When Riverdale – Netflix’s dark reimagining of the Archie comics – started back in January 2017, the storylines were, well, fairly teenage. Following the high-school adventures of Archie, his best friends Betty and Jughead, and mysterious new girl Veronica, the biggest dramas the gang faced were the Betty-Archie-Veronica love triangle, or Archie’s dilemma: play football or perform with school band Josie and the Pussycats? That’s it! That was the whole show! But skip forward four seasons and we are dealing with necromancy, a baby-burning cult, a magical board game that kills people and at least three characters who have returned from the dead.

Just two seasons in, Riverdale showed signs of going off the rails. It expected us to believe that a sleepy town so quiet the characters could always get a booth in the diner also had: enough citizens to staff three separate biker gangs, who dealt two kinds of made-up drugs (jingle jangle and fizzle rocks); a brothel run by an OAP; a gay-conversion hospital; and two masked serial killers (at the same time). Honestly: it’s a mystery why anyone moves to Riverdale, considering it has more murders per capita than Tijuana.

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But the show’s real jump-the-shark moment came at the end of series two, when Betty arrived home to find her mother had apparently murdered a total stranger who had arrived at the house looking for Betty’s long-lost half-brother Chic, who was possibly also a killer. Season one Betty would’ve had a nervy b, but season two Betty gave a resigned sigh, rolled up the body in a rug and hid it in the forest.

Turning Betty and her mum into cold-blooded body-disposal experts seemed to signal the show’s cue to pull the ripcord on even more outlandish storylines. Organ-harvesting cult led by an always-shirtless Chad Michael Murray? Great! A Dungeons and Dragons-type game where players get killed off by the mysterious Gargoyle King? Pile it on! Mafia assassination? That’s just Wednesday around here! By the time Archie gets attacked by a bear, dies, comes back to life and takes his high-school exams in the same 48 hours, you’re fully into the madness. Well, he did survive that illegal, underground prison boxing ring run by the mayor … he’s a tough kid!

Recently, we have seen former Queen Bee Cheryl convinced the brother she absorbed in utero is haunting her and her other dead brother’s body, which she dug up from his grave so he can live with her in her gothic mansion. And Betty has had so many fake long-lost brothers turn up that it is impossible to remember who is secretly working for the FBI and who is out to kill her. And every series, when it is all getting a bit much, the show throws in a musical episode – making the gang ham their way through Carrie: The Musical, before discovering their friend has been brutally slaughtered by whichever serial killer is on duty that day.

Oh Riverdale, never change. You’re the one reason not to use Netflix’s “skip recap” function, because there is not a hope in hell of following the storylines without it.