comes to in a hotel room, tied to a chair next to Alice. Her mother then sums the ridiculousness of this entire storyline up in one sentence detailing Edgar’s plan: “Evelyn is going to drive the bus full of Farmies off of a cliff as a distraction while he takes off in his rocket.” He built the rocket. As for Betty and Alice, they’ll be tied to the front of the bus as shields.
By the time Evelyn checks on them, Betty and Alice have freed themselves. Betty repays the favor by knocking her out and taking her clothes and gun. She gets everyone on the bus, ostensibly on Edgar’s orders. (“That’s the thing about cults: Speak with enough authority, and they’ll do anything you say,” Alice says.) When Fangs starts calling attention to the “traitor,” Betty knocks him out. Alice spots Edgar heading for the roof and takes the gun to follow him.
Betty then spots Principal Weatherbee, without one of his fingers since Edgar thought he might be the mole. “Ms. Cooper, I don’t know how I let myself get embroiled in this madness,” he admits. She has him get everyone on the bus while she goes after her mother.
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Alice confronts Edgar on the roof about to get into his rocket, and he begins spouting some nonsense about ascending just like the prophet Elijah. Gunshots put an end to the madness, but it’s not until Betty reaches the roof that we see who took the bullets: Edgar.
Later, Betty and Jughead (Cole Sprouse) are enjoying being together and the nightmare being over when the doorbell rings. Jughead finds a VHS tape in a bag on his front doorstep. Good thing Riverdale seems like the kind of town to have VCRs?
Riverdale, Wednesdays, 8/7c, The CW
