OlderRoberto Aguirre-Sacasa Talks 'Riverdale' Season 6 Finale Time Jump
In the season finale of Riverdale, the comet causes the cast to go back in time to 1955 and Roberto dished on them doing the time jump.
“It came from a couple of places. At various points in the season, we had talked about what our last season could be and various people had been very nostalgic about when the kids were in high school,” he told EW. “KJ [Apa] said to me at some point, ‘Man, remember when we were in high school and I was on the football team?” And Mark Pedowitz at the CW had a conversation with Jon Goldwater and said something like, ‘Oh remember when the kids were in high school?’ We talked about it in the room and we were sort of like, gosh, could we go back and put everyone back in high school? But we’ve done that. They were in high school for four-plus years. It would feel like a repeat. So we were in a conundrum.”
Roberto also teased how it leads into season seven.
“It felt like all we’re going to do for season 7 is sort of a lesser version of the high school years. But in thinking about nostalgia and then coming off of our big supernatural, mythic, Steven King-like season, we knew we needed to make our last season really, really special. One thing everyone can agree on is that whenever we have our characters in their iconic comic book outfits from the 1950s, people are delighted,” he told the site. “Cole [Sprouse] was so happy when he didn’t have to wear the beanie again but he said to me, ‘But, man, I’ll wear that crown till the day I die.’ So we thought: What if we go back to high school, but instead of high school in the present, we make it high school in the 1950s, which is how a lot of people think of the Archie characters.”
For season seven, with the time jump, they can also explore the characters relationships and tell those kind of first time stories.
“The writers’ room hasn’t started yet, but one of the things we’ve talked about is that our characters, none of them are in relationships yet. So we can tell those first time stories — the first kiss, the first crush, the first heartbreak,” Roberto teased. “So when we meet them, none of them are in the deep tortured relationships that we know and love with them. It’s a little bit more of a blank slate. What that implies is where it goes, nobody knows yet.”
