‘Crystal Lake’ Episode 3 Recap: Hammer Time

By Sean T. Collins

I’m not burying the lede here: In this episode of Crystal Lake, Pamela Voorhees knocks a woman’s jaw off with a meat tenderizer. Clean off! Whole bottom of her face missing! Strands of cheek and tongue dangling down, upper teeth protruding — nasty, nasty stuff! Then she gets hit again and falls face-first into a deep fryer! Pam just smokes a cigarette and watches her cook! 

This show is fuckin’ going for it, man!

I don’t know why that surprises me so much. Maybe it’s the A24 imprimatur, which historically has meant a more cerebral approach to horror. Maybe I expected the standard slow-burn descent into madness that’s more typical of how stories get told on television dramas these days. But I think mostly it’s just that I was forgetting what this is. The Friday the 13th movies are so far over the top you can’t see the floor anymore. Why should the show adapting them be any different?

Pam’s berserker rage is so immediate, intense, and effective that I’m starting to suspect those two goons were not her first rodeo so to speak. (She did almost kill the founder of EST with a bowling ball in front of a crowd last episode, of course.) The assault is triggered by poor young Grace’s mother, Valerie (Tonya Glanz). When Grace gets suspended from school for a fight picked by Claudette, who has turned into a vicious bully, Pam sees Valerie verbally and physically abuse the girl.

You can see why this would be hard for Pam to take. For one thing, Grace was Jason’s only friend; in an opening flashback, we see them discover the familiar shack Jason uses as a lair in Part 2 together, and that’s where she sleeps for the night after the incident at the party.

For another, Pam spent her own life doting on a child, not abusing one. In fact, after Levon helps her clean out Jason’s stuff from his room, she confesses to him over wine that she feels she lost some part of herself through her total devotion to Jason, and she misses it and wants it back. Lee can empathize: He too feels he hasn’t quite rebuilt his life since his wife died. Their conversation is intimate, a little hot at times. When they drunkenly say goodnight outside, they kiss, before Pam cuts it off, afraid of jeopardizing her friendship with the one person in town she can really count on. 

Finally, as we’re about to learn, Pamela has experience on the receiving end of abuse herself.

But if Pamela really is ready to let Jason go, as she says, she’s not ready to let go of being a mother. The scene where she goes to Grace’s house while Valerie is at work to check in on her is a portrait of a well-intentioned woman who doesn’t realize she’s putting her own needs above Grace’s comfort. You can see and hear how weird the girl finds Pamela’s attention as she barges into the apartment, gives her a too-tight jacket that used to be Jason’s favorite, and fixes her a sandwich. Grace opens up and hints at Claudette’s misdeeds as they sit together, but doesn’t go into specifics about where she was when Jason drowned. (Well, “drowned.”) It’s clear, however, that Grace really loved that kid.

Valerie’s return from work puts the kibosh on the conversation, but before Pamela goes she notices a cigarette burn on Grace’s arm. She tracks Valerie down when she’s alone at the restaurant where she works (named, amazingly, the Bronco Beef Pit), after hours. In an effort to put an end to the abuse, she tries to be nice at first, empathizing with how hard it can be to raise a child as a single mother. But when Valerie rebuffs her, she begins to get angry. How dare this woman squander “the privilege of seeing her grow up,” something Pam will never have? How dare she treat this poor girl like Pam’s father treated her, abusing her in deranged effort to toughen her up that only drove her away?

Maybe if Pam used those parenting techniques, Valerie says, Jason would still be alive. Then out comes the meat tenderizer.

The episode ends with Pamela watching the restaurant burn with Valerie’s mutilated, deep-fried corpse inside it. First, Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said” plays in the background, as it has throughout the episode. Then there’s just silence, and the sound of the flames reflected in her eyes. Cut to black.

That ending has the serious tone I was misguidedly expecting from the whole series. One of the episode’s other big storylines, however, has a broadly comedic tone that fits right in with some of the goofier characters from the films. When Deputy Dorfman (Cameron Scoggins), Lee’s goofball sidekick, spreads the word around that they found a partially eaten pelvis in the woods, every local yokel with a gun decides to go out and hunt for it, despite Lee’s order not to. This is the kind of town where the crossword puzzle’s clue for “Martin Luther King” is “Communist Agitator”; no one gets overtly racist with him, but clearly these morons are not going to listen to a Black man, badge or no badge.

Things go predictably poorly. Enos (Daniel Stewart Sherman), one of the more prominent townsfolk thus far, shockingly gets shot in the neck and presumably killed by his own buddy Gus (William Hill), who mistakes him for a bear. Classic yokel behavior.

But before Enos dies, he sees Jason, wearing pants stolen from the PTSD-suffering Ralph. What this means for the rest of the hunting party is left to the next episode to reveal. But after Ralph first realizes he’s not alone out in the woods where he lives and hunts, he tells the hunting party this: “The only thing waiting for you out there is death.” I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right.

When he’s not helping Pam move on with her life, Chief Lee is still investigating “Elvis the Pelvis,” as Dorfman has dubbed their mystery remains. An abandoned rental car found in the area, presumably belonging to the John Doe, has blood in the trunk, meaning foul play is a sure thing. Lee’s sister Briana tracks down the rental records, but both the man who rented it and the company whose credit card he used appear not to exist. I sure am curious if Pam’s fingerprints exist in that car, however.

Crystal Lake isn’t a perfect show. The yokels are drawn a little too broadly to be effective as characters, especially up against characters as serious Pamela and Lee and performances as strong as Linda Cardellini’s and William Catlett’s. The nighttime photography is flat and lifeless, an especial shame given the original films’ oceans of black illuminated by flashlights and porch lights. 

But there’s just so much fun stuff here! In the opening flashback, young Jason blows off a nasty series of jagged cuts in his arm he got from a branch, feeling no pain at all; “I’m pretty tough,” he says, in the understatement of the year. The discovery of the cabin is another piece of the “how did Jason survive out there” puzzle. There’s a creepy shot that reveals Jason has been in Pam’s garage without her knowing it, going through his old box of toys. The opening credits are striking and unlike anything else on TV right now.

On a more serious note, Grace remains a refreshingly imperfect and complicated child character; watching her try to figure out how to parent these terrible adults is heartbreaking, as is the scene in which it’s revealed her cigarette burn was self-inflicted. Pam and Lee’s chemistry is as incendiary as her need to mother Grace is stifling. “I couldn’t save my son,” she growls at one point, “but I can save her.” From whom?

Bottom line: Pamela Voorhees knocks a woman’s face off with a bigass meat hammer. That’s entertainment, if you’re a sicko. If you’re not a sicko, what are you doing here?

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.