“Crystal Lake” put all eight episodes on Peacock on Thursday, October 15th, and its biggest swing lands in the seventh, when the show finally explains how Jason Voorhees survived the lake. That answer is going to split “Friday the 13th” fans down the middle, and it deserves to. Linda Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the grieving mother who becomes the killer of the 1980 film, and she is the reason to stay through the stretches where the plot wanders.
Brad Caleb Kane created the series for Peacock and A24 after helping run “It: Welcome to Derry.” He inherited a project that had already lost Bryan Fuller, and the season he delivered is set mostly in 1972, eight years before the original film. Every episode title nods to the franchise, mostly by borrowing a “Friday the 13th” film title from “Camp Crystal” to “The Final Chapter.” The show also drags the film’s 1950s backstory forward into the early 1970s, and that matters more than it sounds. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for all eight episodes of “Crystal Lake” and for the fate of Jason Voorhees.
Linda Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the grieving mother who becomes the killer of the 1980 film, and she is the reason to stay through the stretches where the plot wanders.”
The premiere opens on Pam soaked in blood with a human tooth lodged in her knuckle, then jumps back. Pam cooks at the summer camp and her son Jason (Callum Vinson) attends so she can watch him for seizures. He has an enlarged skull and an audience of bullies. His only friend Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom) flings a ball deep into the lake to stop them. Jason swims out after it while the counselor on duty, Claudette (Danielle Kotch), is off with her boyfriend Barry (Phoenix Parnevik). Pam dives in but his body is never found. Nine months later police chief Levon Brooks (William Catlett) coaxes her to the town’s Founder’s Day picnic and she ends up screaming at the children swimming in the lake. Back home, two men posing as state police say they may have found Jason. They come at her with a syringe instead and she kills one with scissors and the other with the machete she once bought Jason for camping. They called her Mrs. Wittering, and a newspaper clipping they carried had the word “Argonaut” scrawled on it. She calls a woman named Nora and tells her, “They found me.” Then she feeds both bodies to a bear.
“Part II” sends Pam out of town. Her friend Rita (Joy Suprano) takes her to a weekend self-help seminar called “The Experience” that is run by a guru named Wilhelm. He picks her apart in front of the room and makes her sing. That night she ends up in his bed and bites him. The next day another attendee caves in half of Wilhelm’s face with a baseball bat and saves Pam the trouble. Meanwhile the remains of the two men turn up near the bear’s cave and Levon examines them himself and finds a scissor blade buried inside. Grace crashes a high school party at the camp, where Claudette humiliates her. When Claudette and Barry drive off, something in the woods throws Grace’s discarded shoe through a window of Barry’s car.
“Part III” belongs to Grace. Pam spots cigarette burns on the girl’s arm and blames her mother Valerie (Tonya Glanz). She confronts Valerie at work, kills her with a meat tenderizer and burns the place down to cover it. The burns turn out to be Grace’s own doing, and that is the moment the show stops treating Pam’s violence as self-defense. A bear hunt in the woods goes badly while Levon pulls in his sister Brianna (Devin Kessler), a reporter, to help with a case that keeps getting bigger. A flashback shows Grace and Jason claiming an abandoned cabin in the woods as their hideout, and that cabin pays off in the finale.
“A New Beginning” is the episode built for people who know the 1980 film by heart. A hitchhiker named Willow (Oona Roche) drifts into town looking for the camp, and her walk restages Annie’s doomed hitchhike into town from the film. According to Deadline the production even rebuilt the interior of Trudy’s diner on a soundstage for it. Willow’s trip ends the way Annie’s did, shot through the killer’s eyes. This is also where the slow build starts to show. Tell-Tale TV found the first half “exceptionally slow at times” and the Rita subplot and the bear hunt are the obvious culprits. Halfway through, the season has plenty of mood and not much momentum.
“The New Blood” is where the season finally earns its title. Claudette and Barry sneak off together and the camera stalks them from the killer’s point of view in a near shot-for-shot remake of the opening of “Friday the 13th.” Then the show pulls the rug, because the killer is not Pam. It is Grace, tripping on acid after falling in with the hippies working the camp and convinced that stopping the two counselors will somehow save Jason. Pam walks in on the stabbing and finishes off Claudette herself. Mashable called it “a cheap gotcha twist” and that is hard to argue with. In the film Pamela confesses to those murders. Here they belong to a confused child and Pam only closes the job.
“Kill Them, Mommy” lets Pam off the leash. To protect Grace she goes to the hippies’ campsite and kills them, and Kane told SlashFilm his favorite kill of the season sits in that sequence. Pam then pins the massacre on Harmony (Manon Gage), the one hippie who gets away. Grace largely drops out of the story after this hour, which is an odd fate for the character the season spent five episodes building. The episode also gives the first look at Elias (Hamish Linklater), whose identity the next hour spells out. It ends with Levon and Brianna at Pam’s door with evidence that points at her, and Pam deciding where to begin.
