Crystal Lake review: Linda Cardellini's Pamela Voorhees

Crystal Lake had to explain Jason, and by the end of its eight episodes I understood exactly why. I'm giving the season a 9 out of 10. It's carried by a lead performance that makes you follow a woman you know you shouldn't, a camp full of people who get lives before they become references, and a show that keeps the Friday the 13th DNA without waving it in your face.

Crystal Lake, the Peacock series starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, has all eight episodes of season one available now. Everything below contains spoilers for the full season, ending included.

A horror skeptic and a Friday the 13th superfan both loved Crystal Lake

Me and horror don't generally go together. I'm not a horror fan by any stretch of the imagination. But apparently, give me several shades of trauma dressed as a slasher, and suddenly I want to talk about everybody's emotional damage. That probably explains a few things about me, but this is about the show.

Grandpa sat through it with me. He's a big Friday the 13th fan who revisits that first movie more than is probably healthy. At this point, I feel like he should be getting mail at the camp. So I'm sitting there going, okay, make me care about these people, and beside me is somebody who has essentially been preparing for this for decades.

He loved it too, and that says something. He walked in with a completely different relationship to this franchise than I have, with all that history behind him. I'm not usually a horror person. It worked on both of us.

Crystal Lake opens with Pamela Voorhees in the water, reaching for Jason

For anyone who needs the background: in the 1980 Friday the 13th, the killer is Jason's mother, Pamela Voorhees, getting revenge for the boy who drowned at the camp. Crystal Lake is her story before any of that.

The show opens with Pam trying to get to Jason in the lake. It puts you there with her, trying to reach him, hearing her scream his name. That gives the whole thing a very different weight. There's the famous history of what happened at this camp, and then there's a mother in the water who can't get her child back. You know where this is going. Even I know where this is going.

Linda Cardellini's Pam Voorhees is why you keep following her

Linda Cardellini is a star as a character actress. Keep letting this woman push her envelope and keep giving her room to do things like this, because she plays Pam just right. There's enough humanity that you can follow her, and enough wrongness that you start to question why you're still following her. You almost understand the turns she makes. Almost.

At the end of the first episode, there's a moment with the fireworks where she thinks she's holding Jason's hand, and then you see she's standing there, reaching into nothing. After all the blood and insanity of that episode, there's this woman with her hand out, because some part of her is still with her son. That's the stuff that gets under my skin.

I think the comparison for me is probably Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black. What Maslany did for that series, Cardellini does for this one. She's such a huge part of why you believe the world in front of you. Whatever else is happening around her, your eyes are on her, and you want to see what she does with the next moment.

The show also gives you small pieces of a person. Pam takes a snake out of the kitchen and lets it go. It's a little bit of her dealing with a living thing gently, knowing the places this series is going to take her. Give me those pieces. They matter when you're asking me to follow somebody this far.

Barry, Claudette and Ralph get lives before they become references

Then there's everybody around her. The way the show handles the counselors, their backstories and their connections to the people from the 1980 movie, I think, was exceptional. Barry and Claudette especially, and then bringing it around to that boathouse sequence.

Giving people some life before you arrive at an image that already exists in the franchise adds weight, I think, to something that could have been a simple reference. And that's on purpose. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has said the show recreates scenes from the movies directly. The difference is that by the time you get to the shot, you know the people in it.

Ralph gets a history as a veteran with PTSD. It's another shade of trauma, another person carrying something around while everybody else decides what kind of person he is. Apparently I came to Crystal Lake to think about how badly people understand each other. Fun little trip to camp, very relaxing.

Why Crystal Lake had to explain Jason when the movies never did

So why does all that work here when the movies never bothered? Putting my producer hat on, I think the movies have always depended on your lack of information. Part of their resolution is that you get just enough to go, okay, I get it, and then they're already setting up the next one.

This is too big a story for that. A series has to give you more. You have to see the relationships, how Pam crosses paths with everybody in that town, and her motivations in ways the movies never really could.

There's also a reason this had to be her story. Victor Miller wrote the 1980 movie, and he went to court and won back the rights to that screenplay. Only that one: not the sequels, not the hockey mask. So Crystal Lake could only be built from the movie where the mother is the killer. Miller never liked what the sequels did to Jason. He called that version a "stock villain." To him, that boy was a victim, and the villain he wrote was the mother. She's who this show is about. Miller died in August at 86, and he's an executive producer on this. His last credit is the story he actually wrote.

