Drama
9-1-1: Nashville
This ‘9-1-1’ spin-off offers more of the same dramatized, network TV budget thrills that audiences surely have come to expect by now—but with a violent twist.
Jason Voorhees’ mom, Pamela, is just a bit unstable.
If you’re familiar with the Friday the 13th franchise, you probably know that. Turns out the hockey mask-wearing murderer with a penchant for slashing open promiscuous summer-camp counselors wasn’t the original Crystal Lake killer at all.
(Now, maybe that’s a bit of a spoiler, but the first movie came out almost 50 years ago in 1980, so I’m not feeling too bad about it. Plus, if you’re watching Peacock’s newly released Crystal Lake, you’re going to figure it out anyway.)
It’s the early 1970s, and Camp Crystal Lake is hosting a whole slew of campers for the summer. Pamela works at the camp as cook, which allows her to keep an eye on her son, Jason, who attends the camp during the day.
Jason isn’t like the other kids: He was born with several birth defects, and he draws the stares and whispers of many other campers. But also, at any moment, Jason could have a seizure-like episode, throwing him to the floor and causing him to foam at the mouth as his little body shakes uncontrollably.
However, Pam is a nice lady, and Jason is a sweet kid, so the residents of Crystal Lake have welcomed the Voorhees into their sphere with welcome arms.
Unfortunately, tragedy strikes when Jason swims into the deep parts of the lake to retrieve a wayward ball.
Pamela and the camp’s director, Mr. Christy, dive into the water to rescue Jason, but they’re too late. The little boy sinks beneath surface, likely dragged down by a current, and his body is never recovered.
Nine months later, Pamela is still reeling from her son’s supposed death. Because they were unable to locate his remains, she hasn’t been able to find closure. In fact, she’s not even convinced Jason really is dead. And when secrets surrounding the tragedy begin to come out, Pamela becomes increasingly unhinged.
For starters, although Jason’s drowning was certainly an accident, it was also a preventable one: The counselors who should have been watching over the boy were too busy shacking up together in a shed when the horrific event took place. And boy oh boy does that just burn Pam’s biscuits.
To make matters worse, Mr. and Mrs. Christy plan to reopen Camp Crystal Lake on schedule. Pamela begs them to keep it closed for just one summer—to not disturb the waters until they can be searched one last time for her little boy’s remains—but there’s nothing Mr. Christy can do. He and his wife need the income that the camp provides, and even one summer could force them to shut down the camp forever.
Pamela also learns that there are people looking for her—people who call her Mrs. Wittering instead of Mrs. Voorhees; people who, like Pamela, aren’t entirely convinced that Jason is dead. And people who will definitely turn up dead if they don’t leave poor Pam alone.
And then there’s the mysterious figure stalking the woods around the lake. Blink and you’ll miss him, but perhaps he’s the one responsible for the bodies that keep piling up. Well, the ones that Pamela isn’t responsible for, at least.
Oh yes, the horrors of Crystal Lake began long before Friday the 13th.
Slasher horror flicks were all the rage in the ’80s. Between Michael Myers of the Halloween franchise, Freddy Krueger of the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies and, of course, Jason and the Friday the 13th flicks, the decade drained every drop of synthetic blood that Hollywood had to offer.
Crystal Lake remains true to those origins. In fact, the very first episode of this Peacock series opens with Pamela positively drenched in the sticky red stuff. And before the episode’s end, viewers will see exactly how she found herself in that unfortunate state.
It seems that the creators of Crystal Lake wanted to expand on the grieving-mother premise delivered in the show’s origin material. Pamela isn’t just trying to teach some randy teenagers a lesson about abandoning their duties for a roll in the hay: She’s become completely unhinged, attacking anyone who might harm a child or expose her deepest, darkest secrets.
Speaking of those secrets, this miniseries also gives some background on the seemingly supernatural abilities that Jason possesses in the originating franchise. As presented here, they aren’t supernatural at all. Rather, when Pamela was pregnant with Jason, she almost had a miscarriage. Jason survived, but only because Pamela underwent some experimental treatments. From that moment on, the boy became a guinea pig of sorts for a pharmaceutical company—which may explain why Pamela refuses to believe that her child is dead.
While that revelation may give viewers a new reason to indulge in this franchise, the same cannot be said for Crystal Lake’s content concerns.
This is a really foul show. Between all the bloodshed I already mentioned, every episode is imbued with a bucketload of foul language too. We see depictions of the sex-crazed teenage counselors going at it—and at least one of their young camping charges sees this intercourse through a window. (Adults have premarital sex, too.) Several other counselors give alcohol and drugs to a young girl who wanders into their campsite. That same little girl engages in self-harm, and we witness an adult take her own life after giving birth to a stillborn baby.
