Did you think Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) would be shocked and appalled by what she did to Valerie, the nasty mother of her supposedly late son Jason’s best friend Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom)? She murdered the woman and burned her corpse in a restaurant fire. But she’s not upset. She’s reinvigorated. She’s ready to embrace life and have fun again. So the first place she goes after leaving the flaming restaurant is to the home of her friend Levon Brooks (William Catlett), who also happens to be the Chief of Police in Crystal Lake, and has sex with him.
By the time Pam wakes up in the morning, Levon is dressed for work and she has to fake shock at the news that Valerie Snell died in a restaurant fire. John and Kay Christy (Brian J. Carter and Nancy Nagrant), the owners of Camp Crystal Lake, have already agreed to foster Grace… and the camp is about to re-open, one year after the apparent drowning death of Pam’s son Jason, whose body has never been found. Viewers know why at this point: Jason is still alive, lurking in the woods. And he’s much bigger than he was when he drowned.
Despite the strange things going on in Crystal Lake, things are going pretty well for Pam and Levon. And then writers Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard and directors Celine Held and Logan George take us straight from their domestic bliss to one of my favorite sequences in this entire season. A hippie girl called Willow (Oona Roche) is shown arriving at the edge town, dropped off by an angry man who didn’t appreciate that she didn’t put out when he picked her up hitchhiking. Willow walks into Crystal Lake – and her walk is an exact replica of the character Annie’s walk into two near the beginning of the original Friday the 13th. Crystal Lake filmed in the same town where the original F13 was filmed, Blairstown, New Jersey, and the place looks very much like it did back in 1980, so Held and George were able to recreate Annie’s walk perfectly. It’s a beautiful sight to behold.
Like Annie, Willow stops by Hartung’s Diner and talks to proprietor/waitress Trudy (Bernadette Quigley), among other characters. She’s looking for a group of friends, fellow hippies, and learns that a bunch of “unwashed types” recently passed through town and were told that they could find work out at Camp Crystal Lake, getting the place ready for opening day. Willow heads out to catch up with her pals, but never will.
One of the locals she crossed paths with at the diner was “town crazy” Ralph (Nick Cordileone), and it’s a bad coincidence for both of them that Willow gets the feeling that she’s being stalked while she’s in the woods, starts running, and gets her leg caught in one of the many bear traps Ralph has set up around the area. The guy may spend time at the local establishments, but he primarily seems to live off the land. But it’s not Ralph who finds Willow in the trap. It’s a terrifying, heavy-breathing figure… the same figure that local truck driver Enos (Daniel Stewart Sherman) tells Chief Brooks that he saw in the woods right after his friend accidentally shot him in the neck during their ill-advised bear hunt in the previous episode. Except Enos doesn’t just say he saw a “figure.” He says he saw “a demon.” Of course, we all know it was Jason Voorhees.
Sure enough, there are a bunch of doped-up hippies working out at the campground. Harmony (Manon Gage), Stella Blue (Lark White), Gabe (Philip Themio Stoddard), Rhiannon (April Consalo), Plato (Nate Kelderman), Shutterbug (Drew Scheid, who was previously killed by Michael Myers in the 2018 Halloween), and Space Ghost (Albert DiCesare) are helping fix up the place, although their main focus is painting some hippie imagery on a barn. To the surprise of John Christy, Pam also stops by and offers to return to her job as the camp cook, one year after her son drowned at the camp. We get the impression that the presence of Grace is the reason Pam has decided to come back. She really wants to take Jason’s friend under her wing – and clearly doesn’t like it when Harmony takes an interest in Grace and invites her to join the barn-painting efforts.
Brooks and Officer Dorf (Cameron Scoggins) trudge out into the woods in search of the bear cave – and when they locate the cave, they also find more human remains inside. A broken piece of scissors was found in the bear-chewed pelvis they found in the woods in a previous episode, and the remains in the cave has a wound to the head that couldn’t have been dealt by a bear. The martial arts movie enthusiast Dorf suggests it may have been caused by a katana… and when they see a boot print outside the cave, Ralph becomes the main murder suspect as far as Dorf is concerned. Brooks isn’t convinced. Not even after they have a tense interaction with Ralph at his cabin in the woods.
Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has said that every character in Crystal Lake is living in a different genre in their own minds. Pam is in a tragic drama. Grace is in a coming-of-age Afterschool Special. At some point, all of the characters enter a horror movie. At this point, a character who is firmly living in the conspiracy thriller genre is Levon Brooks’ journalist sister Briana (Devin Kessler), who is helping her brother out in his bear-chewed corpse investigation. That has led them to a non-existent company called Subsun Solutions, and Briana has managed to deduce that Subsun had something to do with a chemical company called the Bellflower Corporation – a massive business that’s involved with the military, manufacturing, and “make half the shit in your kitchen.” Legal documents reveal that a lawyer working for Bellflower is named Noah Feldman, a nod to Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter actor Corey Feldman. Subsun is a shell company, dealing with things Bellflower doesn’t want the public to know about. This could be the story she can build her career on.
Brooks joins his sister in conspiracy thriller world for a scene where he heads back to Newark to get some information from a former co-worker in the police force there. This co-worker reveals the identity of one of the men whose corpse has become bear chow in Crystal Lake – and also that Brooks has a reputation of being a dirty cop in Newark.
High schooler Barry (Phoenix Parnevik) probably wishes he was living in a porno. He’s excited for summer because he and his girlfriend Claudette (Danielle Kotch) are going to be working as camp counselors again, and he figures Claudette will let loose now that school is out. She hasn’t been putting out lately, but he’s prepared for when she changes her mind: he has a copy of The Joy of Sex, and he wants to try out new positions. Unfortunately for him, Claudette has been talking to her pastor – and while we hear some very questionable things about this pastor, he has convinced her that she needs to stop committing sins of the flesh until marriage.
Claudette is also inspired to try to bury the hatchet with Grace, after they had some tough run-ins with each other during the school year. Grace isn’t having it. “Be happy Jesus forgives you, ‘cause I sure as hell don’t.”
Grace has the opposite feeling toward the hippie folks. She falls fast and hard for their lifestyle… and also partakes in some of their booze. When Harmony suggests conducting a séance so they can contact the spirit of Grace’s dead mother, the kid goes for it completely.
Dorf has managed to score a date with local cougar Rita’s (Joy Suprano), but she insisted that it be a double date, so he talked Brooks into joining them on the date with Pam. It doesn’t go well for anybody. When Pam hears about the latest corpse discovery in the woods, she gets freaked out and ends the night early, to the disappointment of Brooks. Dorf does make it to Rita’s bed, but can’t perform well on her waterbed and has to leave in humiliation. That humiliation drives him to go out to Ralph’s and find proof that the man is the murderer he believes him to be.
Pam returns to Camp Crystal Lake (where Jason is watching her from the darkness) just in time to have the spirit of Grace’s mom, speaking through Harmony, go off on her and nearly reveal that she murdered the woman. And out at Ralph’s, Dorf discovers that there isn’t just animal meat hanging up in one of Ralph’s sheds. There’s also the skinned corpse of a hippie girl. Willow.
Never before in Friday the 13th history has Jason skinned a corpse like this, but apparently he has been learning some things by watching Ralph deal with the animals he traps – and in this episode of Crystal Lake, he has scored his first-ever kill.
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