Published Oct. 16, 2026, 2:00 p.m. ET
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Pamela Voorhees, associating sex with violence? Well, now I’ve heard everything. Thank goodness I was standing right next to my fainting couch!
As perhaps the most representative slasher series, Friday the 13th is infamous for its simultaneously prurient and puritanical approach to sex. (At least after the first couple of relatively chill entries in the series.) You know the drill: Psychotically horny dudes convince buxom camp counselors to show the goods, only for Jason to jab a machete through their chests or zip them up in sleeping backs and bash them to death against a tree trunk of whatever. The basic take on this is that it was appropriate entertainment for the era of Reagan and AIDS, a period of conservative ascendency during which sex was often literally death, and treated by the ruling right wing as divine punishment for sins of the flesh.
This episode of Crystal Lake sort of flip things on its head: What it wasn’t witnessing the act of fucking that made Pamela Voorhees want to kill — what if it was the act of killing that made Pamela Voorhees want to fuck?
That’s precisely what she does after she leaves Valerie’s crispy corpse in the burned-up restaurant: She drives right to Lee’s house and jumps his bones, right in front of his wedding photo and everything. “You’re one of the most passionate women I’ve ever met,” he tells her the next morning, “even before last night.” It’s true: Pamela Voorhees does not hide her emotions well.
The bulk of this episode’s actions concerns the series’ more cartoonish characters, which I’m starting to feel is unfortunate if you’re not planning on killing them in a big hurry. There’s only so much of Deputy Dorfman’s would-be playboy antics, or in a new addition to the series, the crew of Hair-style hippie caricatures who show up at Camp Crystal Lake looking for work, that a viewer can take between murders.
Take the hippies, for instance. Yes, they’re true to the spirit of the original series, with its own central-casting dope-smoking longhairs, and their ridiculously broad dialogue is clearly intended to be that way. But since they’re also being used by camp owner John Christy (Brian J. Carter) to make the point that just because they’re different it doesn’t mean they’re bad — they’re trying to shine a little light in a dark world, that’s all — it would be nice if they were a bit more realistically drawn.
Even so, they present the viewer with an interesting question: How the hell could Pamela Voorhees possibly turn on people this harmless? Though she’s initially skeptical, she’s impressed by how kind they are to poor Grace, who doesn’t really know how to feel after her mother’s, ahem, untimely passing. They bring a smile to her face, and that makes Pam happy as well. Moreover, the male members of the group flirt with her relentlessly but respectfully, and the slightly loosened up Pam can’t help but respond favorably to that, too. The friendship of the hippies even seem to give Grace the gumption to tell the newly religious and chaste Claudette where to stick her apologies.
Pam, however, is not counting on one of the hippies to have legitimate psychic powers. (Again, this is perfectly in keeping with the original series, which dabbles in that sort of thing now and then.) Harmony (Manon Gage), the hippie who takes the biggest shine to Grace, channels the spirit of her mother during a séance; she knows things only the mother would know and talks to “Gracie” in a way only her mother would.
Then she notices Pam among the gathering and flips out. “She’s not yours, get it?” Valerie/Harmony growls. “Wait till she finds out what you did!” Shouting obscenities, she tries to strangle Pam before snapping out of it. Now Grace has been turned against Pam, whom she fears…and these hippies have made the Voorhees family hit list, I expect.
One member of the group has already met her demise. Willow (Oona Roche) shows up in town separate from the rest as a hitchhiker. Wandering in the woods, she gets spooked by the lurking Jason and steps right into one of Crazy Ralph’s bear traps. Jason approaches her, she screams, and the scene cuts to black.
Later, we see Jason holding the bloody, empty bear trap. At the end of the episode, Dorfman, desperate to impress Rita and show up the Chief, discovers her body trussed up, skinned, and dressed like a deer in Ralph’s meat shack, where he’s conducting an unauthorized and drunken investigation in the rain in the middle of the night.
Did Jason free her or kill her? If Jason — the “demon” seen by Enos after he got shot, an event he’s lucky he survived — didn’t kill her, who did? It doesn’t seem like something Ralph would have done, which is the whole reason Lee refuses to arrest him for killing the two John Does they’ve now found partially eaten by that bear.
One of those corpses has a huge blade wound in his skull. When Pamela overhears this, she grabs the machete in question and tosses it into Crystal Lake, where I’m totallly sure it will remain at the bottom undisturbed forever.
Meanwhile, Lee and his sister Briana continue their joint investigation into the John Does. Briana determines that their bogus company is affiliated with the massive conglomerate Bellflower in some sub rosa way. Lee learns from an old cop buddy back in Newark that the one who rented their car is a dishonorably discharged special ops guy who’s taken his unsavory talents to the private sector — though there are lingering hard feelings between the Newark cops and Lee, who, as a Black cop, took the fall for their misconduct during the blue riots that tore the city apart.
Crystal Lake’s problems remain consistent: Pamela, Lee, and Grace’s material remains much stronger than everyone else’s, and man do I wish the nighttime cinematography made real use of darkness and light. But so do its strengths: Linda Cardellini and William Catlett are fantastic, the gore is gross and right in your face, and perhaps most importantly, it’s suggesting that Jason Voorhees and Captain America have similar origin stories. Now all we need is a little mass murder and we’ll really be cooking.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.