WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Riverdale Season 6, Episode 6, “Chapter One Hundred and One: Unbelievable,” which aired Sunday, March 20 on The CW.
Riverdale series creator and showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa delved into the powers Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper gained in this week’s midseason premiere, “Chapter One Hundred and One: Unbelievable.”
The recent episode saw Archie gain the powers of super strength and invulnerability, while Betty now has the ability to see evil auras. During an interview with TV Guide, Aguirre-Sacasa was told how fitting these powers were for Archie and Betty. “Exactly,” he said. “It’s funny. When we were talking about this, we wanted to pick up on abilities the characters had already sort of displayed or manifested. We always joke that Archie’s unkillable, and with Betty, we’ve made a big deal in the past that she’s been able to identify serial killers by looking in their eyes and having this sort of sixth sense about it. So that’s how we started talking about these gifts, if they’re gifts, or curses, if they’re curses.”
Later, when asked what they were going to do with said powers, Aguirre-Sacasa replied that he thinks that people will discover that a kind of battle “is brewing in Riverdale.” He added, “We talked about it in the past, about the heart of Riverdale or the soul of Riverdale being at stake. This season, we’re finding out that that is more literal than we’ve ever meant before. So they don’t know it yet, but they’re manifesting powers for a very specific reason.”
In the premiere, Archie and Betty discovered their powers after surviving the explosion of Archie’s house, which also harmed the hearing of Jughead Jones. Of course, bizarre scenarios like this are not unheard of in the pages of Archie Comics, as Aguirre-Sacasa pointed out while speaking to CBR, citing titles like Jughead’s Time Police and Archie’s Weird Mysteries as examples.
“We kind of thought, ‘It would be so fun this season to do a homage to those comic books,'” Aguirre-Sacasa stated. “That said, we did want to keep it grounded in some version of reality. We were sort of imagining, ‘What if M. Night Shyamalan or Stephen King were in the writers’ room? Could we wade into these waters and into this genre in a grounded, realistic way?’ The answer is, ‘Yes.'”
In a recent interview with CBR, Aguirre-Sacasa also touched upon Jughead’s hearing loss, saying that Jughead is “reeling from it, as anyone would coming through that physical trauma,” and that him realizing this “is the start of a very twisty journey for him.” Prior to this, Betty actor Lili Reinhart speculated in 2021 that Riverdale may come to an end after its seventh season, saying the cast and crew hope for such a season and that it will “probably be the last one.”
New episodes of Riverdale air Sundays at 8 p.m. EST on The CW.
Source: TV Guide
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