Full spoilers follow for Crystal Lake Season 1, which is available on Peacock now.
After 17 years since the last entry in the franchise, filled with movies that failed to get off the ground followed by a protracted legal battle over the rights that prevented any new projects from moving forward, the Friday the 13th series has finally risen from a watery grave with Crystal Lake, the new eight-episode Peacock series.
Set in the early 1970s, the series goes back to the roots of the franchise by focusing on Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini, taking on the role made famous by Betsy Palmer), the killer in the original Friday the 13th. Here, we follow the supposed drowning death of her son, Jason (Callum Vinson), and how she reacts to it in the aftermath, charting her descent into madness and murder that we saw in that 1980 movie – before she got her head cut off and her son took over the series in the second film.
By the end of the season, some major revelations have been made that reveal important aspects of the Voorhees family history that have never been delved into before across the 12 Friday the 13th movies, some which are no doubt already proving to be quite polarizing among fans. That includes a key aspect of Jason Voorhees’ history that answers a lot of questions! Let’s dive into what we learned, how it fits into the movie series, and where it diverges from it.
And, of course, who lived and who died…
Jason Voorhees’ Dear Old Daddy
Crystal Lake has a big surprise actor and character pop up in its sixth episode, when we meet Elias Wittering, played by Midnight Mass/Gen V/Widow’s Bay veteran Hamish Linklater. If you’re a big Friday the 13th fan, just seeing the name Elias (not spoken in that episode, but revealed in the closing credits), you knew exactly who he had to be: Jason’s father!
We’ve never met Jason’s dad in any Friday the 13th movie, but we nearly did in 1986’s Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, which was going to introduce Elias Voorhees. And though the scene written for the character was cut and never filmed, his name managed to stick around as part of the lore, said aloud for the first time in 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, while we’d also see versions of the character included or referenced in other Friday the 13th stories, including in comic books and Friday the 13th: The Game.
Linklater is a pretty great get for the series as far as bringing in another acclaimed actor to play Jason’s dad alongside recent Emmy-winner Cardellini as his mom. But of course, it’s also notable that Elias, as envisioned here, isn’t a Voorhees here at all, since we learn early on that Pamela only took on that name after going on the run with Jason.
The show’s seventh episode reveals Pamela and Elias’ full history, and how Pamela Scott was a nightclub singer with a burgeoning career in 1959 New York before she nearly suffered a miscarriage with the child she was carrying with her boyfriend, Elias. Elias Wittering was a salesman for the huge company Bellflower Chemical, and he took her to a state of the art medical facility the company had in Houston, Texas, where they not only said the baby could be saved, but would be given special treatments to help him.
In the midst of this, Pamela and Elias were married, making her Mrs. Wittering, and everything seemed hunky-dory at first. Until…
Why Jason Lives… and Lives… and Lives…
In what will no doubt be the most debated and controversial plot point in Crystal Lake amongst the Friday the 13th fanbase, it turns out that the treatments Bellflower were giving both to Pamela and to other pregnant women were in fact designed to enhance human durability, with the ultimate goal of making people better able to survive what Bellflower saw as an inevitable nuclear war (it was the Cold War, don’t forget!). Elias was fully aware of all of this, keeping it a secret from Pamela, while allowing the scientists to perform dangerous procedures on his wife and child.
These “Project Argonaut” experiments resulted in deformed babies, many of whom died, and none of whom were able to live anything resembling a normal life, except for one… And his name was Jason. Yep, that’s right: Crystal Lake gives the first-ever genuine overarching explanation for both why Jason looks the way he does, but more importantly, why he just won’t stay dead despite all that happens to him throughout the franchise. Why didn’t Jason actually die from his drowning? Why did he survive multiple would-be fatal wounds in Friday the 13th Parts 2, 3 and 4? Why was he able to be resurrected by a lightning bolt as a freaking zombie from Part 6 on? It was because of Bellflower!
