{"id":655843,"date":"2026-10-24T15:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T15:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655843\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T15:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T15:30:08","slug":"crystal-lake-dulls-friday-the-13ths-jagged-edges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655843\/","title":{"rendered":"Crystal Lake dulls Friday The 13th\u2019s jagged edges"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article contains spoilers for Crystal Lake.<\/p>\n

It was around halfway through Crystal Lake<\/a> that I realized the Peacock miniseries wasn\u2019t clicking for me. I\u2019ll admit that the premise had me apprehensive from the jump: A prequel expansion to Friday The 13th, in the vein of Bates Motel, sounded antithetical to enjoying a proper Voorhees chop-em-up. But I was still willing to give Crystal Lake, with its A24 pedigree, an honest, open-minded go. At the streaming-era standard eight episodes, Brad Caleb Kane\u2019s series does what it says on the tin: It marries slasher thrills to the complex melodrama of a contemporary TV show with a veneer of prestige, making Friday\u2018s monsters into human beings in the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is this a happy marriage? That answer was tricky to pin down at first, but as Crystal Lake shuffled along, punctuating each heavily plotted episode with a gory cliffhanger to jolt me into smashing that \u201cNext Episode\u201d prompt, the show\u2019s tonal dissonance suggests that the vengeful spirit of Pamela Voorhees ought to take Kane to divorce court.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Turns out that presenting Friday The 13th<\/a>\u2019s deadly mother-and-son duo as tragic figures saps the shock value. Crystal Lake evokes emotions beyond disgust and exhilaration as the body parts fly, yet it can\u2019t square the violence with its feels. At least this approach shows some early promise: In the last scene of the first episode, we see Pam (Linda Cardellini) coated in blood, holding hands with her son, Jason (Callum Vinson). Fireworks explode all around them. \u201cEverything I Own\u201d by Bread plays as the scene cuts to credits. Pam\u2019s going through it: She\u2019s just killed two people and laid them before a hungry bear. Knowing (dreading?) that this is the start of more killing to come, this squishy moment feels cathartic. The scene is rather eerie, too: Jason isn\u2019t really there. The boy is dead, his drowning under the neglectful supervision of Camp Crystal Lake counselors fueling campfire stories for years to come (and giving the series its inciting incident). Yet Pam believes he\u2019s alive, and we can see that belief sustains her. It\u2019s a transcendent moment in Crystal Lake\u2018s superior first half, before the story buries it in a sticky morass of plot goo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Crystal Lake can\u2019t sustain the balance between these emotional beats and its splatter shocks. Take episode two, in which Pam heads out of town for a seminar called \u201cThe Experience.\u201d She encounters Wilhelm Richter (Nathan Darrow), whose aggressive therapy sessions resemble the practices of a cult. In Pam, Wilhelm senses an inner fury waiting to erupt, and through their sessions together (some in the conference hall, one on a motel bed), he soon discovers just how right he is. Pam\u2019s time with \u201cThe Experience\u201d offers the next unsubtle hint of a dark past that justifies her reign of terror. (The first was those two corpses Pam fed to the bear.) She leaves Wilhelm in a quivering heap (oddly enough, a completely different character put him there) saying, \u201cSome of us are meant to wear masks.\u201d The nod toward Jason\u2019s future flair for facial coverings is about as subtle as an arrow through the throat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And so the Voorhees\u2019 backstory begins to take shape, eventually revealing that Jason wasn\u2019t warped by death and rebirth into an immortal killing machine, but was instead a byproduct of man-made forces set in motion before he was born\u2014forces Pam could not control. Her every act of annihilation\u2014save for one, which we\u2019ll get to\u2014is just proud mama bear protecting her cub. Crystal Lake ties itself in knots to rationalize the violence its bogeyman and bogeymama will soon wreak, giving them villains to hate and vanquish, not victims to brutalize out of mindless anger or revenge. The prequel\u2019s clunky revelations also try to infuse resonance into Friday The 13th\u2018s hacky iconography: The lake, the eponymous date, Jason\u2019s machete.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Oh, brother, that machete: One early beat has Pam gifting Jason the blade as a camping tool (\u201cOne day, these woods will be yours,\u201d she says), and Jason hoists it into the air admiringly. What we\u2019re meant to glean from this beat is that whenever we see Jason chopping up horny teenagers in the future, each swing of the machete serves as a tribute to his sainted mother, who gave him the tools that defined his, um, career. A character detail to appreciate as Jason removes appendages from his screaming victims, certainly.<\/p>\n

