A happy ending? At Crystal Lake? Well, apologies to Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes, but now I’ve seen everything.
It’s true: In this finale — a rather open one for a “limited series,” don’t you think? — it basically all works out for Pamela and Jason Voorhees. Things start looking up right away, when both Briana and Levon say they believe Pam’s story about her and Jason’s mistreatment by her husband Elias and his employer, Bellflower. I mean, they had the files to prove it all along, but Lee needed to hear it from Pam’s own lips, and both the reporter and the cop are convinced. The three head to the police station to begin the work of exposing Bellflower’s crimes so that Pam won’t have to run anymore; this is very much Lee’s decision as Chief of Police, not Pam’s as a woman who’s dealt with Bellflower before.
Sure enough, her estranged husband/tormenter Elias rolls into town with a squad of Bellflower goons. When Elias hits up the diner to get the lay of the land, it’s amusing how the two women present, Rita and waitress Trudy (Bernadette Quigley) immediately realize this man is a threat to their friend, while idiotic old Enos just gives up her name and address without thinking. Women have to operate with a more sensitive threat detection mechanism than men.
By the time Elias and his men track Pam down at the police station, another officer is on the case. Realizing that Pam is in danger, Rita heads straight to Officer Dorfman’s basement apartment in his horrible dad’s house. Turns out she respects him after all, and trusts him to protect her friend. It’s a genuinely sweet moment, made more so by the finely tuned seriocomic performances of Joy Suprano as Rita and Cameron Scoggins as Dorfman.
So it’s Dorfman, of all people, who saves the day. Bursting into the station in the midst of a Mexican standoff between Elias’s thugs and Chief Brooks, he puts his hands in the air…and tosses a shuriken directly into the eyeball of one of the gun-toting hitmen. In the violent confusion that follows, Elias and a pair of goons escape with Pam, while Dorfman and Lee save the unarmed and un-psychotic Briana from those who remain. Lee takes one in the gut in the process, but Dorf is there to tend to him. He even got the plates of the getaway car.
“Good man,” Lee mutters through the pain.
“Learned from the best,” Dorfman replies, holding his friend. Reader, I clapped. I mean, come on, I’m not made of stone!
Fortunately for Pam, she too has help from an unexpected source. Using his Jason-senses (I guess?), her large son appears in the road right in front of Elias’s getaway car, causing it to swerve off into the woods. Wearing a bag with a single eyehole over his head, Jason grabs a fallen branch and knocks the top of one guy’s head off like a broken Pez dispenser; the second is mercifully dispatched off screen.
This just leaves Elias and Pamela to deal with. Daddy tracks Mommy down at Jason’s little shack, and in the inimitably soft, condescending tone of Hamish Linklater delivers a whole spiel about how a father’s job is to make his son strong, helping him achieve his full potential.
“And mother of the year that you are, you let him drown,” he says. “Again.” It wasn’t until right that moment that I realized how traumatic Jason’s second drowning must have been for Pam due to the first. In her feverish mind she probably has fully conflated the guilt.
Then Jason himself appears. “You’ve gotten so big!” Pamela exclaims through happy tears.
Unwisely, Elias attempts to ingratiate himself with the overgrown cockroach boy, his voice tender and intimate. In response, Jason grabs his head by both hands and crushes his skull, squishing one eyeball in and popping another out in the process. Red Viper, eat your heart out.
That just leaves Pamela herself. Even as she apologizes profusely for breaking her promise never to let anything bad happen to him, sobbing over how sorry she is for not being there while he drowned, she hallucinates him as his younger, smaller self, forgiving her. The real Jason disagrees, and throttles her, But when she says “I love you” with her last breaths, he remembers their good times together and relents.
Then Crazy Ralph shoots him in the goddamn head.
It’s a shocking moment, one that’s impossible to see coming, but which has been built to all season long. Ralph, who was the reason Pam was distracted while Jason drowned, is now the man to put an end to him for good…
Hahahahaha, yeah right, this is Crystal Lake, baby! By the time Pam and Ralph finish shouting at each other about what he just did, Jason is up and gone, vanishing back into the woods — his woods.
Pamela laughs. “You can’t hurt him,” she says. “None of you can. Not anymore. Jason is strong. My son is stronger than anybody ever gave him credit for. You just better stay away. Stay away from the lake. Or the camp. These woods are ours now!”
“You’re crazy!” Crazy Ralph says, fleeing as Pamela Voorhees cackles into the night.
Flash forward a few weeks later, and while the camp isn’t open, Steve Christy (Dan Thompson) is there around a campfire. He’s freaking his friends out with the story of Jason, the ghost who haunts the woods and kills people, seeking vengeance for his life of bullying and neglect.
“All it knows how to do is kill…kill…kill.”
Sure enough, when the campers split up, the familiar ki ki ki ma ma ma stinger is heard as something rustles through the woods. Cut to black.
Look, if we actually get a second season of Crystal Lake, I’m not going to complain about this ending, which leaves every main character alive and kicking except Elias, who was obviously Jason fodder from the moment he set foot on screen. What I’ll point out instead is that creatively, it’s probably the most focused and successful episode since the first one or two.
As much as I enjoy the camp (no pun intended) value of the Dragnet hippies, the horny teens, and the Mayberry RFD yokels, it’s undoubtedly a good thing to have an episode’s tone determined by the acting of Linda Cardellini, William Catlett, and Hamish Linklater. As Briana, Devin Kessler also performs in this serious register. When comic relief characters like Dorfman, Rita, and Enos are used here, they’re used in a way that feels consistent both with their own humorous track records and with how normal people would behave. That neatly ties both halves of the show together.
But the real dramatic energy here is from the demented nuclear (again, no pun intended) Whittering/Voorhees family: patronizing, patriarchal, sociopathic Elias; ferocious, loyal, chemically imbalanced Pamela; and…Jason, or whatever’s left of him.
“It ain’t him no more!” Ralph yells at Pamela after he shoots Jason in the head. “Can’t you see that?” But Pamela isn’t Pamela no more, and hasn’t been ever since Bellflower had its way with her.
While it falls short of the full fever dream that the similar Cape Fear remake earlier this year achieved, Crystal Lake is a smartly savage resurrection of a horror icon, willing to go farther than you’d think it would on a consistent basis. This show is the story of two rough beasts, their hour come round at last, who slouched towards Crystal Lake to be born. Now here they are, in all their mad glory. And their second coming, unlike Yeats’s, will likely involve a hockey mask.
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.