As Elias puts it, “Trauma actually makes him stronger. In fact, it could spur accelerated physical growth!” Amusingly, this not only helps account for Jason’s form when we see him return from the lake in this very show (more on that below), but even his increasingly hulking form in the movies, where ever larger actors kept being cast to play him. Oh, and Pamela being so mentally disturbed? Also Bellflower’s fault, as they gave her experimental mood stabilizers that altered her brain chemistry, and which she no longer was using after learning the truth and escaping to her new life and her fake identity in Crystal Lake with Jason.
There were fans already bristling about the hints at this storyline in the show’s trailers, preferring Pamela and Jason remain nothing more than a small town New Jersey mother and son prior to his drowning and the events of the first film. And I get that, but also… Friday the 13th is a ridiculous series! And I say that as someone who adores these movies and has watched each of them dozens of times. But certainly from the moment they even decided Jason didn’t drown as a kid after all, in order to bring him back as an adult killer in Part 2, the series has had little connection to anything grounded. And that was before the sequels included Jason’s aforementioned transformation into an outright zombie, revealing his soul could jump from body to body via a demonic snake-like creature, and his trip to outer space.
Speaking of that last example, while everyone remembers 2002’s Jason X as the one where Jason is on a spaceship hundreds of years in the future, it’s worth recalling the film’s prologue, which is set in 2008 and shows how Jason ends up cryogenically frozen. That was one of the only times an entry in the series so directly acknowledged the bizarreness of Jason’s biology, arguably directly setting up what Crystal Lake has now explained.
In that film, Jason has been captured and taken to the “Crystal Lake Research Facility,” a place we can presume was eventually built expressly because of the town’s most famous resident. After multiple failed execution attempts, the US government now actively wants to experiment on Jason instead, with Dr. Wimmer (played by freaking David Cronenberg!) arguing that “His unique ability to regenerate lost and damaged tissue, it cries out for more research.” If only Dr. Wimmer had known about Bellflower and what they were up to, he’d have his answers.
Camp Blood Has One More Killer
The fifth episode of Crystal Lake features a near shot for shot recreation of the opening sequence of Friday the 13th, as horny Camp Crystal Lake counselors Barry and Claudette (played here by Phoenix Parnevik and Danielle Kotch) sneak off together to do what horny counselors do. As in the film, we get a POV shot of the killer attacking Barry and Claudette, but this time we continue past what the film shows, as we reveal Pamela Voorhees walking in on a murder already in process, rather than committing it herself. And the actual killer here isn’t Jason, the most likely second possibility, it’s… Grace!
Who is Grace? Played by Gwendolyn Sundstrom, she’s in many ways Crystal Lake’s most intriguing new character, a 13-year old girl who was Jason’s only real friend before he drowned, treating him with kindness while everyone else ignored or bullied him. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances to Grace becoming a killer, as the poor kid was in a bad place after her mom recently died (killed by Pamela, unbeknownst to her). She was also spending time with an older group of hippie kids whose irresponsible ways led Grace to take three tabs of acid before she went full Voorhees on Barry and Claudette while tripping out of her mind, having blamed them for what happened to Jason because she had spotted them hooking up while he was drowning in the lake.
The next day, Grace is confused by what actually happened, even as Pamela feeds her the story she wants her to tell the authorities about one of the hippies, Harmony (Manon Gage), being responsible for not just Barry and Claudette’s murders, but for the rest of the hippie group, who Pamela herself slaughtered. We don’t see Grace again after Episode 6, but she’s obviously a notable character to continue to follow in potential future seasons. Does she actually remember what she did or could it come back to her, along with Pamela coldly finishing off Claudette, who was still bleeding out after Grace stabbed her? Is this a tragic event she’ll move on from, or are we seeing yet another full-fledged Friday the 13th killer rise up alongside Pamela, Jason and Part 5’s Roy? Hell, could her past friendship lead to some twisted Jason’s Murder Girlfriend deal down the line!?
Okay, probably not… but maybe!
The Two Voorhees Killers
Crystal Lake reveals that Pamela killed way more people than just Barry and Claudette prior to the massacre that Friday the 13th centers on, with her building up quite a body count throughout the season. But as it turns out, Jason was also already busy with his own murders prior to seeing his mom decapitated.
