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After a gap of 17, Jason-less years (not counting video games, comics and a cameo appearance in Ready Player One), we find Crystal Lake coming to an end all too soon. It’s been something of an uneven journey, I’ll grant you, and that unfeasibly strong first episode was soon backed up by a couple of installments that struggled to keep up the pace, but much like a slasher flick itself, once we got to the second half of the season, business picked up substantially. But now that a hippie massacre and a long awaited origin story now resides in our rearview, can Crystal Lake bring home that big finish that we all require?
With a conspiracy about to break, Pamela’s sanity hanging in the balance and a bag-headed Jason waiting in the wings, can the show give us a satisfying close, while still adhering to basic F13 lore – or will Voorhees purists choke in indignation that the show had decided to take yet more, understandable, liberties?
After relating her ridiculously traumatic past to both Levon and Briana, Pamela is further panicked when she discovers that her husband and Bellflower lickspittle, Elias, is in town looking for her with a bunch of heavies in tow. However, despite wanting to flee once more, Levon disagrees and suggests that if he takes her in legally, she can blow the lid of the Bellflower conspiracy and expose all those horrific experiments on pregnant women and malformed babies. Taking her to the police station, Levon is unaware that Elias is already in town and has gotten all the information he needs, and inevitably, the two groups finally converge.
Outnumbered five guns to one, it seems that Levon’s dedication to justice has finally walked him into a hopeless situation, but after a ninja-star wielding Officer Dorfman somehow manages to even the odds (he’ll be eating out on that story for years), chaos erupts that ends with half of the Bellflower goons killed, Levon gutshot and Elias stabbed in the back by his raging wife. However, that doesn’t stop her husband making off with Pamela in a getaway car, but as they speed off out of town, Elias’ desire to see what his genetically altered son has become is granted when a bag-headed figure in the road causes the vehicle to crash.
Scattering into the woods, Jason soon makes short work of those surviving goons and as Pamela flees to his shack, all three members of the Wittering family come together for one final reunion. But despite Elias’ plans to take Jason back to Project Argonaut and “give him purpose”, his son manages to drop a sizable spanner in the works when he crushes his father’s skull Part III style. But with daddy dead, will Jason’s rage continue when he faces his loving mother? And even if it doesn’t, what will this latest revelation do to her already fragile mental state?
There’s a sense with “The Final Chapter”, that showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has not only had a tremendous amount of fun recreating and reshaping the world of Friday The 13th, but he’s itching to continue if he gets the green light from Peacock. Let’s not forget that Kane has already had considerable success with television continuations of period-set horror icons thanks to his work on It: Welcome To Derry, and the same surprising amount of love and care expended on that show can also be felt within the continuity-altering DNA of Crystal Lake. But with the big flashback episode out of the way, that finally lifted the curtain behind Jason’s abilities, it’s time to bring this first season to a close. However, despite murdered hippies, a self-help seminar and an unkillable maniac living in the woods, it’s Bellflower that ultimately takes the lead as Crystal Lake wraps up the involvement of the amoral company.
To be fair, it does so at the expense of a couple of dangling story threads. The only survivor of that earlier hippy massacre, Harmony, is still in the wind and knows that it’s Pamela who is the real culprit; we never technically found out if it was Jason who framed Crazy Ralph for the murder of Willow; and where the hell is Grace in all of this? However, the show seems hopeful that a second season could help iron all this out and instead dedicates itself almost fully focusing on letting the Bellflower conspiracy play itself out. This proves to be something of a fun choice, as it let’s Hamish Linklater’s Elias indulge in some spiteful villainy, Levon expand on his cool, disgraced hero, schhtick, and even gives Dorf a moment to shine when he finally gets his shuriken technique right and flings one right into the eyeball of one of the Bellflower goons. If you’d told me twenty years ago that one of the biggest air-punch moments in a Friday The 13th TV series involves Officer Dorfman and an item of ninja weaponry, I’d have laughed in your face, but here we are.
However, as fun as the Mexican standoff is, what we’re really waiting for is the big reunion between the father, mother and son who have set this entire adventure in motion.
Well, that doesn’t disappoint either and it also drops in a few more hints about Jason’s physiology as it goes. Remember, it’s only been around 9 months since Jason drowned and as we now know that trauma makes him bigger and stronger, he’s still got the mind of a traumatised 11 year old despite looking far older and much more imposing. Seeing him wearing a version of the sack-head look from Part 2 is still an absolute thrill, but despite his alarming look, Elias still thinks he’s going to be able to reason with his boy and talk him into coming back to Bellflower. However, instead of retorting with a simple no, Jason takes a far more definitive approach and crushes his father’s head with his bare hands – and watching the patriarch’s cranium crunch, complete with popping eyeball, proves to be deeply rewarding. However, the real ending here is the face to face between Jason and his mother, and once again, we find the show straining against established – or at least rumoured – lore to potentially set up further shenanigans. At first, it looks like Jason is going to be as enraged at his mother as he was by his father (possibly due to brain damage from his drowing), but her pleas of love causes him to pause before Ralph suddenly arrives to put a bullet in him. Obviously Jason escapes, but the F13 lore proves once again to be as durable as Jason himself. With Pam now aware that her son his alive, it seems like it contradicts the original movie, but if we pivot to view the ending to mean that the malevolent mother goes on to continue her murderous ways to protect the woods that now “belong” to her and her son in order keep his existence a secret, it still kinda works.
While the timeline of Crystal Lake understandably doesn’t extend so far to include Pam’s iconic decapitation, or even a sniff of a hokey mask, the fact that the show managed to get Jason back on the screen while intelligently massaging the lore is something of a triumph. Anyone complaining about those changes would do well to remember that this is a franchise that’s rarely been treated so well by writers that have been willing to add way more depth to all that slicing and dicing. Let’s hope “The Final Chapter” is no more final than every other final chapter that’s ever occured within the world of Friday The 13th, and season two rises from the titular lake sooner rather than later.
Jason Lives.
