Crystal Lake - "Friday..."

The birth and early childhood of Jason Voorhees.

The story of the original Friday the 13th was as straightforward as it gets. In 1957, a young boy named Jason Voorhees drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. The following year, two counselors were murdered at the camp, so it shut down for a while. Jump ahead a decade-and-change, and a fresh group of counselors are working to get the camp in shape for its grand re-opening when someone starts picking them off one by one. In the end, we learn that the killer was Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees, who blamed a pair of counselors for her son’s death (“They were making love while that young boy drowned”), killed those two in 1958, and now, fuelled by a psychotic belief that Jason’s spirit is in contact with her and urging her to kill, is willing to commit several more murders to make sure the camp remains closed.

Then, Friday the 13th Part 2 threw us a curveball. Jason was revealed to alive, living in a filthy shack in the woods, and seeking to avenge the death of the mother that was killed while avenging his death. Ever since that sequel was released in 1981, viewers have been trying to make sense of it. Did Jason ever really drown? Had he just been living in the woods since 1957 and his mother wasn’t aware? As the sequels went on and Jason proved to be increasingly, supernaturally resilient, the mystery deepened. Had he been a supernatural being from the start?

Some came up with their own theories to fill in the blanks. As far as Jason Goes to Hell director/co-writer Adam Marcus was concerned, Pamela used the Book of the Dead from the Evil Dead franchise to cast a spell and resurrect her son. That’s why the book, the Necronomicon, is seen in the Voorhees house in that film.

Myself, I always felt that Jason was simply resurrected by the power of his love for his mother. Sort of like The Crow, minus the crow. That sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with the soul of the dead and the person can't rest. That Jason’s drowning was so sad and tragic, his spirit continued to linger at Crystal Lake – and when he saw his mother get decapitated while avenging him, he returned from the dead to put the wrong things right. Which, in his case, led to the murders of a whole lot of innocent people.

When it was announced that this prequel series Crystal Lake had been greenlit, I was nervous. The Friday the 13th franchise had gone forty-five years without giving direct answers to its mysteries, but a prequel series was sure to give answers… but at this point, fans have come up with their own answers, and chances are high that they’re not going to like it when they’re finally given straight answers. But that didn’t deter showrunner Brad Caleb Kane from deciding to put his idea of the answers into the show. And in the seventh episode of the eight-episode season, we find out everything about the origins of Jason Voorhees.

As Kane has said, “I don’t want people watching, thinking that we’re doing some sort of Stranger Things, Eleven, government super soldier. It’s not that, it’s its own thing. It’s grounded in more reality. It’s grounded in things that were going on in the 60s and 70s that sort of intersect with the theme of mistrusting our institutions.”

Directed by Quyen Tran from a teleplay by Laura Marks, this is my least-favorite episode of the entire season, ranking even lower than the second episode, which wasted too much time on a seminar. This is a story that I never wanted to be told.

Since Crystal Lake shifts the timeline of Jason’s drowning up to 1971, the story here begins in 1959. Turns out, Pamela Scott (Linda Cardellini) was a professional singer who was doing well enough to make it onto The Jack Parr Show. Unfortunately for her, her live television debut was disrupted by abdominal pains and hemorrhaging. It’s believed that she has suffered a miscarriage – but her boyfriend Elias Whittering (Hamish Linklater) works for Bellflower Chemical and knows the company has a state-of-the-art medical facility in Houston, Texas, where they have hired the best obstetricians in the world. So they head down to Houston and find out from doctors Valentine (Jeffrey Bean) and Landau (Christopher Denham) that she did not have a miscarriage. The baby is still growing in her womb and still has a heartbeat. There are some complications, however, so Pam is offered a spot in a highly experimental clinical trial that the Valentine says will ensure the health and safety of the child.

Elias proposes to Pam while convincing her to agree to the clinical trial, and Bellflower sets them up with local housing. Pam and the other women in the clinical trial are given specific foods to eat, loaded with medications, and have to endure uncomfortable treatments in hi-tech rooms, where the women are tied down while large syringes are inserted into their stomach, injecting the fetuses with mysterious substances.

Pam’s friend Trish (Olivia Macklin) goes into labor prematurely and delivers a stillborn, deformed baby. Pam is visiting Trish in her hospital room when the woman busts some glass and kills herself – and the shock of this causes Pam to go into premature labor herself. This happens on May 13, even though it has previously been established in the franchise that Jason’s birthday was June 13. So they’ve changed the year and gotten the month wrong!