We get glimpses of some of this early in the season, including a girl Jason kills and skins (!), leaving her body at the home of Crazy Ralph (Nick Cordileone). But the finale gives us the full reveal of the post-drowning Jason, with Elias being correct about that trauma-induced growth spurt, because a year later, he’s notably larger (and played by Jonathan Tison) than before. We get some fun elements pulled in from Friday the 13th Part 2 here as well, including the shack Jason used as a home (and a shrine to his mother) in that film, revealed as an abandoned place Jason and Grace used to go to before the drowning.
Plus, we see Jason in a version of his Part 2 look, wearing the one-eyed burlap sack he used as his first mask, prior to Part 3 giving him the iconic hockey mask. Amusingly, they even do a prequel overexplanation move by having Pamela, in the wake of finding the cabin thanks to Grace, leaving him food and supplies in a sack that he clearly decides to use to cover his face afterwards.
At the end of the finale, Elias, having tracked Pamela to Crystal Lake, chases her to that shack, where mother, father, and son are reunited… And Jason treats his crappy father as you’d expect, crushing his head between his hands. Jason then actually begins to choke Pamela, nearly killing his mother too, until memories of her love for him stops him. He’s then shot in the head by Ralph, which could perhaps further explain his simplistic, animalistic state in the films, though he already seemed pretty well there, given he was already in the whole mute murderer mode, presumably as a result of lack of oxygen from the drowning, combined with more Project Argonaut fallout, since he no longer was taking his own medication that helped him when he had seizures as a boy.
Regardless, Jason shakes off the gunshot (not the last time that will happen) and flees, as an unhinged Pamela rants about how these woods belong to her and her son, and everyone needs to stay away from the lake and the camp. This shows her mindset going into Friday the 13th, while also revealing that she actually does have full knowledge that Jason is out there, even as she’s also actively killing counselors in an ill-placed sense of revenge and speaking to herself as the younger Jason. Pamela’s got a lot going on!
Lingering Questions
Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has referred to Crystal Lake as a “spiritual prequel” to Friday the 13th, because it’s clearly not meant to line up exactly with the established canon of that movie. This is explicit from the get-go, when Jason drowns in 1971, not 1957, as he did in that film, while the brunt of the season – and Barry and Claudette’s deaths the summer after the drowning – occurs in 1972, not 1958.
But still, it feels like the idea here is that minus those years being different – and the major events being added throughout including a lot more earlier murders around Crystal Lake than we knew of previously, albeit with out of towners mostly taking the blame for them – the events of the show are intended to eventually lead into the circa-1980 events of the film. Presumably, that means that all of the characters in the show who are also in the movie (including Deputy Dorf, Crazy Ralph, Trudy the diner owner, and Enos the truck driver) are safe if we get future seasons, because they need to be around for the movie’s events.
But that also means you have the Ahsoka prequel factor: the characters who are not in the movie and have to be gotten rid of at some point, whether that be by their death or them leaving for whatever reason. This includes the aforementioned Grace, but also other key players like Sheriff Levon Brooks (William Catlett) and his sister, Briana (Devin Kessler). Levon in particular stands out, since we meet plenty of other Crystal Lake cops in the Friday the 13th films, but never this particular sheriff, who notably has a romantic relationship with Pamela in the first season.
Does this mean Levon is doomed (DOOMED!)? Or could he simply depart Crystal Lake at some point? Or could they say he was still sheriff by Friday the 13th, but simply remained offscreen, ready to get some very bad news about a woman he cared about?
And then there’s Harmony, the Hippie Who Got Away. Pamela and Grace claim she was the killer, but Harmony saw for herself it was Pamela who murdered her friends, even if she also was tripping at the time it happened. That seems like a problem that could easily circle back around for Pamela at some point, which she’d have to figure out how to solve.
Perhaps we’ll find out the answer to these questions and more if Crystal Lake returns for Season 2.