Crystal Lake Finally Introduces a Key Missing Piece of Jason Voorhees' History

The new Crystal Lake series both rewrites and adds to Friday the 13th, including one of the key missing elements in Jason Voorhees' backstory.

Full spoilers follow for the first season of Crystal Lake, available now on Peacock.

After 17 years since the last entry in the franchise, littered with films that didn't make it and followed by a long legal battle over rights that prevented new projects from moving forward, Friday the 13th has finally risen from the blue grave with Crystal Lake, the new eight-part series by Peacock.

Set in the early 1970s, the series harkens back to the franchise's roots, focusing on Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini, played by Betsy Palmer), the killer in the original Friday the 13th film. Here, we follow the supposed drowning death of her son, Jason (Callum Vinson), and how she reacts to it in the aftermath, which shows her spiraling into the murderous madness we saw in that 1980 film - before she's beheaded and her son takes over the show in the second film.

By the end of the season, some major revelations have been made that reveal important aspects of the Voorhees family's history that have never before been explored in the 12 Friday the 13th films, some of which are undoubtedly quite polarizing among fans right now. It contains a key aspect of Jason Voorhees history that answers many questions! Let's take a look at what we learned, how it fits into the film franchise, and where it differs from it.

And of course who lived and who died...

5 things we learned from crystal lake part 1

Crystallake has a big cast and character surprise in its sixth installment, when we meet Hamish Linklater's Midnight Mass/Gen V/Widow's Bay Elias Wittering. If you're a die-hard Friday the 13th fan, just by seeing Elias' name (unspoken in that episode, but revealed in the end credits), you knew exactly who he had to be: Jason's father!

We've never seen Jason's father in any Friday the 13th movies, but we did meet him around 1986's Friday the 13th Episode VI: Jason Lives, which was supposed to introduce Elias Voorhees. And although a scene written for the character was cut and never filmed, his name was able to remain part of the story, first spoken aloud in 1993's Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, while we see versions of the character included or referenced in other Friday the 13th stories, including in the comic books and Friday the 13th.

Linklater is such a success for the series that it brought in another acclaimed actor to play Jason's father alongside recent Emmy winner Cardellini as his mother. But of course, it's also worth noting that Elias isn't a Voorhees here at all, as he's thought to be, since we find out early on that Pamela only picked up the name after her run-in with Jason.

The seventh episode of the series shows the complete history of Pamela and Elias and how Pamela Scott was a nightclub singer who had a growing career in New York in 1959 before she suffered a miscarriage with the child she was carrying with her boyfriend. Elias Elias Wittering was a salesman for the large Bellflower Chemical Company and took her to the state-of-the-art medical center the company had in Houston, Texas, where they not only said that the baby could be saved, but to help He will also receive special treatments.

Meanwhile, Pamela and Elias get married, making her Mrs. Withering, and things seem bleak at first. until…

In what will no doubt be the most controversial and controversial plot point in Crystal Lake among Friday the 13th fans, it is revealed that the treatments Bellflower administered to both Pamela and the other pregnant women were actually designed to increase human lifespan, with the ultimate goal of making people better able to survive nuclear war than Bellflower forgot. Elias was fully aware of all this and kept it a secret from Pamela while allowing the scientists to perform dangerous procedures on his wife and child.

These "Project Argonaut" experiments resulted in deformed babies, many of whom died and none of whom lived anything resembling a normal life, except for one... and his name was Jason. Yes, that's right: Crystal Lake provides the first real, comprehensive explanation for why Jason looks the way he does, but more importantly, why he doesn't stay dead despite everything that happens to him throughout the franchise. Why didn't Jason actually drown? Why did so many survive fatal wounds in Friday the 13th episodes 2, 3 and 4? Why was he able to be resurrected by a bolt of lightning as a strange zombie from episode 6 onwards? It was because of Bellflower!

Jason's History Unlocked: Crystal Lake offers the first comprehensive explanation of why Jason looks the way he does, and more importantly, why he doesn't just stay dead.

As Elias says, "Trauma actually makes him stronger. In fact, it can accelerate physical growth!" Interestingly, this not only helps explain Jason's form when we see him return from the lake in this same show (more on that later), but even his increasing form in movies, where bigger actors are cast to play him. Oh, and is Pamela so mentally disturbed? It was also Bellflower's fault because she was given experimental mood stabilizers that changed her brain chemistry and she stopped using them after she found out the truth and escaped to her new life and fake identity in Crystal Lake with Jason.

Fans have already talked about hints of this storyline in the show's trailers, preferring that Pamela and Jason remain nothing more than a small-town New Jersey mother and son before her drowning and the events of the first film. And I get it, but also...Friday the 13th is a ridiculous show! And I say this as someone who loves these movies and has watched each of them dozens of times. But of course, from the moment they even decided not to drown Jason as a child to bring him back as a grown-up killer in Episode 2, the show has little to do with anything earthly. And that was before the sequels included Jason's transformation into a perfect zombie, showing his soul able to jump from body to body through a snake-like creature, and his journey into space.

Speaking of the last example, while everyone remembers 2002's Jason X as the scene where Jason is on a spaceship hundreds of years in the future, it's worth recalling the film's prologue, which is set in 2008 and shows how Jason is cryogenically frozen. It was one of the only times an entry in the series directly acknowledged the weirdness of Jason's biology, possibly directly setting up what Crystal Lake described.

In that movie, Jason is captured and taken to the "Crystal Lake Research Facility," a place we can only guess was built because of the town's most famous resident. After several failed execution attempts, the US government now seriously wants to experiment on Jason instead, with Dr. Wimmer (played by a crazy David Cronenberg!) arguing that his "unique ability to regenerate lost and damaged tissue warrants further research." If only Dr. Wimmer knew about Bellflower and what they are up to, he would have his answers.

