"Veronica are you... alright?"
"She’s big, she’s beautiful, and she’s deadly! This babe is taller than King Kong in heels! Is Archie man enough to handle the brazen brunette in size 60 shoes?! Attack of the 50-Foot Veronica!" - The Episode's Opening Narration
Veronica plans a big pool party, inviting everyone who's anyone — which definitely leaves out Jughead, who's too "different". However, Veronica gets a lesson on being different herself when she gets zapped by Dilton's growth ray. Soon Veronica grows up and out of her normal life. Can anyone stop the rampage of the 50-foot Veronica?
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Acme Products: Both Dilton’s growth ray, or at the very least the shrinking gun he constructs with Jughead's help, were seemingly constructed with various parts found in a high school science lab.
- Aesop Amnesia: Archie wonders if Veronica's experience as a giantess would teach her a lesson about discrimination before deciding that it's unlikely. The ending shows it stuck at least for a little while.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Played with. When asked how her day as a giantess has been going so far by Jughead, Veronica becomes upset about something potentially solvable before switching to two major problems...and then back to something relatively insignificant.Veronica: I scared my friends, I destroyed public property, the Pentagon will probably arrest me and worst of all… NONE OF MY NICE CLOTHES FIT!
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: This shouldn't come as a shock, given that the title itself shouts out to B-movies of the same sort. Veronica grows to a building-size height and takes out her frustration with her situation in Riverdale.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Betty and Jughead are scared by a giant beetle that was also hit with Dilton's ray.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Riverdale’s answer to a raging teenaged giantess? A squad of police cars… and a TANK.
- Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: This entire plot starts because Veronica foolishly touches a ray emitted from Dilton's device.
- Easily Forgiven: Archie doesn't show any resentment when Veronica throws him into a tree. When she apologizes, he says that what she's been through is pretty upsetting.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Dilton has one following Jughead’s suggestion that he chills out, specifically at the mention of how a cake deflates when exposed to cold air. Fair warning, Techno Babble ahead.Dilton: If I can zero in on the amino acids in Veronica’s growth cells I can weaken their molecular bonds thereby decreasing the space between the molecules!Jughead: In English, Dilton?Dilton: We’ll deflate Veronica like a cake!
- Exact Words: Betty calls Archie to state that she's seen a beetle. Archie asks "Paul McCartney?" before she clarifies she means an insect beetle.
- Fearsome Foot: The ground shakes with Veronica's every footstep, and in one scene, she nearly steps on some of her party-goers.
- Giant's Droplet, Human's Shower: After she realizes how much she misses wearing cute clothes, Veronica cries a rain of tears. After Jughead comes up to her and asks how she is doing, she cries again as she laments about her situation. Though Jughead has an umbrella, he still tries to dodge her gigantic tears.
- Giant Foot of Stomping: When she reaches her final height and goes on a rampage, Veronica crushes two trash cans under her now gigantic feet.
- Giant Wall of Watery Doom: While not necessarily of “doom” levels of devastation, Veronica doing a cannon ball into her pool when she’s over seven meters tall makes for a pretty big splash and nearly empties the pool.Veronica: They need to put more water in these pools.
- Giant Woman: Veronica, "big-bones" and all.
- Glass-Shattering Sound: Upon opening her back door and finding a beetle the size of a car outside, Betty quite understandably, screams, which resulted in the shattering of a cup, a vase, and, surprisingly, the window of her oven. The house windows remain miraculously intact, however.
- Idiot Ball: What exactly compelled Veronica, who should be smart enough to not to mess with a machine she's not familiar with, to turn Dilton's growth ray on and put her hand in the beam's path?
- If I Can't Have You…: Angry that she's too big to wear fine clothes, Veronica breaks open a clothing store and plans to destroy all its wares, saying that "If I can't wear nice clothes, nobody will!" However, before she actually gets to the point, she gets distracted by the gorgeousness of the dress she intended to destroy and then breaks down at the reminder that she's far too big to wear something like that ever again.
- Innocently Insensitive: While trying to break Veronica out of her denial, Archie tells her that she's "different". Unfortunately, "different" is Veronica's word for describing uncool weirdness, and this just tips her over the edge.
- Insistent Terminology: The fifty-foot-tall Veronica insists she is "big-boned", not "enormous".
- Magic Pants: Averted. Veronica manages to keep clothed as she grows, but only by appropriating increasingly large things to wear. By the climax, she's had to steal the tent from her pool party.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Veronica gets herself zapped with Dilton's growth ray. Guess what happens?
- Notzilla: Archie takes Veronica to a movie about a giant lizard. Later when she herself is a giant, she talks about feeling like the monster in that movie.
- Police Are Useless: Veronica shrinks down Just in Time before the police show up and they buy the He Went That Way ruse despite Veronica being naked and standing in the tent out of which she makeshifted a dress. Add to that they missed her shrinking down despite her being (at most) twenty feet in front of them.
- Rage Breaking Point: Veronica is so deep in denial over her ever-increasing stature that when Archie tries to convince her that she’s changed, specifically that she’s different, she… does not take it well.Veronica: I’m not different! YOU’RE different! You ALL are! You’re puny and weak! And I don’t date weaklings!
- Shout-Out:
- Jughead calls the gigantic Veronica "Girlzilla."
- Archie mentions the H. G. Wells novel The Food of the Gods in regards to Dilton's growth ray.
- Skewed Priorities: Upon being asked if he’s alright following his riding the gigantic beetle like a bull at a rodeo, being bodily hurled several meters through the air, and playing chicken with said insect’s pincers, Jughead had this to say.Jughead: No, I’m not alright! The cake is ruined!
- Space Whale Aesop: Veronica gets taught a lesson about treating others poorly for being different... by being zapped by a growth ray.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Initially, Veronica is quite insistent on the fact that she’s still normal despite, at the time, being so large that her weight alone causes the tires in Archie’s convertible to blow out before her head busts through the roof. Gets a bit more ridiculous the next day at her pool party…Veronica: Forgive the strange fashion statement but my swimsuits seem to have shrunk, so I sewed them all together!
- Tantrum Throwing: Following her above Rage Breaking Point, Veronica chucks Archie across the yard and into a tree. Aside from a sore neck though, he’s totally fine.
- Teens Are Monsters: Following Archie triggering her Rage Breaking Point, Veronica goes on quite the rampage through Riverdale, destroying several streetlamps, trash cans, cars, and one clothing department store before eventually being found, and calmed down, by Jughead.
- Unusual Euphemism: Dilton has some choice words to say when it at first appears that his growth ray doesn’t work.Dilton: Dang-frizzle-frazzle-fooey to the -nth degree!
- Wardrobe Malfunction: When she first starts growing, Veronica’s clothes are all too small for her to wear, with her newest dressed visibly torn and tight. When she has a growth spurt at her pool party, her makeshift swimsuit starts coming apart at the seams.
- Somehow avoided with the jogging and sneakers used by Veronica to go to the movies with Archie, which still fit her, though she appears to have grown 1-2 feet during the movie, getting big to the point of ruining Archie's car after entering it.
- Your Size May Vary: This happens a few times throughout the episode, but the most egregious example is a scene where normal-sized people come up to Veronica's knees, only for them to barely be past her ankles in the very next shot. The jogging and sneakers that Veronica wears to the movies also appear to have varied in size as they continue to fit her, although after the movie she became too big to fit in Archie's car without destroying it.
