"Look What The Black Cat Dragged In!"

Don't think I even have time tonight for the promised (Or is that threatened?) Narnia mash-up. I have all the pictures but as I learned last night I'm not capable of just putting them up and walking away. I have to editorialise and in the end it takes as long as writing a proper post, so that's kind of missing the point.

Luckily I have the old fall-back to fall back on. Music videos! Got a couple and a couple of reasons for using them, too. Always good to have a reason.

The first is something I wanted to crowbar into yesterday's post but couldn't find a delicate way to do it. Delicate crowbarring. Now, there's a concept to conjure with. Conjuring with crowbars, even better. What was I talking about?

Oh, yes, the video. It's Nine Stories by Hazel English. Pretty obvious why I wanted to get it in somehow. Better now than never.

It's a slice of sweet indie pop with a bubbling beat and a vocal that sounds like it was recorded through a sock. Several socks. Probably thermal. I don't want to come over like one of those fathers in a 1960s teensploitation movie but I really can't understand the words. 

Of course, by "understand" I mean "make out". I can understand what they mean, now I read them at Genius.com. They're pretty simple to understand or they seem to be. I know lyrics are seldom as surfaced as they appear but it's what I'm going with for now. 

The only conection with the book that gives the song its title would appear to be the first few lines

"You lent me Nine Stories
While you starred in mine
We talked about J.D
In your car..."

It's enough. I mean, I didn't even talk about him.

The other video is "3 Small Words", a candypop slammer from the soundtrack to Josie and the Pussycats, done live by Letters To Cleo, whose singer, Kay Handley, was the voice of Josie in the movie (Something which takes more digging to authenticate than it should.) and the always entertaining Charly Bliss, who are currently supporting LTC on tour, a billing order that surprised me. 

The result is one of the most mood-lifting spectacles I've seen for quite a while.

Seriously, if that doesn't at least make you remember what it felt like to be happy, you may want to check your pulse. I had that much energy once, you know and some of it was even my own.

Other than the sheer, innocent, exuberant joy of it, the reason (Remember, I said I had one.) for wanting to put it up is because Riverdale is back in my thoughts and back on Netflix. Last time I mentioned the show (I'd link but I can't find the post. Maybe I only thought-wrote it.) we'd just gotten to the end of Season Five and everything had gone totally telenovella. 

I wasn't sure there was going to be another season but not only is there, it's now! It's also short. Five episodes. Actually, that's just half a season. Then it goes on hiatus for a few months to return in March next year.

That would be good enough but there's more. So much more. Remember how peeved I was over the way longish-running shows seem to get cancelled these days with no view to giving the fans either the catharsis they need or the satisfaction they deserve? One of those shows was The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which ended (BIG spoiler...) with Sabrina dead and gone to heaven. It was kinda cool but kinda fucking annoying at the same time.

When it happened, I wondered why, since TCAOS and Riverdale both take place in the same 'verse and have the same showrunner, some sort of deal couldn't have been worked out to integrate the two. Well guess what!

Oh, you guessed. I kinda teed that one up a little, didn't I? The picture at the top of the post may have been a clue, too.

Season Six of Riverdale, which is "in-canon and within the continuity" features the return of everyone's favorite teenage witch. Just like in the trailer (I could give you a couple of thousand words on that trailer, by the way. Maybe just on Cheryl.) Sabrina doesn't turn up until the end but I'm hoping she'll be sticking around for the second half of the season, when it finally gets here.

That just leaves me with the familiar quandry: whether to watch the weekly episodes as they drop or to hold my nerve and watch them all in quick succession at the end. I've tried it both ways this year. I waited for The Expanse (Also soon to return.) but I watched each episode of Stargirl as it came. 

My preference is to watch one episode a day. I wish someone would try that for a cadence once in a while. Or maybe they have and it's something I don't watch. 

I don't watch everything. Just the good ones.

On Ya Like Veronica

As well as driving down my engagement with every other game I was playing a month ago, Valheim has cut into the time I spend watching TV. shows. Watching television (whatever we mean by that, these days) is something that had been very much on an upward trend for me until then. From a low base of nothing at all just a few years ago, my hours spent staring passively at a screen have grown steadily, until this last pandemic year saw me goggle-eyed for as much as three hours a night, more often than not

Despite staying up later than normal these past few weeks so as to chop just one more tree or, more likely, recover just one more corpse, I've still been managing an hour or two most nights and what I've mostly been watching has been Riverdale. I was going to wait until I'd seen all five seasons to post about it but honestly, if I wait that long, I may well be too confused to say anything at all.

