Pam Voorhees is all by herself. At the start of this episode of Peacock’s Crystal Lake wanders around alone, through her house, through the old campground. She sets out onto the water in a canoe like the final girl in the first movie, daydreaming about reaching down into the water and touching young Jason’s outstretched hand. Badfinger’s cover of Harry Nilsson’s lugubrious heartbreak song “Without You” is playing in classic ‘70s soft-rock fashion and everything.
Then a fully grown, monstrous form of Jason leaps out of the water and drags her down, before she wakes from her nightmare.
Consider this Exhibit A.
Exhibit B comes all the way at the end of the episode. Barry and Claudette, the teens who were making love while that boy drowned are stuck in their car in the rain down at the camp site when something begins banging on it or throwing things at it, hard enough to shatter their rear windshield. When Barry gets out to look, he sees a strange, deformed man-thing about the size of a tall teenager standing in the dark.
At the risk of getting out ahead of the evidence, is Jason Voorhees growing into unstoppable-behemoth adulthood at a science-fictionally rapid rate, perhaps due to human experimentation on either him or his mother (or, maybe, “mother”) Pamela? Is Jason the Godzilla of slashers for real?
We certainly get plenty of hints in this direction. There’s the dream and the thing in the woods, yes, but beyond that there’s another phone call between Pam and Nora, an old friend who now seems like an old coworker, too. Nora tells Pam she might be in the clear for now, because THE COMPANY uses subcontractors for the kind of black-bag work those guys were sent to do on Pam. Nora seems like a dissident or whistleblower within whatever corporate structure is responsible for Argonaut, the project from which Pam and Jason clearly fled.
Warming up to the locals once more thanks to the persistent friendliness of Chief Levon and the perpetually charming swingin’ single lady Rita (Joy Suprano), Pam actually goes out bowling with the gang. She has a nice time, too, particularly when Rita invites her to a self-help seminar called “The Experience.” The only dark cloud on the horizon is the guy sitting at a table staring her down, whom she’s paranoid is coming after her.
The Experience itself, which takes place in a hotel ballroom or something with the doors chained and padlocked shut, is very clearly a riff on EST, which you may remember Philip Jennings doing in The Americans. The founder and speaker, Wilhelm Richter (Nathan Darrow), is equally clearly intended to be a stand in for Werner Erhard, who chose a Teutonic pseudonym to replace his Jewish last name, as did Wilhelm, who eventually reveals he was born “Phil Lipshitz.”
Are Wilhelm’s techniques, which force people to face their worst fears and traumas head on in order to have a cathartic experience that allows them to move on with their lives, helpful at all? For some people, I’m sure they are. But the way he bullies and breaks down his clients in order to build them back up again is so far away from psychological best practices here we can’t even see ’em.
Wilhelm picks at and pulls apart Pamela in the initial meeting of the group. He deduces from the professional way she holds a microphone that she has some kind of stage background, and she admits she was a singer. He convinces her to sing, then ridicules the phoniness of her torch-song performance. Her whole life, he deduces, is one big performance, one big mask she’s afraid to drop.
But after the first session is over and Rita skedaddles with a tacky but wealthy dentist, Pam notices Wilhelm sitting alone reviewing his notes and approaches him. She tells him he’s insightful, but his jerk-ass techniques, which she remembers from a particularly cruel voice teacher, are unnecessary. Impressed by her moxie, this clearly very experienced smooth operator buys her a drink
They get to talking. She tells him about Jason, and says her worst fear is letting go. She asks if he ever worries about playing around in people’s heads, and he confidently says no. He reveals his origin story. He makes his move. She gets uncomfortable. He manipulates her. They go up to her room. They make out awkwardly. They get on the bed. Pamela gets on top…and she bites him, picturing that bear eating her victims last episode. When Wilhelm unwelcomely plays rough in response, she calls the whole thing off.
Wilhelm is pissed not to get laid, but he’s still a guru, so he puts it guru terms. “Don’t apologize for the power you’ve got locked inside you,” he tells her before leaving.
The next day, she shows up late to the seminar despite her misgivings, and he guides her through her repressed memories of her most painful, fearful experience. She’s told him the thing that frightens her worse is “letting go,” clearly speaking of Jason, whose death she acknowledges is a certainty. (That’s a big moment for her, I think.) But when she does his “regression-possession” technique, she has split-second flashbacks of herself as a happy singer, Jason as a baby, Argonaut, scientists, experiments. She screams and gets up and leaves, prompting him to expose their almost-one-night-stand to the entire group.
Then she comes back with her bowling ball. “Oh dear,” I wrote in my notes.
But before she can toss it at this smug asshole’s skull, another client/patient/victim smashes half his face in with a baseball bat, screaming that Wilhelm’s advice has already caused his wife to leave him. “See what happens when you play around in people’s heads?” Pamela asks, speaking softly right into Wilhelm’s ruined face as he lies immobile on the ground. “Some of us are meant to wear masks.” Like mother, like son!
On his own side of the story, Levon is happy to see Pam back in social circulation. She even drops off blue-and-white “copcakes” for him, though he notices her acting weird when she’s fishing for intel on whether or not they’ve discovered the bodies of the subcontractors she fed to that bear.
They do soon enough, finding an unidentifiable chunk of bear-gnawed human remains in the woods courtesy of a couple of dog-walking teens. (As an aside, they’re pretty sure it doesn’t make a difference if it’s McGovern or Nixon in ’72.) Inadequate facilities force him to house the maggoty remains in his own fridge, which is ridiculous and disgusting and unbelievably unsanitary, but also good clean gross fun.
At the encouragement of his sister, who may or may not have meant it, Levon conducts his own examination of the remains, using the loupe he looks through while painting his collection of Civil War miniatures. Inside the muscle and gristle, he finds the blades of a small scissor — the one Pam buried in one of her attackers. Someone got to this guy before the bear did.
The thing I love most about Crystal Lake so far — and I do love it, make no mistake, I’m a real sucker for what this show is doing — is its hidden depths, no pun intended. You don’t have to make a character like Rita both a classic ’70s floozy and a woman who suffered a stillbirth and thus sees Pamela’s strength and love for her child more clearly than anyone else on the show, but isn’t it better if you do? You don’t have to burrow into the original series’, how shall I put this, fraught relationship with teenage female sexuality so deep that you’ve got Grace mimicking older kids gossiping about “sluts” in the bathroom mirror, or staring intently at the sexual graffiti all over the stall door, or putting on lipstick and clogs to hang with the very kids she watched have sex while Jason drowned — but again, doesn’t it make this a more interesting show when you go there?
(The clogs even have a plot payoff: Jason tosses one of them through Claudette and Barry’s car windshield after Grace furiously discards them in the woods, no doubt further enmeshing the girl in the whole deadly situation. I would not at all be surprised if she winds up the show’s final girl.)
The original Friday the 13th series gave us a great movie monster, two when you count Pamela, but on the whole it’s more interesting for the writing and thinking and criticism it spawned than for much of anything in the movies themselves. Creator-writer Brad Caleb Kane’s project with Crystal Lake seems to be incorporating all that meta-textual energy into the story itself, while still doing batshit b-movie stuff like turning Jason into a science experiment. With an actor as mesmerizing as Linda Cardellini helming this thing, I really think it’s got the juice to do something special with a slasher saga that has unlimited untapped potential.
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.