Everybody's arguing about whether they should have explained Jason. The real question is whether they ever had a choice, and they didn't. So the show goes back to her earlier life, to what existed before the camp and before this version of Pam. I appreciate that. Grief lands on top of things that were already broken. People don't arrive at the worst moment of their lives as blank slates.

That's what I mean by trauma dressed as a slasher. My brain keeps walking straight past the blood to poke around in everybody's history, although the blood does occasionally make that difficult. A movie can leave a killer in the dark. Eight hours can't. If you're going to ask me to follow this woman all the way to that camp, you have to show me who she was before she got there. You can't explain her without him.

Crystal Lake keeps the Friday the 13th style without waving it around

The reason it still feels like Friday the 13th is the craft. The show tries very hard to hold on to the movie's stylings: the first person POV shots and the 80s slasher language, reimagined through a modern lens. Then there's the sounder, the one you know. It immediately does its job, pulling you into the moment because it hits something in the back of your brain in a very specific way.

That sound comes from Pamela's line in the 1980 movie, "Kill her, Mommy," and the show names an episode after it. Every episode after the first is named for a sequel or a line from that first movie. I think they deployed the sounder judiciously. I never felt like the show was trying to remind me that this is a Friday the 13th piece. You're living in the reality of that world.

For all its attempts to be cinematic, and it is beautifully shot, it comes across as prestige TV. These days that isn't a dig, because prestige TV is gorgeous, but you clearly understand you're not seeing a movie. It still keeps that cinematic DNA. The color grade reminded me more, I think, of the 2009 reboot than the original, which I think had a flatter look.

Funny enough, a season of American Horror Story nailed the look: 1984, with Camp Redwood and a killer loose at a summer camp. American Horror Story: 1984 is the Orville to Crystal Lake's Star Trek: Discovery. The Orville is an homage. It loves Star Trek and nails the feel, and it gets to tell its own story because it never has to answer to the canon. Discovery moves the actual story forward, so every choice has to answer to the canon. 1984 chases the look of a 1980s summer camp slasher and stops there. Crystal Lake has to hand you off to that 1980 movie, so it answers to it.

The all at once release is the one thing I'd change

Everyone is performing well, the cinematographer knows what they're doing, the beats land, and at no point did I feel like the story was rushing me. Then all of a sudden I'd whipped through six episodes, and I purposely slowed down.

That brings me to the one thing I'd change: how they dropped it. I enjoyed being able to keep going, and I was so pulled in that week to week would probably have frustrated me. I get it, it's Halloween month. But I would have loved discussing this week to week. There are things here I wanted to sit with. Give me a week of people talking about Pam after that first episode ending, about what's real for her and what she's hiding. Instead, you have to work out where everybody is before you open your mouth. Somebody finished it, somebody's on episode three, somebody hasn't started, and I'm standing here with an entire season in my head trying to decide which sentence is safe.

I also missed the sneak peek at New York Comic Con. At the time I shrugged it off. Now I would have loved being in that room, seeing the first episode with a crowd. That one hurts a little, because it was really good.

Crystal Lake season 2 hasn't been ordered, but the season feels complete

Peacock hasn't ordered a second season yet, and Kane says he knows exactly what he would like to do with it. I'd love to see where they take this story within this universe, and I do think there are places it can go. But it also feels very complete, and that's by design. Kane has said he built the season to feel finished even if Peacock never orders another one. It does, and that's a hard thing to pull off when everybody already knows the ending.

In the final confrontation, Pam is still reaching for the child she sees, even with what's standing in front of her. That thread is still there: the need to get him back, to reach him, to somehow make all of it right. Cardellini sells it. She keeps you able to recognize the mother inside everything else Pam has become, and she makes it feel like you're seeing this person rather than somebody working hard to convince you.

I cared about the people, the connections to the original worked for me, and Grandpa was happy, which, considering his long term residential status at Camp Crystal Lake, carries some weight. Everybody who worked on this should be proud of themselves. It deserves its flowers, and it lands a 9 out of 10. It starts with her hand reaching for him in the water, and it ends with her hand still reaching.