Last year, largely as a result of a passing comment by XzzySqrl, I think, although whether that comment was about the new show or the old I now have no idea, I started watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. That one started out a lot darker and, well, more genuinely chilling than I was expecting. After the first episode I put it away, maybe for later and maybe for not at all.

It wouldn't stop nagging at the back of my mind so I went back sooner than I imagined I would and ended up watching the entire run, all of which I loved, once the shock wore off. As the seasons progressed the initial darkness gave way to something closer to the hyperstylized camp I was expecting, although thematically the really-quite-disturbing overtones (can't call them undertones) never entirely went away. 

Maybe I just got used to the idea of ritual cannibalism as a normal part of small-town life. God knows after a while it seemed like the least of Greendale's problems. There is that about a long-running television show; the things that stand out at the start always recede into the background as the milieu deepens and settles. You acclimatize or, perhaps, are assimilated.

 

I was well aware that Greendale was connected to Riverdale. I am a comics fan, after all. Just not an Archie Comics fan. That probably goes without saying. As Sheldon derisively replies to Penny's ex-boyfriend Zack, when he asks where the Archie comics might be found, it's "In the bedrooms of ten year old girls, where they should be". 

Yes, I'm also watching the Big Bang Theory. I realize that's a controversial choice. I'm not planning on having a debate about it but I will if I have to. I can hardly pretend I don't care for it. I'm watching it on Netflix but I own the first seven seasons on DvD. 

Some of the seasons I own several times because I started buying it after the first. I was an early adopter at least in U.K. terms. It began to be packaged in seasonal bundles and some years it was cheaper to buy a bundle than to buy just the newest season alone so now I have several copies of some of them. Don't you hate marketing? 

I used to work in marketing, by the way. It was a long time ago. I didn't do anything bad. That I remember now. Or would admit to.

Even though I own seven seasons I stopped watching at the start of season six. The show went downhill around then. Or so I heard. Since I didn't watch it it's hard for me to say. I'll know soon, though, because a few weeks back I began again from the start. I'd just finished How I Met Your Mother and I needed another sitcom that would take a few months to get through. The choice is diminishing. I get though the things like candy. 

How I Met Your Mother: now that's a polarizing show. Or it should be. I can see why Big Bang Theory raises hackles but How I Met Your Mother frequently made me consider buying tar and feathers. Metaphorically. I probably didn't need to clarify that.

But I didn't come here to rant about HIMYM (Fed up of typing the whole long-ass name). I considered coming here and ranting about it many times while I was watching it but I didn't and it's a bit late now. Suffice it to say I did get to the end, somehow, and I thought the final episode was exactly what the show needed, which was something I wouldn't have said about some of the more heinous episodes. 

I only mentioned it because there's not a great deal that happens in HIMYM that rings true to life but Sheldon's comment on Archie Comics is so impeccably accurate it could very easily have been something I heard a friend say at a comic convention in 1985. I nearly got into a fist fight with someone once just because I said I didn't hate Disney and admitting to not seeing the point of Corto Maltese was tantamount to committing social suicide in my circle. Comics fans are tribal.

The irony is that Sheldon's comment, which was made maybe a decade ago, now has to stand in the shadow of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's re-invention of the Archieverse. And it's a dark, dark shadow.

I sorta-kinda knew about it before I started watching TCAOS (yes, I'm going to abbreviate all these multi-word titles). I'd picked up something about Riverdale being retooled as Twin Peaks for Teens a few years back. I'd even added the DVD of Season One to my Amazon wishlist (this was in my pre-Prime, pre-Netflix life).  

Mrs Bhagpuss bought it for me one Christmas and we watched the first episode together. It was pretty much what I was expecting. I liked it but not so much I wanted to watch the rest right away. It went on the shelf with all the other scores of unseen discs.

When I ran out of Sabrinas (they really should have kept making them - it was just hitting its stride) the obvious next step was backwards. I rewatched the first episode of Riverdale (nice short name, no need to accronymize that one) and it was as I remembered. The whole first season was what I thought I was getting: Teen Peaks

I'd seen Sabrina. I should have known where things would go. Off the rails, that's where.

The second season was almost in sync with the cartwheeling trajectory Twin Peaks itself carved out back in the super-early nineties, when David Lynch took his hands off the wheel and the show veered crazily from one side of the lost highway to the other until he came out of his daydream and took back control. I loved that ride. I know a lot of people didn't but I went with it all the way.

I went with Riverdale's sophomore season, too. It's basically one, long serial-killer arc. That apple's not falling far from the tree. 

It also starts to speed up, something I've noticed happening to most 21st century American drama series. The pace can feel almost glacial to begin with but once inertia's been overcome things get moving, fast. You have to hang on tight and hope.

