Crystal Lake Ending Changes Jason Voorhees Origin Story in Friday the 13th Canon

Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane is ready for the haters. He will probably need to be. His new show, Crystal Lake, changes Jason Voorhees canon in order to give the slasher icon and his murderous mother Pamela (Linda Cardellini) a fleshed-out backstory. Riled-up Friday the 13th fans are almost guaranteed to push back.

The show reshuffles the original timeline. It moves Jason’s death up from 1957 to 1971, then compresses the time between that event and the summer camp slaughter that follows.

“I think the mythology is a little wonky as it is in terms of the timeline,” Kane says, somewhat defensively, when I bring up the shifts.

Kane isn’t too worried about how Crystal Lake tweaks or outright changes the existing canon. He argues that our modern obsession with lore misses the point of these movies, which also gives him more freedom to tell the story he wants. He may have a point.

“I bemoan a little bit like this thing that we’ve gotten into,” he says. “I grew up watching these movies in theaters and what they were about was sensation. They’re about a collective experience, a cathartic experience, with an audience full of people. It’s about taking a ride.

“But somewhere over the last 20 years, watching these slasher movies that had multiple sequels became about collecting and hoarding information. I come to these movies for character, for sensation, for the kills.”

Kane isn’t wrong. The Friday the 13th continuity has always been murky at best, and the less time spent applying logic to its timeline the better. Still, Crystal Lake‘s seventh episode contains some very specific reveals that I wanted to discuss with him. They affect both the broader Jason Voorhees lore and the story this particular show tells.

Kane was happy to dig into the details, but first he offered one more disclaimer.

“I am the original fan of these movies,” he says. “I didn’t make these changes out of whole cloth or because I don’t have a respect for the franchise. They came from a very specific place.”

There are major spoilers for all of Crystal Lake in this article.

Jason Voorhees’ new origin story, explained

The first trailer for Crystal Lake showed a mysterious laboratory door labeled “Argonaut.” Franchise fans began to speculate that Jason was some sort of MKUltra-style government experiment. In response, Kane posted a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mister Freeze on Instagram, captioned “Everybody Chill!”

The Sept. 14 post shot down most of those rumors and floated a few others:

“It’s not the CIA. He’s not a gov’t super soldier or an Eleven. He’s probably just a Chud. Or at worst a Trog. In any case, all will be known Oct. 15. Y’know, they called Copernicus a heretic at first, too. And look how that turned out!”

Kane wasn’t being entirely honest.

Episode 7 is essentially one extended flashback. It shows how Pamela gave birth to Jason and how he became the subject of a nefarious corporate experiment designed to create humans who could survive a nuclear blast. The story unfolds at the height of the Cold War and the era of mutually assured destruction. Jason is invulnerable, and physical trauma makes him grow larger and stronger at an accelerated rate.

The episode draws on influences ranging from David Cronenberg and Rosemary’s Baby to the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. There’s a lot to take in, and some viewers may finish with more questions than they started with.

It opens on a young, pregnant Pamela as she experiences a miscarriage, or so the doctor tells her. The father (Hamish Linklater) gets a second opinion through his sales job at a large conglomerate. It reveals that the fetus is still alive, but just barely. Pamela signs up for an experimental treatment to save the baby, which means moving from New York to a suburban town in Texas controlled by the company.

Pamela gives birth successfully and years go by. Jason spends much of that time undergoing treatments at the laboratory. Eventually Pamela discovers the truth and finds her boy chained up in a secret facility. She murders the doctor and flees from her husband, who has been directly involved in the experiments.

So is Jason a supersoldier? Not exactly, but he isn’t a regular kid either. For Kane, the distinction comes down to one detail.

“He’s not a science experiment,” the showrunner says. “He was a real baby who was holding on for dear life inside Pam.”

Jason’s new origin story is also deeply personal for Kane.

“Anybody who’s ever gone through those fertility issues, which my wife and I have, knows you get to a very desperate place where you’re like, ‘This is a child and it’s probably going to miscarry unless I take something to strengthen the follicles.'”

He adds that the episode is rooted in the real history of the Cold War era.

“These experiments were going on at the time,” Kane says. “Whether we’re talking about things like thalidomide, or other drugs that companies were working on for very specific purposes that ultimately showed they had other properties that were useful, and so they tilted into corporate and government contracts. It seemed realistic to me that this could happen.”

That other Pamela Voorhees twist

Horror fans have long wondered why Pamela became a serial killer. Original actor Betsy Palmer’s eerie delivery of the line “Kill her, mommy!” fed the debate. Those three words suggested either that Jason was possessing his mother from beyond the grave or that grief had pushed her over the edge.

Audiences have argued about it for decades, but Crystal Lake seems to supply an answer. Early in episode 7, an exhausted Pamela almost drowns her infant son. His miraculous survival is the first hint of his powers. The doctor treating Jason then prescribes Pamela some powerful antidepressants to calm her down.

Later, when Pamela rescues Jason from the lab, the doctor warns her that she has become dependent on those drugs. If she runs away, the withdrawal could permanently damage her brain. She takes the risk. Throughout Crystal Lake, it’s clear that Pamela isn’t just grieving her son. She’s also dealing with a serious mental health disorder.

“Obviously there’s the grief aspect of it,” Kane says. “That’s real, and that plays into the changing of her brain chemistry. But if you know anybody who’s been on SSRIs or various other things and goes off cold turkey — it really changes your brain chemistry.”

The show never specifies which medication Pamela was taking. Kane notes that the 1960s was a “much more experimental” time in that respect.

“God knows what she was on to keep her stable and quiet and gaslit while they were doing whatever they were doing to her son,” he says.

For Kane, those few lines of dialogue are crucial to understanding Pamela’s character and Crystal Lake in general.

“We wanted to explain her protectiveness with Jason,” he says. “We wanted to explain how the grief could stay with her for as long as it does. And we wanted to explain how her brain chemistry could have changed to the extent that the madness would ultimately fully take hold of her, and she would become the woman that we know from the first movie.”

The show puts an interesting new spin on Pamela Voorhees. In the process, it arguably undercuts one of the best moments in horror movie history.

“Maybe it’s a little too much explanation,” Kane says, “but too fucking bad.”

Crystal Lake is streaming now on Peacock.

Source: Polygon