In this week’s episode, another citizen of Riverdale discovers that they have a superpower, and now it’s time travel.
This episode put Tabitha Erinn Westbrook in the spotlight. This is refreshing and nice to see. Usually, Archie takes the crown of town hero, but the viewers this week watched as Tabitha had her well-deserved turn.
Every town has a special place. I bet if you think about where you live now or where you grew up, you can think of one place that would’ve changed the whole town had it not been there. Riverdale also has this place, and it’s Pop’s. Percival knows this, so of course, it’s the target of his next attack. He wants to build a new railway right through where it stands now.
Tabitha goes to ask everyone for help, but none of them want to join her right now. Granted, they have been through a lot, and Percival seems to just keep winning, but it’s still a pretty big let-down. However, Tabitha needed her own moment to shine, and she got it. After being rejected by everyone, she goes home and realizes that Jughead can hear everything that she’s thinking. Then, Jug tells her about everyone else’s powers and tells her that Pop’s needs to be declared a historical landmark. If they do that, nothing can happen to it. They just need to prove that it has some sort of historical significance.
Pop gives them a box of memorabilia, among other things, to help with their search, and Tabitha finds a copy of The Green Book. While looking through all of these things, they figure out that basically, every significant event that happened in Riverdale had taken place in the diner. Therefore, there’s absolutely no way the historical society won’t declare a historical landmark. However, things can never be that easy in Riverdale. Tabitha gets shot by a henchman and learns that her superpower is time traveling.
The first year she travels back to is 1944, specifically Christmas Eve. An angel who looks like Jughead accompanies her in this time period, but it’s actually an angel named Raphael, Tabitha’s guardian angel. The angel has taken the form of Jughead because if she saw the angel’s true form, she would go insane (which comes in handy later). Now, she’s on a search for a talisman of some sort so that she can control her powers. Before she can actually find one, she has to go to a meeting that is going to decide if Riverdale will become a sundown town. To nobody’s surprise, it’s Percival Pickens who is behind all of this. That evening the 1944 versions of Toni, Fangs, and their baby show up at Pop’s needing a place to stay after they had gotten caught in Centerville, a sundown town. When Percival insists on arresting them, Tabitha tells Raphael to show his true form to Percival and the other cops, and it works. But, once again, things can’t just be simple, and Tabitha gets shot again by Percival, sending her to yet another time period.
Now she was in 1968, and her plan now is to stop the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., or try to at least. Raphael explains to her that she can’t change some events in history. Tabitha decides to keep the diner open so people can have a place to go. The police show up again, claiming that they are banning all public gatherings in Riverdale, but Tabitha doesn’t stand down and explains that they all just need a place to be together. The police claim that if they’re still there at 6:00, then they will start arresting people. Tabitha then gets in contact with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and threatens to leak all of his secret files unless he gets one of his agents (Pickens) under control. Hoover follows through, and the 1968 version of Pickens gets fired. It’s still not over yet, though! Tabitha finds a bomb in the back of Pop’s.
The year is now 1999. Tabitha and Pop Tate are scrubbing white supremacists’ graffiti off the walls. Pop mentions the kid who they caught doing it being in a daze when they found him and that he didn’t even remember doing it. Tabitha goes to talk with Brian, and she finds out that he had bought a baseball card from a curiosity shop that had just opened. It just so happens that Percival is the owner. Tabitha goes to the shop and takes pictures of things when he leaves the shop. Her guardian angel has now taken the form of Betty, who suggests that the Spear of Longinus or the Holy Grail could be just what Tabitha needs to control her powers. When Tabitha goes back to the shop, she gets into a fight with Percival, and just as she’s about to stab him, he disappears. She burns down the shop and grabs the Holy Grail. When she gets back to Pop’s, she drinks a milkshake out of it and ends up back in the present day.
Now back in the present, Tabitha catches the guy who shot her and explains everything that happened to Jug, and eventually Cheryl, Betty, and Archie as well. She mentions that she thinks she’s being prepared for war, and the final battle will take place at Pop’s. She also explains that it’s going to take all of them working together to defeat Percival.
Unfortunately, Tabitha has enough control of her powers to jump to the future as well, and it looks grim. The diner was an empty shell, the sky was full of ash, and Riverdale was gone. Will they be able to stop it? Who knows, but there is no point in predicting anything in Riverdale because it will always take a turn that nobody is expecting.
