13-year-old Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom) dropped too much acid while hanging around the hippies that have been working at Camp Crystal Lake, a bad decision that led directly to the murders of camp counselors Barry and Claudette in the previous episode. Camp cook Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), the mother of Grace’s supposedly late best friend Jason and a woman has been trying to take Grace under her wing recently (and who, unbeknownst to Grace, murdered Grace’s mother in the process), is on the scene and determined to make sure that no one will ever find out what happened. She plans on dumping the bodies somewhere… but then she hallucinates a conversation with little Jason (Callum Vinson) where he advises her to frame the hippies for the murders. And that’s the best idea Pam has heard in a while.
Jason tells Pam, “Kill them, mommy.” A prequel to the original Friday the 13th movie, Crystal Lake is having fun reminding viewers of moments and lines from that 1980 classic.
Pam uses a canoe to take the bodies, and a sleeping Grace, across the lake, over to the spot where the hippies are camping. And then we get the sort of sequence that Friday the 13th fans always enjoy seeing: the wholesale slaughter of youths who have been indulging in drinks, drugs, and premarital sex.
It might have been even more fun if the murders had been spread out over a longer stretch of this episode – after all, it usually takes an entire movie for either Pam or Jason to knock off a large number of characters. But writers Evan Endicott, Josh Stoddard, and Brad Caleb Kane, along with directors Celine Held and Logan George, have decided to get through multiple murders at turbo speed. By the 10 minute mark of the episode, Pam has already murdered Stella Blue (Lark White), Gabe (Philip Themio Stoddard), Rhiannon (April Consalo), Plato (Nate Kelderman), and Shutterbug (Drew Scheid, who was previously killed by Michael Myers in the 2018 Halloween).
The hippie called Space Ghost (Albert DiCesare) tries to steal the canoe, but when Grace wakes up and struggles with him, Grace’s guardian angel emerges from the woods. As the preceding episodes have established, Jason – who survived the drowning that was believed to have killed him a year earlier – has been keeping an eye on Grace when she’s in the woods. We don’t see it happen, but Jason comes out to help her again… and this time, Space Ghost ends up with a machete planted in his face.
When Pam finds the corpse, she also hears and sees a figure in the woods, pulling the trigger on an atomic ray gun toy just like the one her son Jason used to love carrying around. Jason lives?
The only hippie who manages to escape is Harmony (Manon Gage), who has been the most prominent character among the hippie group. We won’t hear or see anything more from the character by the time this season ends, so she must have gone into hiding in that commune she has been talking about. It makes sense that she would be hiding, because her absence makes her a person of interest in this case. Regardless of who’s responsible, Detective Walfisch (Jim Santangeli) doesn’t want Crystal Lake Chief of Police Levon Brooks (William Catlett) working the case anymore. This is up to the state police now.
“Town crazy” Ralph (Nick Cordileone) was arrested for the murder of another member of the hippie group (another murder that we know was committed by Jason), but when a lawyer is able to get Ralph out of jail, that leads to a heated exchange between Brooks, who blames himself for what happened at the camp and never believed Ralph was guilty, and Officer Dorf (Cameron Scoggins), who is convinced that Ralph is a killer – and has just found out that Brooks has a “dirty cop” reputation in his former home of Newark. Things are not going well for Brooks.
Brooks’ journalist sister Briana (Devin Kessler), on the other hand, is still investigating the case of the dead men, the bear-chewed corpses, and the rental car with blood in its trunk, a mystery that Brooks’ asked her to help him with. The men’s association with a non-existent company called Subsun Solutions has led her to a major chemical company called Bellflower – and documents sent to her by whistleblower Dr. Landau (Christopher Denham) reveals that Pamela Voorhees had some sort of past association with Bellflower. Landau thought all of the people named in those files were dead – but when Briana tells him that Pam is still alive, he insists on meeting her in person, in public rather than talking about these things over the phone.
It doesn’t work out. Dr. Landau is about to meet Briana in an amusement park, surrounded by people, when some Bellflower security thugs grab him and kill him. The person who sits down beside Briana on a bench for a meeting isn’t Landau. It’s a man named Elias Whittering, played by Hamish Linklater – and fans might not realize this just yet, but they have now been introduced to Jason’s father, a character who has remained a mystery for 46 years.
Fans have wondered about Jason’s father for a long time. He was never even mentioned in the films until Jason Goes to Hell gave him a first name in 1993, and that’s all we’ve ever known about him within the canon of the films. He makes an appearance in the comic book Jason vs. Leatherface, where he was presented as an abusive drunk, but that book’s not canon. He was going to appear in the sequel to the 2009 Friday the 13th movie, but that project never made it into production. Elias was presented as a murderer in a Friday the 13th reboot script written by Aaron Guzikowski, but that’s another script that was never filmed. Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI writer/director Tom McLoughlin intended to have Jason’s father appear at the very end of that movie, which would have shown us that he was a very intense, creepy person… but that scene was never filmed.
And so, here we have it, the first official introduction of Jason’s father Elias, as named in Jason Goes to Hell. And the character played by Hamish Linklater is probably nothing like any fan ever imagined Jason’s father being. Here we discover that Elias is a scumbag business man, a person who works for a chemical company that has conducted some highly questionable experiments – or “clinical trials” – and believes that every risk and sacrifice made in the process was worth it, in the name of progress and innovation. Bellflower Chemical has been paying people hush money through shell companies so word of their experiments wouldn’t leak out to the public… and their goons have just killed Dr. Landau to shut him up.
Elias confesses that the mysterious Project Argonaut was his project, he was overseeing it, and it was his failure. Now that he has heard that one of their test subjects may still be alive, he claims to want to make amends to Pamela. And since Briana never said the name “Pamela” to either him or Landau, he just gave away that he’s dangerous and may be able to hurt Briana to get information on where Pamela is located. So Briana goes on the run.
Back in Crystal Lake, Pamela is carrying out an investigation of her own. A very personal investigation. Now that she has seen evidence with her own eyes that Jason may be out in the woods, she starts questioning others. She asks Grace if she has seen Jason in the woods. She thinks she has – and she has an idea where Jason might be staying. That rundown shack in the woods that we saw in previous episodes.
Ralph also gets questioned after he makes a spectacle of himself in the local diner, telling his fellow residents that there’s something evil lurking in the woods and if they go out there, they’ll “never come back again.” The Crazy Ralph character gave that same warning, “You’ll never come back again,” to someone in the original Friday the 13th, and Cordileone delivers the line in a way that sounds wonderfully similar to the way actor Walt Gorney delivered the line in the 1980 film.
Pamela confesses to Ralph that she thinks the person he has seen in the woods – watching him, stealing his clothes, messing with his animal traps, skinning the captured prey, learning from what he does – may be her son. But Ralph knows, if that thing out there was Jason, they’re not anymore. And he intends to do something about it.
His warning that Jason has turned evil isn’t enough to dissuade Pam from taking some food and a sleeping back out to that shack in the woods, though. When she finds that atomic ray gun toy in the shack, it gives her even more hope. It’s strong evidence that Jason is out there… but why is he avoiding his mom? And why does he destroy the things she left for him in the shack?
Pam has more disappointment waiting for her. She returns home to find Brooks and Briana there. They confront her with the evidence that she killed the men from Bellflower and ask her about her connection to the company. She agrees to tell her story… and in the next episode, we’re going to learn more about the origin of Jason Voorhees than I ever wanted to know.
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