WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Riverdale Season 6, Episode 6, “Chapter One Hundred and One: Unbelievable,” which aired Sunday, March 20 on The CW.
While discussing Jughead Jones’ (Cole Sprouse) story in Riverdale moving forward, showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa likened the character to Marvel’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil.
Following the show’s five-part “Rivervale” event, the sixth episode of Riverdale Season 6, “Chapter One Hundred and One: Unbelievable,” finally resolved the massive cliffhanger from the Season 5 finale, which saw Hiram Lodge (Mark Consuelos) bomb the home of Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) with Archie and Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) still inside. (Jughead was later revealed to be in the nearby garage at the time.)
After surviving the explosion, Archie and Betty discovered that they now had superpowers. Archie gained the powers of super strength and invulnerability, while Betty gained the ability to see evil auras. Getting a slightly rawer deal was Jughead, whose hearing was severely damaged in the blast, leaving him deaf.
“I will say that Jughead’s journey is just beginning, and it does seem like, unlike Archie and Betty, Jughead wasn’t granted a special ability,” Aguirre-Sacasa told TV Guide. “That said, he was a little further away from the nexus of the blast. So stay tuned and see what happens with Jughead. This is only the beginning of his journey, not the endpoint of his journey.”
Aguirre-Sacasa was then asked about an early draft for the initial Riverdale pilot, in which Jughead was written as being deaf. “God, that’s such a deep cut. I completely forgot about it,” he said. “Yeah, in one of the early drafts — not the original, but I would say probably in the third draft of the Riverdale pilot, he was, but then he went back to not being deaf. But it was something we talked about way back when.”
When asked if he could now explore some of the ideas he had back then, the showrunner said, “Yeah, I’ll be totally honest with you, I didn’t even consciously set out to do that.” He continued, “You know, I guess in a weird way… Obviously, we’re playing with genre and different comic book tropes, and that’s why comics were such a big part of ‘Rivervale.’ Without giving too much spoilers, it’s sort of a version of the Daredevil story where someone loses a sense that is so important to them, and then other things start to happen to fill in that missing sense. So that’s our genre take on this story, but stay tuned. A lot happens with Jughead in the next episode.”
Created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, the Marvel Comics character Matt Murdock lost his sight at a young age, though his other senses heightened to superhuman levels, giving him a “Radar Sense.” As an adult, Matt — a lawyer by day — began using these abilities to fight crime as the masked vigilante known as Daredevil.
Daredevil has been adapted into live-action on a number of occasions, with Matt Murdock being portrayed by Rex Smith in the 1989 made-for-television film The Trial of the Incredible Hulk and by Ben Affleck in the 2003 big-screen film Daredevil. The character was then portrayed by Charlie Cox in the Netflix original series Marvel’s Daredevil from 2015 to 2018 and in the limited series Marvel’s The Defenders in 2017. Cox recently reprised his role as Matt in the film Spider-Man: No Way Home.
New episodes of Riverdale Season 6 air Sundays on The CW.
Source: TV Guide
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