'Riverdale' Season 4 Episode 16 exposes the novel murders and legacies hidden behind Stonewall Prep's doors
Spoiler alert for 'Riverdale' Season 4 Episode 16 'Chapter Seventy-Three: The Locked Room'
Remember when Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes) told Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse), "Jughead, there is no school more nihilistic and/or privileged than Stonewall!"? Boy, was she right! In this episode titled, 'Chapter Seventy-Three: The Locked Room' we find that Jughead faked his death thanks to the Stonies from Stonewall Prep. The school was not only home to the Quill and Skull society but was also home to some murderous minds. So how much blood did Stonewall and its Stonies have on their hands?
Riverdale's favorite detective couple had noticed a vicious pattern, the month that a ghostwriter got a contract, one of the four "Stonewall Four" disappeared into thin air. "The ghostwriter challenge was to devise the perfect murder. What if the real challenge, the real price that someone had to pay, was to commit the perfect murder?" asked Jughead.
Jughead became a liability to the schemes behind the walls of Stonewall when he began investigating their antics and was given the Baxter Brothers contract labeling him as a target. In fact, Francis Dupont, the English teacher and former ghostwriter for the Baxter Brother franchise foreshadowed who would try to kill Jughead. He revealed to Jughead that "all the students had a crack at re-writing his novel." Now we know that each of those four also attempted to take his life. While the murder may have not worked out because one of the geniuses forgot to check Jughead's pulse, we got to see how things run in the eerie sepia dorms of Stonewall prep school.
While glassy-eyed Dupont kept harping on his innocence stating that he never asked anyone to commit a crime, the detective duo of Jughead and Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) uncovered the dirty tale of how Jughead's grandfather Forsythe's work was stolen and how Jane Dallas Brown, Charles Chickens and Theodore Weisel, the three members of the literary society were murdered by Dupont to keep the theft under wraps. Not only were lives taken, but Forsythe also left behind his family because he was warned by Weisel that their classmates were all conveniently dropping like flies.
Jughead was a pawn in an elaborate chess game and was admitted into this forsaken school so as to bring back his lost grandfather out of the woodworks - the only member that knew the truth and had collected enough evidence on the matter. Dupont claiming, "I am a man of honor, to the end," met Rupert Chipping's (Sam Witwer) fate but not before Stonewall's secrets are out in the open. Brown was Donna's grandmother and she was a victim of Dupont's kleptomania as well, 'Tracy True' was stolen from her. Donna was out for revenge and ran an elaborate operation to get her hands on the Baxter Brothers-turned-Tracy True contract.
Too bad for her though, she met Betty, Riverdale's ultimate wild card; Donna was left with nothing but bloody revelations because Betty always wins.
'Riverdale' airs on Wednesdays at 8 pm EST on The CW.