New information about Jason’s death comes to light in this week’s RIVERDALE and Cheryl Blossom’s shocking confession at the end of the last episode means that all eyes on her. Meanwhile, Alice Cooper has been enjoying sensationalizing Jason’s death for newspaper sales, but Betty thinks she should just focus on the facts instead of trying to explot Jason. Alice suggests that she come work for the town paper, but Betty goes in another direction: she decides to revive the school’s paper — the “Blue and Gold”. And to do this, she asks Jughead for some help in investigating Jason’s death.
During our visit to the RIVERDALE set in Vancouver, we spoke to Cole Sprouse and Lili Reinhart about a Jughead/Betty team investigative team-up.
“Betty also has a storyline with Jughead where they kind of team up together to uncover more about Jason’s murder mystery,” Reinhart said. “Because they think the sheriff and the Blossoms are hiding something or trying to twist something. So they’re trying to figure [things] out, from an insider’s perspective. Betty, at first, is an outsider to the murder. She wasn’t involved. The only connection that she really has to the murder is that Polly was dating Jason. That’s kind of her only real connection. As the season progresses, she realizes that her family may be more involved than she thought. That’s why she and Jughead team up to get to the bottom of it. Because everyone is hiding secrets from everyone. her own parents are even lying to her. So that’s why she kind of takes it upon herself and Jughead to figure out what’s actually happening.”
Related: The Cast Dishes on the Archie-Betty-Veronica Love Triangle
Sprouse thinks this team-up works because “Betty has the journalistic resources from her parents in the background of her lineage and Jughead is an objective character on the outside of their school society and of their society at large. It gives him an interesting angle to approach writing about the town, writing about the students, writing about how people treat him and, by association, treat the rest of their classmates and the citizens of this [version of] Riverdale. It’s pretty obvious that Betty [and] her relationship to the journalism of the show is very much driven by her relationship with her mother. Whereas Jughead, without saying too much, has a different angle for it…a lot of his motivation, in my opinion, is driven by him trying to figure out quite a bit about himself and how he stands in society and where he fits in and how people are treating him. It’s the classic, if you’re a bully in school that’s probably because the person is hurting a bit at home [thing]. Jughead is trying to figure out other people, or he’s being quite cynical to other people, he’s pushing away from other people because he doesn’t understand himself and I think a lot of that writing is going on through that.”
In addition to this journalistic team-up, which will continue over several episodes, tonight’s episode will also feature Veronica getting slut shamed by a football player (Chuck Clayton) which eventually leads to other girls revealing that they too have been systematically shamed by various Riverdale High football players. So Betty and Veronica team up to make sure these women get justice.
Don’t miss an all new episode of RIVERDALE tonight (February 9) at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
