Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane let it be known that fans should expect to see recreations of familiar Friday the 13th moments in the prequel TV series Crystal Lake, and the second episode of the show begins with one of them: grieving mother Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) rows a canoe out onto Crystal Lake. Chief of Police Levon Brooks (William Carlett), a friend of Pam’s, pulls up in his cruiser and watches her from the shore and motions for her to come in off the water, but Pam is distracted, imagining that she sees her drowned son Jason in the water, reaching for her.
Then a rotting corpse lunges up out of the lake and grabs Pam from behind – not the corpse of her son, but of one of the mysterious, threatening men she murdered in the previous episode. It’s not shot-for-shot, but it is a recreation of the final jump scare from the original Friday the 13th. And, of course, it’s a nightmare.
Like the first episode, this one was directed by Michael Lennox from a teleplay by Kane, and in this one we find that not only is Pam overcome by grief due to the loss of her son, but she’s also haunted by the violent things she had to do in the previous episode, and she’s worried that more people who know about her secret history will be coming after her. Wherever she’s from, she has a contact there who assures her that nobody has mentioned her name in years, but that doesn’t do much to calm her down.
Pam isn’t the only character who’s haunted in this episode. Jason’s 13-year-old friend Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom) is haunted by something she saw something at Camp Crystal Lake last summer: teen counselor Claudette (Danielle Kotch) and her boyfriend Barry (Phoenix Parnevik) having sex in a shed while the unsupervised Jason was drowning. At school, Grace crosses paths with both Claudette, who she tries to avoid, and with Pam, who works in the school cafeteria. When Grace observes and mimics the behavior of a pair of older girls, a bit of a coming-of-age story starts to enter the picture.
But the focus here is still firmly on Pam. Brooks invited her to a town event in the previous episode in an attempt to lift her spirits, and in this episode he invites her to the local bowling alley. That’s where she has an interaction with local cougar Rita (Joy Suprano) that gets the events of this episode really rolling.
Although we had always been told that Jason Voorhees drowned in 1957, Crystal Lake moves the timeline up to the early ‘70s, and Kane said that he did so because he wanted to “touch on all the pop-culture artifacts that were tangential to the America from which these movies were born.” One thing that was going on at that time was the Human Potential Movement, which led to things like Erhard Seminars Training, which was founded by Werner Erhard in 1971 that offered a two-weekend course meant to "transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself." That’s the obvious inspiration for a seminar Rita invites Pam to called The Experience, founded and hosted by a man called Wilhelm Richter (Nathan Darrow). Held at a hotel called the Packanack Lodge (a nod to the setting of Friday the 13th Part 2), this self-help seminar takes up a large chunk of the episode’s running time… and, as a result, this is one of my least favorite episodes of this season of Crystal Lake. I wasn’t very interested in what happens at this seminar, and I doubt many other Friday the 13th fans will be. It comes off like “bottle episode” filler.
At least there are more interesting things taking place in the town of Crystal Lake. A pair of hippies with a dog named Frodo find some human remains out in the woods and notify the authorities. Brooks investigates, with the help of dimwitted but enthusiastic officer Dorf (Cameron Scoggins), and finds that this corpse has been gnawed on by a bear. We know that it’s one of the men Pam murdered and dropped off at a bear cave in the first episode, but the cops don’t. This corpse will need to be closely examined – but first, Brooks takes it home and sticks it in his refrigerator because the Medical Examiner’s office was closed.
Seeing chewed human meat in the fridge doesn’t go over well with Levon’s journalist sister Briana (Devin Kessler), who keeps visiting and hassling him over leaving his job on the police force in Newark behind to settle in a little hick town. Right now, she’s just here to convince her brother to examine that corpse himself, but she’ll have more to do as the season goes along.
But mostly in this episode we just watch Pam experience The Experience, catch the attention of Wilhelm, demonstrate her singing ability (at Wilhelm’s demand), almost have sex with the guy, and then get so upset at his behavior that she considers bashing him with her bowling ball. It’s pretty underwhelming, and I don’t think it was a good idea to fill so much of the second episode of this series with The Experience. This episode is so lackluster, I was surprised that it was actually given a public screening alongside the premiere episode.
One of the most interest moments comes when Brooks visits the isolated home of off-kilter Vietnam veteran Ralph (Nick Cordileone) to ask him about bear activity in the area, since Ralph is a hunter who has bear traps set up throughout the forest, and if he has seen any strangers around lately. Ralph drops the line, “There’s worse things in these woods than bears,” which is quite an intriguing thing to say in a Friday the 13th story…
We get a hint of what Ralph might be talking about in the final moments, when we see that teenager Steve Christy (Dan Thompson) has organized a high school party at the closed-for-the-season camp owned by his parents. An adult Steve plays a major role in the first Friday the 13th movie, and this party he set up at the camp as a teen is exactly the sort of get-together that gets disrupted by murders in the Friday the 13th franchise. Nobody dies this time around, but there is some drama when Claudette objects to the arrival of Grace, who is too young for a party like this. Grace and Claudette blame each other for what happened to Jason, and as an upset Grace leaves the camp, she angrily tosses her shoes into the woods.
When the party is crashed by a storm, Barry and Claudette start to fool around in his car – and while doing so, they make sports references, which was a nice touch because Claudette is heard saying “Barry’s out of bounds” when they’re fooling around in the opening sequence of the first Friday the 13th. They decide to bail when flashes of lightning reveal someone is lurking in the woods outside the vehicle – and this someone looks a lot like Jason, but bigger than he was when he drowned last year. Most fans would expect a Friday the 13th prequel to only be about Pamela, but Kane is bringing Jason back into the story surprisingly early…
At least, there’s a confusing glimpse of Jason here. Right before he throws one of Grace’s discarded shoes through the back window of Barry’s car. And so, by the time the credits start to roll, things have just gotten a lot more mysterious.
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