‘Riverdale’ Killed off an Original Cast Member on This Week’s Episode (2024)

Spoilers forRiverdale Season 5, Episode 17 “Chapter Ninety-Three: Dance of Death” past this point.

Though this week’s episode of The CW’sRiverdale threatened multiple characters with their impending demise, thanks to a mine explosion that left Archie (KJ Apa) in danger, and Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes) threatening her father Hiram (Mark Consuelos) with patricide as revenge, only one original character didn’t make it out alive. That character? Rest in peace, Polly Cooper (Tiera Skovbye).

Okay, so Polly wasn’t part of the main cast of the show. And she’s not the only character who died this episode (RIP, Chris Mason’s detestable Chadwick, who was shot by his now ex-wife Veronica). But she’s also one of the driving forces behind a number of the show’s mysteries, as well as a character who has appeared since the very first episode aired, way back in 2017. Since then, Polly has given birth to twins fathered by her cousin, joined an organ stealing cult and impersonated her own sister, made prank calls from an insane asylum on Halloween night, and solicited truckers on the dangerous Lonely Highway.

It’s that last one that seemingly led to her death in Season 5, something that’s been teased and danced around since nearly the beginning of the season. After disappearing at the end of “Chapter Eight-One: The Homecoming,” her sister Betty (Lili Reinhart) launched a desperate search to find Polly. Partially because Betty can’t not solve a mystery, but also with a heavy dash of guilt over not being there for Polly when her sister clearly needed her help. Instead, she was last seen — by the viewers of the show, at least — running down the Lonely Highway, chased by a truck.

The next time she was seen (well, heard) was “Chapter Eighty-Four: Lock & Key,” when a terrified Polly called Betty and her mother Alice (Mädchen Amick). She had escaped from somewhere, and only knew she was on the Lonely Highway. But by the time Betty and Alice arrived, all that was left was a crushed phone booth covered in Polly’s blood.

As Betty got deeper into the mystery, she discovered dozens of bodies of missing girls buried in a nearby swamp, and a trucker who clearly liked to kill women who was far from alone in his predilections; yet no answers as to Polly’s whereabouts. Even a decaying body that looked like her turned out to be someone else. Until this week, when she was definitively discovered, dead.

The circ*mstances are a little too convoluted to explain (they involve an inbred branch of the Blossom family who like to dress up as aliens and hunt women), but the short version is that Polly has been dead pretty much this whole time, locked in the trunk of an old car and rotting in a junkyard. After solving the mystery, the man behind everything — Old Man Dreyfus (John Prowse) — offers to “draw you a map” to Betty, and we’re left at the end of the episode with Alice and Betty sobbing, finally having seen the dead body of their daughter and sister, respectively.

It’s a shocking and heartbreaking twist for the show, only in that we’ve come to expect that the longer a mystery like this gets dragged out, the more likely it is that the person in question will survive. Yet that’s not at all what the show is going for this season. Versus previous, high school set mysteries that were always solved by Betty and Jughead (Cole Sprouse) with the usual array of twists andRiverdale craziness, after a seven year time jump, the former teens are now dealing with the realities of the world (albeit still through the lens of this being Riverdale).

But chainsaw killers and gangs of trucker murderers aside, what Polly’s death digs down into is the idea that there are no easy answers when you’re adult. That’s true of relationships, as we’ve seen with all the characters on the show this season (much to the anguish of ‘shippers). It’s also true of mysteries. In this case, there isn’t a cult leader ready to escape on a rocket he built himself, or a poisonous mother brainwashing a killer into dressing like a stick monster, or even decades of abuse leading to the rise of a serial killer who was Betty’s own father. Here, Polly took a chance soliciting the wrong man, and died.

It’s a harrowing end to the character, and it only means worse things for everyone on the show as they come to the crashing realization that the sense of immortality they may have felt in high school has fallen away in their twenties. Betty, certainly, will blame herself. And we know that Alice will fall completely apart: in next week’s episode, at least part of the runtime will be taken up with her imagining a musical where her perfect family is alive and well.

Polly’s death is also something that ties into the true overall arc of this season, cleaning up Riverdale, which has fallen on hard times in the intervening years. What better example of where Riverdale went wrong than one of the people central to the show’s first mystery? It’s sad that Polly had to die, but allowing the town to see how far they’ve truly fallen, how they’ve finally hit rock bottom, means that in the final two episodes of the season they can hopefully begin to heal their tattered town — and themselves.

So rest in peace, Polly Cooper. And hey, it’s stillRiverdale: just because she’s dead, doesn’t mean she won’t show up again, somewhere down the road. Fingers crossed that road isn’t The Lonely Highway.

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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