Riverdale Season 4 Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs From 'Chapter Fifty-Nine: Fast Times At Riverdale High'

Downs...

4. Too Much Happens Off-Screen

One of the more unfortunate aspects of Riverdale that it would really benefit from dropping is its insistence on having so many major events happen off-screen. That convenient trope doesn't just result in a lot of telling in the dialogue, it undercuts storylines with real potential - two downsides we saw up-close-and-personal this week.

Kevin's reunion with Fangs in the woods was a pleasant surprise, but the pair's second meeting off-screen apparently resulted in Kevin discovering where The Farm's new location was. Shouldn't we have at least seen the pair's meeting in order to deduce if Kevin is telling truth? It's getting very hard to read which side he's on and, while that may be the intention of the writers, this just felt like a cheap attempt to force those feelings of confusion based off what we didn't see - instead of allowing us to be unsure of what we did.

On the other hand, Reggie's struggles with his father's abuse felt admirably authentic (more on that later), but it was completely let down by the fact that we never saw the pair's supposed heart-to-heart - a heart-to-heart that presumably brought an end to the story, reducing his father (and this compelling storyline) to nothing more than a villain-of-the-week that needed to be defeated.

Speaking of his father...