Crystal Lake (Credit: Peacock).
This article contains major spoilers for Peacock’s Crystal Lake. Proceed with caution.
The wait was long and difficult Friday the 13th the fans love me. Last year the official short film was presented sweet revengebut It’s been over 17 years since the last film in the beloved slasher franchise hit theaters. Peacock finally helped relieve the itch with Crystal Lakethe prequel series largely focused on Pamela Voorhees—Jason Voorhees’ mother.
The original series leaves us with much to discuss, however. Spoilers follow. You have 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. Subsequently, mysterious strangers arrive at her door, which sets off a disturbing chain of events. The show takes place primarily in 1972, approximately eight years before the events of the original Friday the 13th movie.
As anyone reading this no doubt knows, the big twist in this movie is that Pamela was revealed to be the killer, seeking revenge on her son. Jason only became the killer when Friday the 13th Part 2. The series does a lot to help us understand Pam better, but it also deepens our understanding of Jason in several ways, particularly with a big twist in the series’ 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 ends up being taken care of by the company before and after his birth. This is where things get weird. Pam is furious with Elias when she discovers that they conducted experiments on Jason at Bell Flower, based on the idea that they were trying to cure his seizures and other problems.
In reality? They were trying to create a human who could survive a nuclear war, which was a big concern in the early ’60s when this was going on. To do this, they turned to the only animals capable of surviving nuclear fallout. Namely cockroaches.
“Our team managed to replicate the cellular process that allows a cockroach to resist radioactive fallout on a human,” Elias reveals, Jason being the test subject at the center of it all. So yeah, the implication here is that Jason Voorhees is some sort of human experiment benefiting from cockroach DNA that makes him nigh-invincible. It’s a big creative swing.
Until now, Jason’s ability to never die has been more of a supernatural explanation. Jason Voorhees was an undead being. Crystal Lake posits that his abilities are all much more grounded in science. This will surely stir up all kinds of thoughts and feelings among longtime fans, but it fundamentally changes our understanding of Jason and the Friday the 13th films as we know them.
This big twist is far from the only way the series reframes who Jason Voorhees is and how he operates. On the one hand, we know that he was alive and fully adult during the events of the original film, which changes how we perceive Pam’s killing spree on behalf of her boy. She knows he is alive, but the blood continues to flow. You could say that makes Pam a little less likeable.
On the other hand, the earlier episodes do a lot to introduce Jason as a young boy. It shows how he interacts with his peers, what he looked like as a child, and even how he got his first machete. Ithis is another chapter in The evolution of Jason Voorhees, and one more important point. Mainly because the show does a lot of work to make Jason sympathetic, rather than the unstoppable, silent killing machine that fans have come to know and love.
For better or worse, depending on how the series appears to you as a viewer, this series completely reframes the characters at the center of this franchise. Jason is not a mystical, undead being. Pam doesn’t just kill people because she thinks her little boy died because of negligent counselors. Jason’s father was a complete asshole 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 put aside creative differences, Brad Caleb Kane (This: Welcome to Derry) took over well, that’s how we got here. What would have been different under Fuller’s leadership, and would it have been better? Worse? We will never know. What we can say for sure now, however, is that the Voorhees family has clearly been shown in a very different light.
Crystal Lake season 1 is now streaming on Peacock.
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