Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Season six opens with five episodes set in Rivervale, a parallel version of the town where familiar characters face horror-story versions of their lives. Jughead investigates how this reality differs from Riverdale, connecting it to Hiram’s bomb beneath Archie’s bed and discovering that the two worlds echo one another. The story then returns to Riverdale, where the explosion leaves Archie with super strength and near-invulnerability, Betty able to see a red warning glow around dangerous people, and Jughead deaf. Those changes pull the friends into a supernatural fight that keeps spreading through town, while Cheryl becomes entangled with the spirit of her ancestor Abigail and Veronica tries to escape her father’s shadow.
Percival Pickens uses magic and political control to turn Riverdale against its own residents. His plague kills the town’s firstborn residents, including Archie, Jughead, Toni and Fangs, but Cheryl and a coven of witches use phoenix magic to bring them back. Percival then traps the town behind a force field and sends a comet toward it. As impact approaches, Veronica gathers the friends’ supernatural abilities and passes them to Cheryl, who uses her phoenix power to stop the comet. Betty proposes to Archie and he accepts, although their marriage must wait until the danger passes. The next morning Archie wakes as a teenager in 1955, carrying the story into a new timeline.