Well, after forty-six years of Friday The 13th, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m referring to the fact that for the majority of that time, the origin of Jason Voorhees has been either deliberately vague, or fairly jumbled with the franchise either giving conflicting explanations as to what Jason actually is. To some, he’s just a hulking lunatic with impressive resilience, to others he has Wolverine-style regenerative powers, and to others still, Jason is a supernatural engine of destruction (we’ll leave out the demon possession from Jason Goes To Hell for now), but for all these years, no one’s tried to fully iron our all these threads and assumptions into an actual cohesive explanation – until now.
Obviously, giving Jason Voorhees a scientific explanation for his ability to shrug off death itself is going to be a risky prospect – origin stories tend to dilute how effective horror villains can be – but can the good folks behind Crystal Lake manage to pull off a backstory that’s been debated for decades?
We head back to New York in 1959 as pregnant singer, Pamela Scott, launches into a TV performance that ultimately ends in near tragedy. After profusely bleeding mid-song, she’s told by doctors that she’s lost the baby; however her boyfriend, Elias Wittering, works for Bellflower and the chemical company steps in and suggests that Pamela’s pregnancy can be saved. Marrying Elias and moving to Houston to be closer to Bellflower’s medical facility, Pam finds herself and her husband put up in luxury company housing, but while the clinical trials are certainly traumatic (it involves a big fucking needle), it seems that project Argonaut has successfully saved the unborn Jason.
However, here’s where things go south. Firstly, after a fellow mother-to-be delivers a stillborn baby, she aggressively takes her own life while a horrified Pamela watches, and when Jason is finally born, we find that he has multiple birth defects. Worst of all, an exhausted Pam dozes off while giving Jason a bath causing him to drown – but due to whatever scientific mojo Argonaut has performed, the baby suddenly revives on his own, clueing us in to his regenerative properties. From here, Jason is periodically taken away for years of research while Pam is doped up on mood stabilisers, but after realising that Argonaut’s increasingly harsh experiments are harming her child, Pam decides to try and smuggle herself and her son away from Bellflower.
During a company event we find out that Argonaut is performing experiments in order to make humans resilient to nuclear fallout, and Pamela makes her move. Discovering that Jason is only the latest in a long line of malformed babies deformed by Bellflower’s genetic tinkering, mother and son flee on a path that’ll eventually lead them to Camp Crystal Lake and their destiny.
The shift from early 70s slasher drama, to late fifties set body horror conspiracy thriller was always going to be a bit of a jarring. After spending six episodes in the earthy greens and browns of Crystal Lake, the switch to the bright primary colours of 50s fashions and suburban designs is fairly jarring and at times even feels strangely like we’ve wandered into an episode of American Horror Story. However, while the time jump was always going to something of a stylistic shock, it’s obviously going to be the explanation behind Jason’s abilities that was always going to draw the most attention. I have to say, back in the day when the Friday The 13th franchise was in full swing, if I had to guess a backstory for Jason’s unkillable nature, I don’t think I would have come up with pre-birth experiments to make humans tougher in order to withstand a nuclear blast. Basically making Jason as unkillable as a cockroach, he proves to be Argonaut’s first true success when he manages to bounce back from that accidental downing.
While longtime, hardcore Jason fans may recoil from the show suddenly throwing in creepy experiments, cockroach comparisons and mutant babies, the show has to offer some sort of reasoning behind the fact that Jason can shrug off any kind of injury. Obviously, Crystal Lake is now hip-deep in its own lore now, so that doesn’t mean that you have to put this particular origin onto the franchise as a whole, however, for those that are skeptical, I’d also like to remind you that Jason was once roused from death by a bolt of lightning, so some genetic fuckery actually makes a fair amount of sense when you look at the bigger picture. But beyond Jason finally getting a clear clarification that injuries make him stronger, we also get a deeper look into Pam’s past too.
Making her a singer is a nice nod to the Broadway work of original Pamela actress, Betsy Palmer, and we also finally get to meet Jason’s father, Elias, who has been mentioned in previous forms of Friday The 13th media, like tie-in novels of the original films, but never actually seen on screen before. It’s something of a boon that he’s being played by Hamish Linklater as an amoral ladder climber who will happily sell out his wife and child in order scale the ranks of his company as it nicely fits alongside his other roles as a corrupted priest in Midnight Mass and a soul selling town founder on Widow’s Bay who also has an aversion to dying. However, once again, it’s Linda Cardellini who guides us through this surreal, primary colour nightmare as various men conspire to separate her from her beloved child. It’s a canny choice to have Jason revive from a drowing as a baby as it proves to be both deeply disturbing and cements Pamela’s later responsibilities as a mother who will do literally anything for her child.
There’s also a hint that the treatment given to an unborn Jason has effected Pamela’s sanity too due to the unstable nature of the other wife who kills herself. However, after witnessing the house of horrors that dwells within the bowels of Argonaut, I’d be surprised if Pam didn’t drill the face out of that offending doctor. Riffing somewhere between The Brood and that sequence from Alien Resurrection where Ripley discovers all the previous, failed experiments of her, Crystal Lake certainly doesn’t hold back from the body horror on show. One child in an iron lung has his mouth sewn up, another seems utterly feral and we even get a prosession of little twisted babies who weakly still show signs of life. Jason’s brand new origin may not be what some fans envisioned, but while keeping details vague may work in a film series, they had to come up with something to fill out a television reboot – and if Jason is a childhood experiment in the creation of an unkillable human, then so be it. It’s as good as explanation as any.
Jason finally gets a clear beginning (a new beginning, technically) and considering how outlandish some of hints are the franchise has offered up in the past, having a unscrupulous corporation designing him to have the durability of a cockroach isn’t that bad a take. Still, with only one more episode left to go, it isn’t the Voorhees’ past that’s in question now – it’s their future.
Where to watch Crystal Lake – Season 1, Episode 7: Friday…: