Crystal Lake can’t 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 “The Experience.” 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’s time with “The Experience” 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, “Some of us are meant to wear masks.” The nod toward Jason’s future flair for facial coverings is about as subtle as an arrow through the throat.
And so the Voorhees’ backstory begins to take shape, eventually revealing that Jason wasn’t 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—forces Pam could not control. Her every act of annihilation—save for one, which we’ll get to—is 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’s clunky revelations also try to infuse resonance into Friday The 13th‘s hacky iconography: The lake, the eponymous date, Jason’s machete.
Oh, brother, that machete: One early beat has Pam gifting Jason the blade as a camping tool (“One day, these woods will be yours,” she says), and Jason hoists it into the air admiringly. What we’re 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.
This facile obviousness bleeds into the show’s stock characters. We have Claudette (Danielle Kotch), a born-again mean girl who wants to make amends for how she’s hurt strange, sad Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom). There’s the town’s 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’s Dorf (Cameron Scoggins), the deputy caught between his duty to his captain and his racist father. These folks are Crystal Lake‘s source of dramatic support, not a bench of victims waiting for the slaughter. Pam wouldn’t hurt most of these folks even if they posed some kind of threat to her, and that blunts Crystal Lake’s dramatic edge. Who should we fear for here, if not the supporting cast? Who is there to be afraid of, if not Pamela Voorhees?
There’s a major midseason kill sequence blocked out to mirror the opener in the first Friday—the twist is that it’s Grace, not Pam, who does the camp counselors in. She’s all whacked out on acid tabs (there’s a hippie subplot I don’t 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’s 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’t work because it makes Grace’s rampage a means of dulling Pam’s 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’s lost innocence and Pam’s inability to protect her. They embrace, as the results of their slaughter remain safely out of frame.
Can’t characters in TV shows just commit murder because they want to? By the time Grace’s big scene has passed, Pam should have zoomed well past the point of no return—earlier, she had bludgeoned Grace’s mother with a mallet—but Crystal Lake shows little interest in exploring the hideousness of her crimes, or how they’re 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’ true threat. That would be Pam’s weirdo husband, Elias (Hamish Linklater), who helms the top-secret “Project Argonaut.” Elias is a bad man: He turned their son superhuman in utero without Pam’s knowledge, and simultaneously dulled his wife with drugs, knowing that withdrawal could lead to a psychotic break. This development with Elias further handwaves Pam’s maternal wrath with ridiculous TV hyperrationale and ends just as it’s supposed to: At Jason’s hands.
At the center of Crystal Lake‘s 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’t 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’t simply want to tune in every week to see Will scold Hannibal and Hannibal scandalize Will. The characters’ relationship compelled them to.
Crystal Lake has no such pairing. Jason is taken out of the picture almost immediately. While his memory sustains Pam (and Cardellini’s performance holds the toppling enterprise aloft longer than it should), there’s no one for her to bounce off of, no foil for her to grapple with—not until the show is closing in on its finale. But that’s the least of Crystal Lake‘s sins. The worst crime it perpetrates against its iconic killer mommy is that it won’t peel back the fingernails to reveal the red-hot hate that drove Pam Voorhees to butcher a cabin’s 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.
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