I’ll admit I came out of the gate pretty strong for Crystal Lake’s first episode – but can you blame me? After such a long gap between projects (not discounting the ill-fated online game and all that Jason Universe stuff), the Friday The 13th origin story went all-in with it’s first installment, giving us new perspectives on the lore and rapid-fire easter eggs which made the fan in me squeal like Leatherface with delight. However, despite the fact that the cannily titled “Part II” (the majority of the episode titles wittily riff on F13 sequels) continues this thread of tipping it’s hockey mask to the history of the franchise, it’s time for Crystal Lake to restrain its more nostalgic leanings and actually start acting as a real show.
However, the result gives us a second episode that frustratingly brings the momentum of the show to a screeching halt. You see, while all the classic aspects of Friday The 13th are still present, we have to deliver all the character development needed to sustain eight whole episodes.
Complaints about actual character development in a Friday The 13th film? What’s gotten into me?
After messily disposing of the two mysterious fixers who came to make her disappear due to her shadowy past, the sanity of Pamela Voorhees seems to be balancing on a knife edge. The act of slaughtering two men and feeding their corpses to a bear has her seeing her drowned son, Jason, and while she struggles to find some sort of equilibrium within her own sanity, she gets an invitation from sympathetic, yet highly sexed local, Rita, to visit a self-help seminar and she accepts to maybe get some insight in her own experiences.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Levon has discovered some extraordinarily managed human remains in the forest, and while there’s barely enough left of the victim to tell much of anything, we know that this tattered pulp of flesh and bone is all that’s left of one of Pamela’s two victims. But as Levon stores the “body” in his fridge at home (don’t ask), former camper, Grace, is trying to use her knowledge about Jason’s accident to shame the horny teens responsible in order to join the cool kids at a party. However, Claudette counteracts her attempted blackmail with the claim that the young girl is just as responsible for Jason’s drowning as they are.
Meanwhile, back at the seminar, Pamela is rather taken aback at the host’s rather direct and heavy-handed methods. Insisting that we’d all be happier if we drop our exterior masks and let our inner selves free, Wilhelm and Pamela soon build something of a love/hate relationship as they grow quite fascinated with one another. But as their dalliance turns sexual, Pamela has something of a pertinent point – surely not all masks should be allowed to slip. But while Wilhelm finds this out the hard way, what are all these rumours about a misshapen monster lurking out in the woods of Camp Crystal Lake?
“Part II” is not what I’d call a bad episode. It’s well acted and proves to be an intriguing puzzle piece when gradually shuffling Pamela Voorhees from her role as grieving mother to someone who’ll stick an arrow through the neck of a post-coitus Kevin Bacon. The suggestion that she’s struggling against these murderous impulses is a fine subject to make the central thread of the season and if there was any doubt that Linda Cardellini was a perfect fit for Pam (there wasn’t), she dispels it all thanks to a performance that sees the woman slowly giving in to her more anti-social impulses. However, the jump of episode 1’s nostalgia blowout to an actual TV show that has to sustain various subplots proves to be so abrupt, at times it feels like we’re almost watching a different show.
It’s a bizarre experience, mainly because both “Camp Crystal” and “Part II” were directed by the same director (Michael Lennox, who amusingly also helmed every episode of Derry Girls), and despite some continuing, crowd pleasing pandering to fanboys, at times the show feels like it’s shuddered to a dead stop. While keeping a close eye on the deterioration of Pamela’s sanity is wisely the focus of the show, The inclusion of her going to a self-help seminar with Joy Suprano’s lavacious Rita just seems like a weird avenue for a Friday The 13th story to go down, even though A24 and the showrunners are understandably trying to “elevate” the material. There’s genuinely great stuff here, especially with the emotional jousting that occurs between Pamela and the over confident Wilhelm goes from animosity, to flirting, to sexual – and while the climax of this subplot doesn’t quite go where you’d think (Pamela’s plan to brain him with a bowling ball is thwarted when an other, outraged victim of his seminar beats her to it), it all feels strangely our of place compared to the very camp-based set-up.
Elsewhere, we find that the show is only getting started when it comes to building up those other plots, and as a result, the frenzied momentum of this first episode is completely lost. Obviously, as the season continues, each of these plots will pick up speed to coincide with Pam going crazier than an out-house rat, but all this business about Grace trying to blackmail Claudette, and a group of young hippies coming to town, is still too deeply into its early moments to be of much interest. Still, there’s some decent milage to be gleaned from Levon and Dorf’s flailing attempts to investigate the discovery of those mangled human remains, but other than Pam’s weird plot deviation, once again the best moments come from that shameless fan baiting.
An early nightmare sequence sees Pamela dreaming that she’s in a canoe, reaching for Jason who is floating just beneath the surface. But in an awesomely cheeky twist, it replays the infamous jump-scare ending of the original film by having one of Pam’s victims leap out of the lake behind her. Elsewhere, the reaction of Levon’s sister, Briana, to finding human remains stored in her fridge is a cute nod to Pam’s-head-in-a-fridge shock from the second movie, and they’re undoubtedly the kind of shameless, punch-the-air type of moments that raise the heart rates of die-hard fans. But as much as I genuinely adore them, they’re not enough to support an entire season, and those various sub-plots might need to pick up some slack to get us back to the giddy fun of the first episode. Still, at least we also have a misshapen being that’s lurking in the forest and attacking teens. Jason, or some other outlandish being to overcomplicate matters?
We’ll soon see, but Crystal Lake needs to step that pace up somewhat if its going to reclaim the nostalgic energy of that kick-ass, first episode, otherwise Linda Cardellini is going to have to undergo some severe back surgery from carrying the entire show. While still bristling with promise, this new iteration of the Voorhees family needs to run, rather than lope it’s way through proceedings.
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