Published Oct. 17, 2026, 10:00 a.m. ET
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I am now fully on board with the cartoon hippies of Crystal Lake. I’m smoking their grass, I’m dropping their acid, I’m rockin’ their van till no one comes a-knockin’. They’re simply too funny to resist anymore.
Funny on purpose, I mean. To me, that’s obvious, because the show is funny on purpose all the time. Claudette droning on about how the power of prayer can spiritually replace her hymen because “Jesus has a hard-on” for her, Barry teaching the kids how to row with a paddle by saying “cup the tip, guide the shaft, in and out, in and out” over and over, the dark dark comedy reveal that Claudette’s pastor is a pervert — this episode alone has ample evidence of the show’s comedic chops. But you can also think back to the brilliant splatstick comedy of Pamela’s fight with the Bellflower thugs, or the bawdy read-along that introduced us to Rita and the rest of the townsfolk.
In other words, when this show wants to be sharp, it is. And not just in the comedy department, either: The gap between how seriously Pamela, Lee, and Grace are taken versus the rest of the cast remains pretty vast, which by now seems deliberate. The point is that if Crystal Lake is ever stupid, it’s stupid like a fox.
I mean, for crying out loud, they’re giving Harmony, the lead hippie, dialogue like this:
“The straight world’s no place for our kind.”
“Our souls are vibrating at the same frequency.”
“Everyone’s waiting for us. We’re building a new society.”
“I get the suffocating hypocrisy of our male-dominated society.” (“Right on, sister,” her friend chimes in.)
Everyone making this is aware they’re just doing the Dragnet hippie episode on the shores of Crystal Lake, and everyone’s having a whale of a time with it. So am I.
Anyway, in true this is your brain on drugs fashion, hippie experimentation with psychedelic drugs leads to madness and murder. Learning from Chief Lee that their friend Willow was found murdered in the nearby woods, the hippies decide to collect their paycheck from the Christys now that the camp is opening, owners of the camp, and get while the gettin’s good. But first, they’ll pay tribute to their fallen friend with a few tabs of orange sunshine, doled out like sacramental wafers.
Grace, who by now has been welcomed into the group and invited to their commune up north, initially passes on the acid. But when her friend Harmony, who partakes, slinks off to fuck her campground fling Barry — “I like a man in my nonny when I’m comin’ on,” she says cheerfully — Grace naturally feels left out. This goes double when Barry points out that transporting a minor across state lines like they plan to do is a felony.
So once again, Grace, forced into premature adulthood by everyone who’s ever purported to care about her, is left on her own, and once again she decides to kickstart adulthood for herself, with disastrous results. Taking three tabs of LSD, she wanders off into the woods, where she sees Jason in the distance, giving us a brief glimpse of his now-monstrous face.
Parallel to all this, Pam has been enduring one rejection after another. Lee breaks things off with her, mistaking her frequent freakouts about getting caught for ambivalence about their relationship. Grace tells her off, straight-up saying “You’re not my mom” and telling her that the whole “I would do anything for you” business is “too heavy, man.”
It’s Claudette of all people who turns to Pamela for comfort, rather unwisely. Unburdening herself of her guilt, she tells Pam how she and Barry were having sex in the boathouse while Jason drowned. For a time, Pamela keeps this information to herself. But this is a new Ms. Voorhees, one who chops snakes into pieces rather than harmlessly releasing them into the wild, one who has killed multiple people on screen. You just know Claudette’s in trouble.
While Claudette leads a group of counselors singing “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” around the fire (lol, the Christianity is as cartoonish as the hippie shit), Barry flees the hippie’s van, freaked out by Harmony’s attempt to turn their hookup into an MMF threesome.
“You do her, I’ll do you,” says Shutterbug (Drew Scheid), the erotic interloper.
“I don’t even know how that would work!” Barry protests. You see what I mean about the show’s awareness of when and how to be funny?
What follows is almost a beat-for-beat recreation of the opening of the original Friday the 13th movie. Barry approaches Claudette by the fire and mouths “I love you.” Forgiving him for his tryst with Harmony (née Mary Ann Sacrimoni), she smiles and follows him out and up to a seemingly abandoned loft, where they start fooling around. They’re interrupted by an unseen intruder, whose eyes we look through. The intruder stabs first Barry, then Claudette. We have every reason to believe it’s Pamela, who’s even wearing her trademark blue sweater at this point.
But it’s Grace, tripping balls, convinced that by keeping Barry and Claudette from having sex, she’s saving Jason’s life. Pamela, who has learned that Barry is sneaking away from the kids he’s responsible for in the night, stumbles onto the scene in horror. She talks Grace down, takes the knife from her…and then finishes Claudette off herself. “Jason…he should have been watched every minute,” she says, before stabbing Claudette in the lung. “He wasn’t a very good swimmer.”
She then guides Grace down from her bad trip. “Mama’s here,” she says, finally giving voice to what she’s been after all along. “Mama’s here.”
As for the investigation into the now multiple homicides, Deputy Dorfman manages to bring Crazy Ralph in for the body in his meat locker, though it’s clear right from the start Ralph has no clue how it got there. Like Enos, he IDs the “demon” in the woods as the culprit.
Frozen out of the subsequent investigation because of his constant leaking, Dorf is reduced to chucking shuriken at a firing target. (Apparently, the good deputy is a weeb.) His father Hamish (Neal Huff), meanwhile, berates him for kowtowing to a Black man.
Elsewhere, Lee’s sister digs further into the Bellflower conspiracy, tracking down a Dr. Landau (Christopher Denham) who tells her that if she knows what’s best for her, she’ll leave well enough alone. Meanwhile, Pam learns from a little boy that Jason is already a campground legend, a monster who drowned and rose from the dead to stalk the woods, and that he’s even been spotted out there. The real question for this delightfully over-the-top reimagining is what will happen when we get our inevitable mother and child reunion.
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.