Honestly, I feel sometimes like there are single episodes where enough happens to pad out a whole regular series of British TV. Our runs always used to be much shorter, so that would only be six or eight episodes, but even so... 

If it was just hyperactive pacing, that would be one thing, but it's the plots, the writing and, especially, the characterization. Characterization? What characterization? Superheroes, conceptualized and dialoged by a dozen different writers over a couple of decades, have more consistency than Archie, Veronica, Cheryl, Jughead and the rest. 

I kind of want to exempt Betty, who does actually stay moderately close to someone you could recognize as the same person episode to episode... always assuming you can parse the pony-tailed girl-next-door as Louise Brooks wannabe dominatrix and serial-killer's ammanuensis dichotomy in the first place. But any slack you might want to cut the show in terms of believabilty goes straight out the window in Season Three.

Season Three is batshit crazy. I'm sorry but there's no gentler way to put it. The Twin Peaks/serial killer motifs don't go away, they're just crushed by the avalanche of insanity that pours out of every script like flying monkeys in an acid flashback. It isn't even the extremity of the irreality that fractures the illusion; it's the conflicting conceits.

For one thing, someone decided back at the beginning it would be a good idea to have Jughead frame every episode as a kind of story he's writing. Someone calles him Riverdale's own J.D. Salinger at one point but Jug himself clearly takes Truman Capote circa Cold Blood as his model. He's documenting his own reality but how much he's heightening it, who can say?

That does add some kind of filter. It might even go some way to explaining the frequent lurches into pastiche, parody and homage. Of course we have the musical episodes that have been obligatory in all teen shows since Buffy pulled it off so utterly brilliantly back in the nineties but we also have point for point remakes of Chinatown or The Breakfast Club to contend with along with parts of Riverdale apparently existing in entirely different time periods for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Pop's Chock'lit Shop, where the gang all hang out, reflects the Archie Comics traditional obsession with the 1950s, a sock-hop and milkshake take that jars grindingly with an alternate 1950s also present, one that puts a Philip K Dick style fallout shelter in the woods for the gang to take turns hiding out from the authorities after the many and various murders they may or may not have committed, or just to enjoy increasingly exploitative, if always determinedly soft-core, sex. 

Meanwhile good-bad girl Veronica (no, wait, Cheryl's the good-bad girl. Or is it Betty?) runs a 1920s speakeasy, Jughead struggles to control a 1960s biker gang, the Manson family are moving in from The Farm and Cheryl's mother has a whole floor of the hotel set aside as a brothel. Why no-one even raises an eyebrow at a character called Alice Cooper defeats me. It suggests a level of self-restraint entirely absent from literally any other aspect of the show. I'm working on the theory that never mentioning it is in itself an act of supremely confident metafiction.

At times it's hard to remember with so much happening but there is some kind of season arc involving a roleplaying game called Griffons and Gargoyles that may or may not have actual supernatural effects. It may or may not (Again. Actually, always) be the instrument of a malevolent entity known as the Gargoyle King.  

You might be tempted to assume this would all have a Scooby Doo ending where the hood gets pulled off to reveal it was the janitor all along only by halfway through the season the hood's already been pulled off twice, revealing two different janitorial impersonators (oh, wait, that was the Black Hood in  Season Two. No, as you were, it's both of them!) and yet the Gargoyle King's still out there. And anyway, don't forget Riverdale is just one town over from Greendale, where the actual devil hangs out, along with more witches than you can shake a broomstick at.

Greendale, by the way, is the place Jughead drives Penny (not the one from the Big Bang Theory, although that's a crossover I'd pay good money to see) so he can take out a bowie knife and carve the biker gang tattoo out of her arm. Torture, mutilation and, particularly, branding with hot irons are recurring leitmotifs of this happy-go-lucky, teen-friendly show. 

We've come a long way from the kind of Archie comics Sheldon was deriding in the comic shop back in 2010. And I'm only halfway through Season Three. Where will it all end? I have no frickin' clue but I want to be there when it happens.

I can only manage one episode of Riverdale a night. Mostly because that's all Valheim allows time for. To decompress from the crazy I sometimes take in an episode of Kid Cosmic, an absolutely gorgeous work of line art set in motion, with a rockin' soundtrack and a blessedly U-certificate rating. 

The mesmerizing backgrounds remind me of any number of ligne claire classics but the true inspiration appears to be American also-ran comic-book imprints from the fifties and sixties like Harvey and Charlton. Contemporaries and competitors of Archie Comics, in fact.

Sheldon Cooper wouldn't have had any truck with those, either.

Your loss, Shelly.