Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
The season completes the friends’ senior year before dividing them: Betty graduates as valedictorian, but Archie receives an empty diploma cover, enlists, and leaves for the Army. A promised reunion slips away. Seven years later Archie returns from military service and calls his old friends back to Riverdale. The town is visibly diminished, with vacant buildings and the Ghoulies controlling Archie’s wrecked home, while Hiram Lodge wants a freeway that would help his SoDale development and drain the town further. Archie wants to rebuild Riverdale High and revive the town, but the others arrive with adult lives and old wounds: Betty is an FBI trainee still pursuing the Trash Bag Killer, Veronica is trapped in a strained marriage to Chad, and Jughead is a blocked novelist facing debt and eviction.
The friends’ efforts to save Riverdale intertwine with disappearances along the Lonely Highway. Jughead’s interest in local Mothman sightings overlaps with Betty’s investigation, and their search leads to the Starkweather family, a group of killer truckers with ties to Betty and Polly’s family. They learn Polly was murdered and left in the trunk of an old car at the junkyard; Betty and Alice later hold a memorial for her. Meanwhile, Hiram’s feud with the town reaches Pop’s, which a Ghoulie firebombs, and the friends suspect Hiram’s hand. Riverdale is reincorporated with a town council, while Cheryl secedes Thornhill and discovers a family curse. Hiram is forced to leave town. Archie and Betty decide to try a relationship, but a bomb planted beneath Archie’s bed begins ticking as the season ends.