Riverdale creator and showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa explains that the season 6 finale will be quieter, even though the stakes are “apocalyptic.”
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the penultimate episode of Riverdale season 6.
The creator and showrunner of Riverdale has shared plot details of the upcoming apocalyptic season 6 finale. The series, which premiered on The CW in 2017, is a dark and gritty reboot of the classic Archie Comics, starring KJ Apa as Archie Andrews, Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper, Camila Mendes as Veronica Lodge, Cole Sprouse as Jughead Jones, and Madelaine Petsch as Cheryl Blossom. The characters have experienced all kinds of wild plot twists, including multiple murders, a death cult, and now the development of superpowers that coincide with the return of Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina Spellman from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Earlier this month, the synopsis for the Riverdale season 6 finale was released, teasing that the season would end with the gang facing the “greatest threat” they’ve ever encountered. It was widely assumed that this threat would come from the season’s main villain, the supernatural and wicked Percival Pickens (Chris O’Shea). However, the penultimate episode featured a major twist: Percival was defeated, but Riverdale is now trapped within a magical barrier while a comet is racing toward the town from outer space. This certainly explains the episode title, “Night of the Comet,” a reference to the 1984 post-apocalyptic cult film.
Riverdale creator Aguirre-Sacasa sat down with EW to discuss the upcoming season 6 finale. He revealed that this episode will be much quieter, even though the stakes are “apocalyptic.” The episode will be primarily focused on what the characters will do when they realize they only have 12 hours to live. Although he was joking, he said that “we use the movie Melancholia as a little bit of an inspiration.” Read his full quote below:
In a weird way our penultimate episode, which was the final battle between Percival and our gang, felt like our really big, action-packed finale. We did that consciously so that in our last episode, we could focus weirdly on more emotional stories and character stories and relationship stories. The question we asked when we were breaking the story was: “Okay, all of these characters we love, they have one last day to live. They have 12 hours, how are they going to spend those 12 hours?”
I love our scenes when all the characters are together talking about what they’re going to do and I think them all wrestling with this changes the temperature of the season. It slows it down a little bit in a great way. We jokingly said that we use the movie Melancholia as a little bit of an inspiration for the season so that we could live with our characters in what might be their final moments.
This season finale is somewhat reminiscent of the finales in the early days of American Horror Story. Season 1, Murder House, ended its primary conflict in the penultimate episode, allowing its finale to be quieter and more reflective as it wrapped up the character arcs that had been running throughout the season, while season 2, Asylum, defeated its Big Bad three episodes before the end, allowing for even more mayhem to crop up in the meantime. Considering the fact that Aguirre-Sacasa has previously worked with American Horror Story co-creator Ryan Murphy on Glee and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, he likely drew this inspiration from his former collaborator.
It certainly seems unlikely that the Riverdale characters will actually be destroyed during this episode, considering the fact that the series has been renewed for a seventh and final season. However, knowing the twists and turns that the series is famous for, they might find a way to make that work. A season 7 that takes place in the afterlife wouldn’t be entirely out of the show’s wheelhouse, so truly anything can happen in the finale.
Source: EW
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