This facile obviousness bleeds into the show\u2019s stock characters. We have Claudette (Danielle Kotch), a born-again mean girl who wants to make amends for how she\u2019s hurt strange, sad Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom). There\u2019s the town\u2019s police chief, Levon (William Catlett), who keeps a dark secret from his previous beat in the big city, and his sister, Briana (Devin Kessler), a frustrated journalist looking for a scoop to boost her career. Then there\u2019s Dorf (Cameron Scoggins), the deputy caught between his duty to his captain and his racist father. These folks are Crystal Lake\u2018s source of dramatic support, not a bench of victims waiting for the slaughter. Pam wouldn\u2019t hurt most of these folks even if they posed some kind of threat to her, and that blunts Crystal Lake\u2019s dramatic edge. Who should we fear for here, if not the supporting cast? Who is there to be afraid of, if not Pamela Voorhees?\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a major midseason kill sequence blocked out to mirror the opener in the first Friday<\/a>\u2014the twist is that it\u2019s Grace, not Pam, who does the camp counselors in. She\u2019s all whacked out on acid tabs (there\u2019s a hippie subplot I don\u2019t have time to get into here) and has just seen what she believes is Jason in the woods. Triggered by this vision and years of her mother\u2019s abuse, Grace turns into a bloodthirsty zombie, stabbing Claudette and her boyfriend, Barry (Phoenix Parnevik), in a fit of hallucinatory rage. This wild, left-field twist doesn\u2019t work because it makes Grace\u2019s rampage a means of dulling Pam\u2019s furious edge. When she finishes what Grace started, punishing the randy camp counselors who failed to keep Jason alive, the scene almost immediately redirects our attention to Grace\u2019s lost innocence and Pam\u2019s inability to protect her. They embrace, as the results of their slaughter remain safely out of frame.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Can\u2019t characters in TV shows just commit murder because they want to? By the time Grace\u2019s big scene has passed, Pam should have zoomed well past the point of no return\u2014earlier, she had bludgeoned Grace\u2019s mother with a mallet\u2014but Crystal Lake shows little interest in exploring the hideousness of her crimes, or how they\u2019re warping her into a monster, beyond the motivation that justifies them. Later, as a wildly thorough backstory reveals her dark history, Crystal Lake further hedges her crimes so she can justifiably take a hack at the series\u2019 true threat. That would be Pam\u2019s weirdo husband, Elias (Hamish Linklater), who helms the top-secret \u201cProject Argonaut.\u201d Elias is a bad man: He turned their son superhuman in utero without Pam\u2019s knowledge, and simultaneously dulled his wife with drugs, knowing that withdrawal could lead to a psychotic break. This development with Elias further handwaves Pam\u2019s maternal wrath with ridiculous TV hyperrationale and ends just as it\u2019s supposed to: At Jason\u2019s hands.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the center of Crystal Lake\u2018s incomplete melding of mayhem and sentimentality is the space where two compelling characters should be. The problem is easy to diagnose: Pam Voorhees and her homicidal son aren\u2019t built for a series-length excavation, at least not the sweetly rendered one this series gives us. A&E got five seasons out of the Psycho prequel Bates Motel because the uncomfortable overtones of abuse and codependency within its Oedipal core could sustain that many episodes. Hannibal, meanwhile, made great TV out of details Thomas Harris had previously left to the imagination by playing off the obsessive, psychosexual dynamic between FBI profiler Will Graham and his cannibalistic psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter. Audiences didn\u2019t simply want to tune in every week to see Will scold Hannibal and Hannibal scandalize Will. The characters\u2019 relationship compelled them to.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Crystal Lake has no such pairing. Jason is taken out of the picture almost immediately. While his memory sustains Pam (and Cardellini\u2019s performance holds the toppling enterprise aloft longer than it should), there\u2019s no one for her to bounce off of, no foil for her to grapple with\u2014not until the show is closing in on its finale. But that\u2019s the least of Crystal Lake\u2018s sins. The worst crime it perpetrates against its iconic killer mommy is that it won\u2019t peel back the fingernails to reveal the red-hot hate that drove Pam Voorhees to butcher a cabin\u2019s worth of camp counselors in the first place. It wants us to understand her, even feel sorry for her, when watching her chop it up with a wild grin on her face is way more fun. And exhilarating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article contains spoilers for Crystal Lake. It was around halfway through Crystal Lake that I realized the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-655843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}