The CW hit Riverdale referenced an iconic Buffy The Vampire Slayer villain, but Legacies pulled the homage off better. Legacies is the second spinoff from The Vampire Diaries and, like the first spinoff The Originals, the series shares the original show’s love of dramatic twists. However, Legacies cast of characters often have a more campy sense of humor that their predecessors notably lacked, making it the zaniest show in the shared universe so far.
One of the few shows that can match Legacies in terms of goofy twists is Riverdale. A CW teen soap that adapted the long-running Archie comics to the screen, Riverdale rapidly became an increasingly bizarre fusion of horror, small-town mystery, and vaguely fantasy-adjacent soap since season 2 debuted. Now entering season 6, Riverdale is almost as surreally silly as the explicitly supernatural Legacies, although its lack of witches, werewolves, and vampires meant the CW hit could not reference Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as Legacies has.
Long before Riverdale killed off Archie, the show introduced Dark Betty, a cold-blooded alter ego for its usually sweet heroine Betty Cooper. The character was an obvious nod to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Dark Willow, an inversion of Alyson Hannigan’s adorable supporting character who was bloodthirsty, cunning, and surprisingly powerful. Although she didn’t arrive on the series until season 2—long after Riverdale debuted Dark Betty—Legacies’ Dark Josie is a much more fitting tribute to the iconic Buffy arc.
Like Betty Cooper and Willow, Josie is usually the biggest pushover in the show’s cast. As proven by Lizzie threatening Josie’s relationship with Finch, the Legacies heroine can’t pick a side to save her life and has little of Hope’s resilience or even Lizzy’s snarky overconfidence. As a result, Dark Josie is a perfect nod to Dark Willow, since she is supernatural—rather than a persona, like Dark Betty—and is physically distinct from the normal Josie, with the same creepy black veins that marked Dark Willow out as an evil impostor. Since it took Riverdale until season 5 to start depicting explicitly supernatural phenomena, Dark Betty was more of a character Betty played than an actual threat to the cast.
In contrast, the powerful Dark Josie has the potential to be as lethal as Hope’s Tribrid form and has proven that she can outsmart her opponents without any of the guilt that would stop Josie. Dark Willow served essentially the same purpose in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lulling cast members into a false sense of security before revealing the extent of Willow’s evil potential when she was unburdened by her conscience. As such, The Originals spinoff has made a more fitting reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s legendary villainess, despite Riverdale toying with the same idea earlier than Legacies.