Pop Tate, expecting an important food critic, becomes unusually snobby and demanding and then completely redoes the Chok'Lit Shoppe into an upscale restaurant. But that becomes the least of everyone's problems when a horde of giant cockroaches start invading the town and replacing the citizens.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In addition to the human-size cockroaches that keep replacing people, the cockroach queen, who is building-size, breaks out and goes on a rampage.
- Borrowed Catchphrase: Trying to get Archie to come investigate the human-sized cockroaches early in the morning, Pop Tate says that it looks like a "weird mystery" to him, referencing Archie's catchphrase.
- Cartoon Bug-Sprayer: Pops administers his family bug killer with an old fashioned sprayer.
- Cassandra Truth: Archie doesn't believe Pop Tate when he claims to have seen human-size cockroaches in one of his booths. It doesn't help that 1) Pop's been up all night cleaning the Chok'Lit Shoppe and 2) the cockroaches have left by the time Pop manages to bring Archie to take a look.
- Creepy Monotone: The cockroach clones speak as little as possible in a machine-like monotone.
- Dead Hat Shot: A cockroach grabs an electrical worker, leaving her hat on the tunnel floor. Naturally, however, she isn't actually dead; she's just held prisoner while a cockroach impersonates her.
- Disney Villain Death: Archie blasts the cockroach queen with a hose of bug spray, knocking her off a cliff into a river. While he's not sure initially if she might return, his ending wrap-up says she didn't.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Archie and his friends discuss their encounter with the cockroaches and realize the screen the roach queen was speaking from was actually a window. Which leads them to realize if it was a window, then the queen herself must be huge.
- Friendly Address Privileges: Mr. Hotsocks tells Pop Tate to call him what his friends call him: "Sir." He claims to have been joking immediately afterwards.
- Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!: Pop slaps himself after concluding that maybe he did hallucinate the cockroaches.
- I Warned You: When the queen appears, Pop reminds Archie that he told him he'd seen huge cockroaches.
- Monster of the Aesop: Shapeshifting cockroaches using the revamped Chok'lit Shoppe to replace Riverdale's adults coincides with Pop changing himself and his restaurant drastically to please a critic.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Before blasting the cockroach queen with Pop's family bug spray, Archie tells her to "bug off!" Before blasting her again (and actually killing her), he retorts that this is getting old.
- Trauma Button: At the end, Pop loses his new adult customers because the revamped Chok'lit Shoppe reminds them of being kidnapped, impersonated and imprisoned. Luckily, the teen customers are quite happy to return.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The cockroaches were going enact their plans anyway, but thanks Horton J. Oddsocks telling Pop to attract adults instead of teens to his restaurant, he unintentionally gave the cockroaches older targets with more authority and give a lot of grief to the adults of the town.
- Vertical Kidnapping: The electrical worker from the beginning is grabbed by a cockroach on the ceiling.