If you’re thinking, whoa, well, my sentiments exactly.
Love for the acting chops of Linda Cardellini (who convincingly captures the increasing derangement of Pamela Voorhees) is not enough to justify Crystal Lake’s own deranged content. And frankly, maybe it’s time for this franchise—and Jason himself—to finally rest in peace.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Jason Voorhees tragically drowns in the lake at Camp Crystal Lake. Nine months later, his mother, Pamela, continues searching for proof of his death.
A woman gets knocked and thrown around quite a bit when two men attempt to subdue her with some sort of drug in a syringe. She fights back, eventually killing them both. I’ll try to spare most of the gory details, but suffice it to say that one man bleeds out after getting stabbed in the leg (the blade gets twisted before it’s yanked out) and then having his throat sliced open. The second man’s face gets sliced off with a machete, exposing muscle tissue and bone. Someone cleaves the guy’s skull with the same machete thereafter.
The woman herself becomes drenched in blood during the cleanup: After removing the machete, blood gushes from the wound. The woman wraps a plastic bag around the corpse’s head to contain the flow, and it quickly fills the bag to the point of bursting—which it does, all over the woman’s face. Later on, the woman removes a tooth that had become embedded in her knuckle during the scuffle.
Jason screams for his mother when he begins drowning. Pamela takes off running for the lake. She and Mr. Christy, the camp’s owner, both dive into the lake to save the boy, but they never reach him. Jason disappears beneath the surface.
A presumably dead body apparently rises up and tries to attack its killer. The killer struggles with the corpse for a moment before it falls back down. It’s unclear if the killer was hallucinating this, though: She imagines that her dead son is holding her hand, for instance, but the camera reveals this is only in her mind. Other jump scares work their way into the threatening mix. Pamela claims she can “feel” Jason’s presence lurking in the lake.
Two corpses are dragged to a bear’s cave. The bodies are naked but covered by plastic sheets. Their killer covers them with honey, tuna and berries to entice the bear. Sure enough, the bear comes out and begins tearing them apart.
We see lots of kids swimming in the lake at camp, including a teenage girl in a bikini. When she steps away from the lake to grab some supplies, her boyfriend joins her, kissing her neck and groping her. The pair begin to make out as a prelude to sex, which we eventually see a partial view of when one of the campers spots them through a dirty window. Elsewhere, a woman reads out loud a graphic scene from an erotic novel involving urination. (She omits a profanity describing the man’s genitals.) We see a woman sitting in a bathtub from the shoulders up.
Someone jokes about drinking alcohol. We see a woman drinking a bottle of beer.
Crystal Lake’s chief of police is African American. When his sister comes to visit, she chides that he is trying to forget his heritage, and she laments the struggles she’s faced at work as Black woman.
A man with severe PTSD sets bear traps in the woods near the camp. He seems to have some serious mental health problems, and someone reminds him that he’s not allowed on the campgrounds due to those problems. We see evidence of Pamela’s grief through her behavior: She isolates herself from the townsfolk; she screams at some swimmers to get out of the lake; she lays in Jason’s bed, snuggling a pillow in his place.
Jason was born with several birth defects that deformed the shape of his head. He’s mocked by many of his peers for his appearance, and he asks his mother why he was born this way. In a flashback, Jason falls to the floor and has a seizure, foaming at the mouth as his mother tries to administer medication. A man is abhorrently rude to Pamela after Jason’s death, making unkind remarks about the boy’s physical maladies.
A bully purposely hits Jason in the face with a volleyball. When a girl comes to Jason’s defense, throwing the ball into the deep parts of the lake, the same bully calls her an “idiot” and threatens to get her kicked out of camp. Two of the camp’s counselors say they hate kids.
Jason and Pamela clearly love each other, and Pamela tries to give her son as normal a childhood as she can. When a rattlesnake finds its way into the camp’s kitchen, Pamela seems to consider killing it, but she captures the serpent in a pot and releases it in the woods away from the campgrounds.
Jason and Pamela are connected to a pharmaceutical project called “Argonaut,” which is likely a reference to Jason and the Argo of Greek mythology. A teen girl says that if she wasn’t a camp counselor, her mom would make her work at their church over the summer.
There’s a handful of uses of the f-word and more than double that of the s-word. Other profanities include “a–,” “b–ch” and “h—.” Jesus’ and God’s names are both abused twice, the latter paired with “d–mit.”
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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