This article contains major spoilers for Peacock’s Crystal Lake. Proceed with caution.
It’s been a long, difficult wait for Friday the 13th fans like me. Last year brought the official short film Sweet Revenge, but it’s been over 17 years since the last movie in the beloved slasher franchise hit theaters. Peacock has finally helped scratch the itch with Crystal Lake, the prequel series centered largely on Pamela Voorhees—the mother of Jason Voorhees.
The origin series, however, leaves us much to discuss. Spoilers follow. You’ve been warned.
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The series centers on Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), a single mother who is grieving the loss of her young son Jason (Callum Vinson), who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. In the aftermath, mysterious strangers arrive at her door, which sets off a disturbing chain of events. The show mostly takes place in 1972, about eight years before the events of the original Friday the 13th movie.
As anyone reading this undoubtedly knows, the big twist in that movie is that Pamela was revealed to be the killer, seeking vengeance for her son. Jason didn’t become the killer until Friday the 13th Part 2. The show does a lot to help us understand Pam better, but it also deepens our understanding of Jason in many ways, particularly with one big twist in the show’s penultimate episode.
In the episode titled “Friday…,” we meet Jason’s father, Elias (Hamish Linklater). He works for a company named Bell Flower and, due to some complications during Pam’s pregnancy, Jason winds up being cared for by the company both before and after his birth. This is where things get weird. Pam is furious with Elias when she finds out that they’ve been running experiments on Jason at Bell Flower, predicated on the idea that they were trying to cure his seizures and other issues.
In reality? They were trying to make a human who could survive nuclear war, which was a big concern in the early '60s when this was going down. To do that, they looked to the only animals capable of surviving nuclear fallout. Namely, cockroaches.
“Our team has managed to replicate the cellular process that enables a cockroach to withstand radioactive fallout in a human being,” Elias reveals, with Jason being the test subject at the center of it all. So yes, the implication here is that Jason Voorhees is some sort of human experiment benefiting from cockroach DNA that makes him nearly invincible. It’s a big ass creative swing.
Up to this point, Jason’s ability to pretty much never die was more of a supernatural explanation. Jason Voorhees was an undead being. Crystal Lake posits that his abilities are all far more rooted in science. This will surely spark all sorts of thoughts and feelings among longtime fans, but it fundamentally changes our understanding of Jason and the Friday the 13th movies as we know them.
This big twist is far from the only way the show reframes who Jason Voorhees is and how he operates. For one, we know that he was alive and fully grown during the events of the original movie, which changes how we view Pam’s killing spree on behalf of her boy. She knows he’s alive, yet the blood still spills. One could argue that makes Pam a little less sympathetic.
On the flip side, the earlier episodes do a lot to showcase Jason as a young boy. It shows how he interacts with his peers, what he was like as a kid, and even how he got his first machete. It’s another chapter in Jason Voorhees' evolution, and an important one at that. Mostly because the show does a lot of work to make Jason sympathetic, rather than the unstoppable, silent killing machine slasher fans have come to know and love.
For better or worse, depending on how the show sits with you as a viewer, this series completely reframes the characters at the center of this franchise. Jason isn’t some mystical, undead being. Pam isn’t only killing people because she thinks her baby boy is dead thanks to neglectful counselors. Jason’s dad was a total dick who experimented on his son. It’s a lot to process.
It’s worth remembering that Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) was the original showrunner who had a totally different plan for Crystal Lake. Once he left over creative differences, Brad Caleb Kane (It: Welcome to Derry) took over and, well, that’s how we got here. What would have been different under Fuller’s direction, and would it have been better? Worse? We’ll never know. What we can say with confidence now, though, is that the Voorhees family has firmly been painted in a very different light.
Crystal Lake season 1 is streaming now on Peacock.
