Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Riverdale opens the season by mourning Fred Andrews, then turns to Jughead's new life at Stonewall Prep, where he is invited to join the school's elite writing program. His classmates Bret, Donna and their circle draw him into a contest over the Baxter Brothers novels, while Betty and the others find that ominous videotapes are appearing on doorsteps around town. Jughead's investigation into missing Stonewall students becomes entangled with the school's traditions, its secret society and the growing suspicion that his new peers are willing to eliminate anyone who threatens them.
The Stonewall conflict peaks when Jughead appears to be murdered with a rock and Betty, Archie and Veronica are accused of killing him. Donna uses a drug and planted evidence to make Betty doubt her own memory, but Jughead's apparent death is staged as part of a plan to expose the students who set him up. Betty and Jughead expose DuPont’s murders; cornered by the evidence, he jumps from a window to his death. Riverdale High's senior year then shifts to Principal Honey: after he cancels school activities, the students imagine revenge in a story Jughead writes, blurring their real conflict with fiction.
The season's final episode was not written as a finale: production stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving the last three planned episodes for the start of season five. Prom and graduation therefore remain ahead, and the voyeur mystery is unresolved. In the shortened ending, the gang learns Honey made a fake tape to justify his restrictions and he leaves for a job at Stonewall. Then a new VHS shows masked figures stabbing a stand-in for Honey in a scene copied from Jughead's private story. Betty and Jughead recognize that someone knows what they wrote, but the sender's identity remains unknown.