Pam’s baby Jason is deformed, but unlike Trish’s baby, he is not stillborn. He is, however, extremely fussy. While Elias is out on an extended business trip, Pam discovers that the only way to soothe the baby is to let him soak in the bathtub. Trouble is, she falls asleep while the tub is still being filled, so the baby drowns in the overflowing tub. Elias arrives home to find his wife asleep and their baby dead, blue and submerged.

But Jason is resilient. As soon as he’s taken out of the water, he starts breathing and crying again. This boy can’t be drowned.

Valentine informs Pam that Jason will need various therapeutic interventions after this event, and a registered nurse is hired to take the baby to and from the clinic every day from that point forward. The nurse is played by Kate Micucci, a fairly well-known actress, comedian, and musician, who somehow only shows up for a couple of minutes to hold a baby and speak a few words.

The situation really goes off the rails on Jason’s fourth birthday, when the kid’s presence sets off a Geiger counter that he found in the family bomb shelter and then his hair starts falling out in bloody clumps. He has clearly been exposed to high doses of radiation during his “therapeutic interventions.” Jason (played at this age by both Kaiden Cullen and Theo Lonsdale) has to be put in a restricted ward at the clinic after that. Pam is, understandably, very concerned and freaked out. She tells Elias that she wants to take Jason away from the clinic, to get the opinion of a doctor not connected to Bellflower. In response, Elias threatens to divorce her and take full custody of their child.

Elias will be delivering a speech to investors at an upcoming gala, and he needs his wife there for the sake of appearances. Pam agrees to go with him – but she has an ulterior motive. She intends to find Jason and get him away from the Bellflower doctors, especially since she has found some very disturbing pictures Jason has drawn of what happens when he’s taken to his treatments. Evil doctors tormenting a crying child.

The gala is held at the clinic. As the episode goes on, we see that what’s being done at the clinic is taking a heavy toll on Landau’s conscience, as he has taken to drinking heavily, and he’s continuing to drink heavily at the gala. This is setting up the fact that, as we’ve seen in previous episodes, Landau is going to become a Bellflower whistleblower.

While Elias takes the stage to deliver his speech, Pam sneaks off to find their son. So she doesn’t hear the explanation of what’s been going on at Bellflower – but we viewers do. Bellflower is concerned about the inevitability of nuclear war, and have been wondering if they might be able to fortify people to survive in irradiated wastelands. Project Argonaut has managed to replicate the cellular process that enables cockroaches to withstand radioactive fallout in a human being: Phase 1 Test Subject J. Jason. He has developed a cellular matrix capable of hyper-proliferation far beyond normal thresholds. He has uncanny levels of resilience to radioactive bombardment. Trauma makes him stronger, much like pruning a tree can stimulate it. Trauma could even spur accelerated physical growth – which explains why Jason has gotten much bigger in the other episodes since his lake drowning.

Bellflower is now developing a technique to harvest Jason’s DNA in hopes of replicating these results in others, even though the in utero inoculation given to one hundred other fetuses haven’t yielded the same results in any other subject as they have in Subject J.

In a lab, Pam finds all sorts of deformed babies. Tiny corpses in jars. Children being subjected to monstrous experiments. And, hooked up to some machinery, there’s little Jason. With this sequence, Friday the 13th has gone sci-fi – and while Kane says it’s grounded in reality, based on horrific experiments that were really carried out on children and pregnant women in the first half of the 20th century, this also brings to mind the futuristic, hi-tech, space-bound shenanigans of Jason X.

Valentine warns Pam that Jason won’t survive without the chemicals Bellflower has been infusing him with, but she kills the doctor, takes her kid, and goes on the run. Elias’s secretary Nora (Blair Sams) lets her use her car to escape from the clinic, which is why Nora has previously been shown to still be Pam’s connection at Bellflower in 1972.

So now we know that Jason was subject to some cruel and unusual experiments as a child, which is not something I ever considered, not something I ever wanted to know, and not something I would have sanctioned if I were a decision-maker behind the scenes on this project. But at least this origin story does leave room for Jason being uniquely strange, as the Bellflower experiments aren’t necessarily what makes him so resilient. After all, he survived a supposed miscarriage before he was ever taken to that clinic, and none of the other test subjects held up as well as he did. So he’s still Pam’s “special boy,” regardless of being pumped full of chemicals and radiation.

But, let’s get out of this oddball flashback episode (this Bellflower story really didn’t need to have a 50-minute episode all to itself) and get back to the town of Crystal Lake in 1972.