'Riverdale' Finally Revealed The Truth About Chic & Honestly, I Did Not See That Coming

After eight episodes full of creepy brooding and unsettling cereal-eating, the truth about Chic on Riverdale has finally come out in Wednesday night's new episode. And even though there have been countless theories about Chic, I don't think anyone fully guessed the truth. Oh, and the big reveal also pretty much completely crosses Chic's name off the Black Hood suspect list... unless there's another sneaky twist in store for us.

Spoiler alert: This post will discuss details from Riverdale Season 2 Episode 19, "Prisoners." It was all about Chic on Wednesday night's new episode of Riverdale, and it was about time, since Betty's mysterious long-lost brother has been acting super sketchy for a while now without revealing any real reason for it. Well, it turns out, Chic isn't Betty's brother at all — he's a total imposter! Betty and Jughead got a photo of the real Charles Smith when they did what they probably should have done weeks ago: went to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy to look at Chic's records from his childhood there. The photo showed a curly-haired child that was not the Chic staying in the Cooper house. It became immediately clear that whoever this was brooding at the Cooper house, it was not Alice Cooper's actual son.

Betty and Jughead wasted no time showing the photo to Alice and Chic, and then knocking Chic out when he grabbed a knife and began attacking them after being exposed.

Once he is tied up in the Coopers' basement, Chic starts to spill the truth: he met Charles Smith on the streets and moved into that shady motel with him. There, Charles told Chic (the imposter confirms that his real name actually is Chic) about the Coopers, saying that they were a perfect family in Riverdale who wholly rejected him. To drive the point home, Chic recounted a story about how Charles came knocking on the Coopers' door one day and Alice shooed him away. Finally, he claims that Charles developed a drug addiction and overdosed on jingle jangle (I still can't get over that name) the night that Alice rejected him at her doorstep.

All of these revelations cause mixed emotions in Chic's audience. Alice breaks down in tears over her guilt, Jughead becomes enraged at the lies, and Betty immediately begins to turn a critical eye on Chic's claims. After a call from the newly-active Black Hood, Betty brings Jughead with her to snoop around the hotel where Charles and Chic lived together, and learns from their neighbor that the boys fought all the time, and that the day Charles disappeared, some bloody sheets were found in the trash. However, when Betty confronts Chic with the accusation that he killed Charles, Chic refuses to reveal the truth.

Finally, Betty makes the decision to turn Chic over to the Black Hood for execution. She leads him out to a graveyard at gunpoint, and suggests that he begin running once the Black Hood appears.

The ending is super unsettling for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it shows how much closer Betty and the Black Hood have grown. Betty's darkness has been an understated theme of this season, and with the Black Hood's return also comes an increase in his correspondence with Betty. With the two growing closer in principles, we might be seeing a scary side of Betty before Season 2 ends.

The other major thing that we learn is that Chic is not the Black Hood, since we saw Chic and the Black Hood in the same place, and on top of that, the Black Hood presumably kills Chic at the end of the episode. Chic has been a major Black Hood suspect for a long time now, so this is pretty shocking news, but although it seems to clear Chic of being the head honcho behind all these recent murders, it's still possible that he may have been somehow involved. For instance, Chic could have been working for the Black Hood and simply outlived his usefulness. There's also the possibility that Chic lied about Charles Smith's death, and that Alice's real son is the actual man behind the mask. Now that would be a twist!