“Friday…” is the flashback hour, and it rewrites the franchise. In 1959 Pam is a nightclub singer in New York who starts bleeding during a performance while pregnant. Her boyfriend Elias Wittering works for Bellflower Chemical and takes her to the company’s medical facility in Houston, where the doctors promise to save the baby. They inject her throughout the pregnancy and the tests move to Jason once he is born. When Pam falls asleep during his bath and he nearly drowns, the company uses it to paint her as unfit and puts her on psychiatric medication. Years later his hair falls out at his own birthday party and a Geiger counter goes wild.
The program is called Project Argonaut. Bellflower wants a human body that can survive nuclear fallout like a cockroach does, and Jason is its first real success. “Trauma actually makes him stronger,” Elias tells his colleagues. Pam drives a drill into the face of the project’s chief doctor, Dr. Valentine, and runs with her son, taking the name Voorhees on the road. Variety called this episode “the best of the bunch.” Vulture called it “the most egregious example in recent memory” of the penultimate flashback that stops a season cold. Both have a point. The hour Variety ranks highest is also the one that does the most damage, because a Jason who cannot die thanks to cockroach science is a smaller monster than a Jason nobody can explain.
Kane knows the risk. “I took a swing, but I didn’t send him to Hell. I didn’t send him to space,” he told Dread Central. That is fair enough, since the films did both. Neither of those films claimed to be telling you where Jason came from, though, and that is the difference. A sequel can get silly without costing anything. A prequel that explains the monster changes every film that comes after it, and this one changes all of them.
“The Final Chapter” picks up with Levon and Brianna believing Pam’s story, and Levon brings her into the station. Elias reaches town and gets her address from a local at the diner. At the station Pam stabs her husband in the back and Deputy Dorf (Cameron Scoggins) answers with a throwing star. Levon is shot in the gunfight and his fate is left open. Elias’s men drive off with Pam until a hulking figure in a burlap sack blocks the road. She runs for the cabin Jason and Grace once used as a hideout, Elias catches up and their son walks in. The grown Jason is played by Jonathan Tison. Elias peels off the sack and asks Jason to come with him. Jason crushes his father’s head between his hands. Then he starts choking his mother and stops when he seems to remember her. When Ralph (Nick Cordileone) opens fire, Jason vanishes into the trees. “These woods are ours now,” Pam warns.
A campfire coda follows. A young Steve Christy, whose family owns the camp, tells a ring of teenagers that the Jason in the woods is not a boy anymore. A branch snaps behind them and the season cuts to black. It is a good last image and it also confirms what the season had been hinting at all along. Earlier in the run a young woman turns up skinned at Ralph’s place, and the finale makes it plain that Jason is the likeliest culprit. Pam’s son has been killing in the woods for most of a year while she served lunch.
Here is the continuity problem, stated plainly. In the 1980 film Pamela (played there by Betsy Palmer) kills counselors to avenge a son she believes drowned. The final scare is a boy Jason lunging out of the lake. “Crystal Lake” now puts Pam face to face with a grown Jason in 1972 as she tells the woods they belong to both of them. That makes the film’s Pamela a woman who knows her son is alive, and it also makes the boy in the lake hard to square with the giant in the sack eight years earlier. The details elsewhere are loving. The burlap sack is the look from “Friday the 13th Part 2” and Dorf, Ralph, Trudy and Enos all come from the original film. Kane told Deadline that the snake Pam frees from the camp pantry in the premiere is “a direct nod” to the real snake killed during the 1980 shoot, and this production killed no snake. The show respects the film’s surface and rewrites its motive.
Critics split hard. Variety called the season “Thoughtful though overlong” and praised Catlett as well as Cardellini. Decider’s call was “STREAM IT.” The Guardian went the other way and wrote that “the overcomplicated and underpowered Crystal Lake just doesn’t warrant the stay.” Tom’s Guide wrote that “Linda Cardellini is phenomenal as Pamela Voorhees” and that is the one point the reviews mostly share. Even The Guardian credited her “at times ferociously compelling performance” while panning the show around her.
Peacock has not renewed the show. Kane told Deadline, “I do have ideas for Season 2 in mind.” He also gave Dread Central a safety net for the other outcome. “I designed this so that if nobody watches and Peacock decides to not make a second season then it will at least feel like a satisfying whole,” he said. It does feel whole, and that is part of the problem. The season answers questions the franchise was better off leaving open and then ends on the one image that still works, a mother in the woods laughing because her boy is stronger than anyone gave him credit for. Cardellini earns a second season. The Argonaut answer does not.
What Do You Think? Does Project Argonaut make Jason more interesting, or does explaining his survival with a lab experiment shrink him? Was handing the first film’s opening murders to Grace a smart twist or a cheat on Pamela’s story? And if Peacock orders a second season, should it head straight for the 1980 massacre or spend more time with the town?
Catch up properly: every “Friday the 13th” film and series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Friday the 13th timeline.
See you on the next binge!