Crystal Lake episode 5 has a close-up shot recreating the opening sequence shot of Friday the 13th, where the horned Crystal Lake camp counselors Barry and Claudette (Phoenix Parnwick and Daniel Koch) go undercover to do what the crazy counselors do. As in the film, we get a POV shot of the killer attacking Barry and Claudette, but this time we skip over what is shown in the film as we see Pamela Voorhees walking over the murder in progress, rather than committing it herself. And the real killer here isn't Jason, the second most likely possibility is... Grace!

Are we seeing another Friday the 13th killer appear alongside Pamela, Jason and Roy in episode 5?

who is grace Played by Gwendoline Sundstrom, she is in many ways Crystal Lake's most interesting new character, a 13-year-old girl who was Jason's only real friend before he drowned, treating him with kindness while others ignored or bullied her. There's a lot of extenuating circumstances for Grace to be the killer, as the poor kid was in bad shape after her mother's recent death (killed by Pamela without her knowledge). She also hangs out with a larger group of hippie kids, whose irresponsible ways lead to Grace taking three acid pills while passing out before dumping Barry and Claudette completely, blaming them for what happened to Jason after realizing they were hooking up while he was drowning in the lake.

The next day, Grace is confused as to what really happened, even as Pamela gives her a story to tell the authorities about one of the hippies, Harmony (Manon Gage), who is responsible for not only Barry and Claudette's murder, but the rest of the hippie group that Pamela herself slaughtered. We won't see Grace again after episode 6, but she's clearly a prominent character to follow in possible future seasons. Will he really remember what he did, or could it come back to haunt him, with Pamela coldly finishing off Claudette, who was still bleeding after Grace stabbed her? Is this a tragic event that he'll move on from, or are we seeing another perfect Friday the 13th killer emerge alongside Pamela, Jason, and Roy in episode 5? Hell, could her past friendship lead to a nasty deal with Jason's murdering girlfriend!?

Crystal Lake reveals that Pamela killed more people than Barry and Claudette before the Friday the 13th massacre, and her body count was high throughout the season. But as it turns out, Jason was busy with his own murders before seeing his mother beheaded.

We touch on some of this earlier in the season, including the girl Jason kills and skins (!) and leaves her body at Crazy Ralph's (Nick Cordileone) house. But the finale gives us Jason's full post-drowning reveal, though Elias is right about that trauma-induced growth spurt, because a year later, he's significantly older than before (and played by Jonathan Tyson). We get some fun elements from Friday the 13th episode 2 here as well, including the cabin that Jason used as a home (and a shrine to his mother) in that movie, as the abandoned place where Jason and Grace went before they drowned.

Additionally, we see Jason in a version of his look in episode 2, wearing the one-eyed bag he used as his first mask, before episode 3 gave him the iconic hockey mask. Amusingly, they even make an over-explanatory move by having Pamela find the cabin thanks to Grace, putting food and supplies in a sack for her, which she clearly decides to cover her face afterwards.

At the end of the finale, Elias, who followed Pamela to Crystal Lake, chases her back to the cabin, where mother, father and son are reunited... and Jason acts like you'd expect his grumpy dad, crushing his head in his hands. Jason then actually begins to strangle Pamela and almost kills her mother as well, until memories of his love for her stop him. He was then shot in the head by Ralph, which might explain his simplistic, animalistic state in the movies, though he looked pretty good there before, considering he was already in full killer mode, probably due to lack of oxygen from the drowning, along with more fallout from the Argonaut project, as he stopped helping her when she lost her son.

Regardless, Jason destroys the arrow (not the last time this happens) and runs away, while Pamela blurts out that these woods belong to her and her son and everyone should stay out of it. The lake and the camp show that her mindset goes back to Friday the 13th, while showing that she really knows Jason is there, even while that he actively kills the counselors in an evil sense of revenge and talks to himself as a younger Jason. Pamela has a lot going on!

Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has referred to Crystal Lake as a "spiritual precursor" to Friday the 13th , as it's clearly not going to follow that film's canon exactly. This is clear from the start, when Jason drowns in 1971, not 1957, as he did in that film, while the bulk of the season — and the deaths of Barry and Claudette the summer after the drowning — takes place in 1972, not 1958.

But still, the idea here seems to be that the minus of those years is different – and the major events added throughout, including many more murders around Crystal Lake than we previously knew, albeit without the townspeople being primarily to blame – the events of the show eventually lead to the events of the 1980 or so film. Presumably, this means that all of the show's characters who are also in the movie (including Deputy Dwarf, Crazy Ralph, Diner Trudy, and Truck Driver Enos) are safe if they get future seasons, since they should be around for the events of the movie.

But that means you have the Ahsoka prequel factor: characters who aren't in the movie and you have to get rid of them at some point, whether it's by their death or by them leaving for whatever reason. This includes the aforementioned Grace, as well as other key players such as Sheriff Levon Brooks (William Catlett) and his sister, Brianna (Devin Kessler). Levon in particular stands out because we meet so many other cops from Crystal Lake in the Friday the 13th movies, but never this particular sheriff who has a romantic relationship with Pamela, especially in the first season.

Does this mean Levon is doomed? Or could it simply leave Crystal Lake at some point? Or could they say that he was still the sheriff until Friday the 13th, but simply stayed off-screen, ready to receive some very bad news about the woman he cared about?

Want to see Crystal Lake in Season 2?

And then there's Harmony, the hippie who got away. Pamela and Grace claim that she was the killer, but Harmony realizes on her own that it was Pamela who killed her friends, even though she was also falling down at the time. It seems like this is a problem that could easily get around at some point for Pamela and she has to find a solution.

Maybe we'll find out the answers to these questions and more if Crystal Lake returns for Season 2.