Riverdale ep. 3.21 recap “Chapter Fifty-Six: The Dark Secret of Harvest House”

Was last week’s prom not over-the-top enough for you? Do you want organ harvesting and fake-out deaths? Well good! Riverdale is here to serve you everything in your insane dreams!

Now in the belly of the beast, Betty continues her investigation into The Farm. She’s mostly ostracized by the others (go figure). But straight away it’s clear why Edgar extended the invite to Betty.

Alice sits down with the family and admits “the truth” to Betty. She tells her daughter that she has the “serial killer gene” that no one else in the family has. After this bombshell, Edgar suggests hypnotising Betty so that she can, I don’t know, come to peace with herself?

Betty agrees, mostly because she’s a really thorough detective. In her hypnosis, Betty meets her “other self” one that tells Betty that she pushed Polly down the stairs and drowned her cat. When she wakes, she seems fairly unshaken. Which can only mean 1.) she’s totally crazy or 2.) she’s clever enough to spot a lie a mile away.

She calls Juggie about the new addition to her routine. She also sets him on the mission to hunt down the chain of people that delivered the letter to her on the night of the prom. The trail leads Jughead to his sister, then Little Ricky, and on to Princess Ethel.

When Jughead finds Ethel in the bunker, she seems pretty upset. She tells Jughead that while she left the “false king” of the Sisters, she’s still in love with the Gargoyle King. He convinces her to leave and take her to safety, along with a gang of Lost Boys (aka the seemingly feral boy scouts). They go to retrieve the littlest Lost Boy and come face-to-face with the hooked Black Hood.

Jughead eventually escapes with Ethel and the boys, which gains Ethel’s trust. She blesses him with the true name of the Gargoyle King: Jason Blossom.

When Jughead shares the news with Betty, she barely bats an eye. She’s in full-on Riverdale mode and is as unsurprised as we all are at this point. Plus Betty has something bigger and more pressing to deal with: The Farm’s organ harvesting.

Betty had started to become suspicious when the others at The Farm told her that Edgar took their emotional pair and channeled it into something physical. Er, win win?

She later sees Evelyn sitting in a chair to receive dialysis. She also notices that the woman is receiving anti-rejection medication. The type taken by someone who has had an organ transplant.

Also, all the stars for the Easter egg of Evelyn reading The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Betty later gets into the room with all the organs. She immediately takes it to Cheryl (who was on the cusp of losing faith anyway after the whole “you-can’t-run-for-prom-queen thing”), who believes her cousin when she sees the organ in the ice chest.

Cheryl immediately helps Toni escape, at the expense of her own freedom. And Betty is tackled by Fangs and Kevin, who hand her over to be Edgar’s next victim.

Meanwhile, a little closer to reality, Archie meets with his mom’s FBI friend! (I did say a little.) Together, the FBI agent and Veronica begin working together to arrest Hiram, who is apparently going to buy Riverdale. As if that’s a thing.

Veronica, the FBI and Archie work together to get Hiram. Archie challenges Hiram to a match. Le Bonne Noit (which Hiram technically owns) takes illegal bets. FBI raids Le Bonne Noit. Hiram gets arrested during the illegal boxing match.

And it all seemingly goes without a hitch.

But after his mother’s coaxing, Archie goes to see Veronica and admit his feelings for her. Only when he arrives, he learns that he’s been beaten by Reggie. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs. But I’ve always thought Archie was better off without Ronnie (that’s both in this TV show and in the comics in general – and I’ll stand by that).

So the kids are seemingly close to wrapping up their mysteries. But somehow, it’s not that likely that things can be so simple. Could it really be Jason this whole time? Well, in Riverdale Land, it’s very well possible. But we saw his body at the funeral, as a rotten corpse, and shot in the head in a video. Sure it could all be fake, and it takes a show like Riverdale to just tell us that “it’s possible!”

There’s some shifty shenanigans going on that are sure to make us scream in next week’s finale. I doubt that Hiram will be down for long. And I’m sure he’s already cooking up delicious revenge.

Let’s just hope that this time, they can cook up a good storyline for him.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.