In Crystal Lake, injuries make Jason Voorhees grow bigger and stronger rather than weaken him. Episode 7 traces that ability to a new origin story: a corporation experiments on him as part of an effort to make humans capable of surviving a nuclear blast.
The explanation changes the history of his murderous mother, Pamela, too. Played by Linda Cardellini, she becomes caught up in Cold War research, moves to a company-controlled Texas town, and agrees to treatments without understanding their real purpose.
The following contains major spoilers for all of Crystal Lake.
In his conversation with Polygon, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane separates the idea of a lab-created child from a child who later undergoes experiments. “He’s not a science experiment,” he says. “He was a real baby who was holding on for dear life inside Pam.” Jason isn’t an ordinary boy, but Kane disputes the description of him as a government supersoldier.
An extended flashback in episode 7 lays out that past against the Cold War’s threat of mutually assured destruction. David Cronenberg, Rosemary’s Baby, and the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk all figure among its influences. That mix gives viewers plenty to consider, though it could leave them with as many questions as answers.
The episode begins with a young, pregnant Pamela being told by a doctor that she’s having a miscarriage. The father of her child, played by Hamish Linklater, arranges a second opinion through his sales work for a large conglomerate. It reveals that the fetus is alive, though only just. To save the pregnancy, Pamela agrees to experimental treatment and relocates from New York to a suburban town in Texas under the company’s control.
Jason is born successfully. As the years pass, however, he keeps returning to the laboratory for treatments. Pamela eventually discovers him in chains inside a secret facility and uncovers what’s been done to him. After killing the doctor, she flees her husband, who has been directly involved in the experiments.
For Kane, Pamela’s desperation draws on fertility difficulties within his own family. “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 sees the pharmaceutical research of that era as a basis for the premise’s plausibility. “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.” His comments explain the reasoning behind the fiction; they don’t establish that an experiment like Jason’s actually occurred.
The laboratory revelation and why Kane changed canon
Speculation about an MKUltra-style government operation began before the episode’s release, when the first trailer showed a lab door bearing the name “Argonaut.” On Instagram, Kane attempted to dampen those theories with an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mister Freeze and the caption “Everybody Chill!”
His Sept. 14 post read: “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!”
As Polygon sees it, Kane wasn’t wholly truthful. Although fans misidentified the organization, they were right to suspect a laboratory’s involvement. It’s the corporate experiment that accounts for Jason’s invulnerability and the unusual effects of physical injury on him.
The revisions also alter the franchise’s underlying timeline. Instead of dying in 1957, Jason dies in 1971, with a shorter interval before the subsequent summer camp murders. When Polygon asks about the shifts, Kane sounds somewhat defensive: “I think the mythology is a little wonky as it is in terms of the timeline.”
[IMAGE:static0.polygonimages.com]Where 1980’s Friday the 13th saved Jason’s appearance for a final-scene shock, Crystal Lake aims to account for his past. Polygon considers angry fans’ criticism of the canon changes almost inevitable. Still, it notes that Friday the 13th has never had especially clear continuity, arguing that imposing a logical chronology on it isn’t a particularly productive exercise.
Kane doesn’t much care about keeping every established detail intact. In his view, an obsession with lore misses what makes the movies work. That position also happens to give him more room to tell the story he wants, though Polygon concedes there may be merit to his argument.
“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.”
He adds: “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.”
Even so, he stresses that he didn’t make the revisions lightly. “I am the original fan of these movies,” Kane 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.”
The other twist in Pamela Voorhees’ story
Horror fans have spent years debating what lies behind Pamela’s transformation into a serial killer. Betsy Palmer’s unsettling delivery of “Kill her, mommy!” in Friday the 13th left room for two interpretations: Jason could be possessing his mother from beyond the grave, or her grief could have pushed her into madness.
[IMAGE:static0.polygonimages.com voorhees]Crystal Lake appears intent on answering that question. Early in episode 7, Pamela is so exhausted that she almost drowns her infant son. Jason’s survival supplies the first indication of his powers. Afterward, the doctor treating him prescribes strong antidepressants to keep Pamela calm.
When she later takes Jason from the lab, the doctor warns that she has developed a dependence on the drugs. Withdrawal, he says, could leave her with permanent brain damage if she stops taking them. Pamela escapes despite the warning. In Polygon’s reading, her behavior throughout the show reflects a serious mental health disorder as well as mourning for her son.
“Obviously there’s the grief aspect of it,” Kane says. “That’s real, and that plays into the changing of her brain chemistry.” He further cites going off SSRIs or other medications abruptly as a potential cause of changes in brain chemistry. This is how he explains Pamela’s story, although Crystal Lake doesn’t identify her medication.
Calling the 1960s a “much more experimental” period for such treatment, Kane says he can’t specify what Pamela received. “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.
To him, those few words about withdrawal do more than establish a risk Pamela accepts while fleeing. They’re central to understanding her character, connecting the flashback’s protective mother with the murderer audiences meet in the first film.
“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.”
Polygon argues that the decision has a benefit and a drawback. It gives Pamela an interesting new interpretation, but the answer may also weaken one of horror cinema’s greatest moments. Rather than leaving viewers to weigh possession against all-consuming grief, the series provides a particular explanation tied to medication and withdrawal.
Kane recognizes the criticism, but stands by his choice. “Maybe it’s a little too much explanation,” he says, “but too fucking bad.”
