Friday the 13th fans have been waiting for a new installment in the long-running franchise for nearly two full decades now. The last time that Jason or any of his ilk were seen onscreen at all was in 2009’s Platinum Dunes-backed remake, fittingly called Friday the 13th. Despite initial plans for an immediate follow-up to that film and then several other attempts at starting production on other projects in the years since, here we are seventeen years later with precious little to show for it all.
Fortunately, this drought finally comes to an end in just a few weeks, as Peacock’s Crystal Lake TV series sees Jason and his mother Pamela (now played by the ever-iconic Linda Cardellini) returning to the screen, albeit the small one. But because it’s been so long, fans are understandably ravenous for more Friday the 13th-related stuff, which is how a single shot in the new Crystal Lake trailer has become such a fixture of discussion that it’s incited a whole line of discourse online.
The shot in question is of what seems to be an underground laboratory of some sort, and many people have run with this and other marketing materials as a sign that Crystal Lake may try to explain what’s up with Jason Voorhees. But is that really what Peacock and A24 have in store for their attempted relaunch of the franchise? It seems incredibly unlikely.
For the uninitiated, the question of ‘what’s Jason’s deal?’ is not really something that the first few Friday the 13th films ever really grappled with outside of heavily implying and even occasionally outright saying that he was a deformed child with a very protective mother. That was all well and good when his death by drowning at Camp Crystal Lake was simply being used as motivation for his mother, Pamela Voorhees, to kill off camp counselors in Sean S. Cunningham’s original film, but it became a bit more complicated when an adult Jason inexplicably showed up to extract revenge on camp counselors for his mother’s death.
The 2009 remake kind of side-stepped this whole issue by moving the timeline around a bit in its opening prologue, having Jason supposedly drown and Pamela Voorhees basically start immediately killing people. Then, Jason, who has actually survived the drowning incident but wound up lost in the woods afterwards, makes it back to camp just in time to see his mother beheaded and spends the next decade-plus roaming the grounds of Camp Crystal Lake as the iconic slasher.
But because Crystal Lake is a prequel series that seems to be explicitly set in the original continuity, it raises some questions, and fans are unsurprisingly excited to see what creative solutions it has up its sleeve. So the shot of the laboratory has many fans worried that the series is preparing to make Jason part of some scientific experiment to try and explain his survival and subsequent super-slasher abilities. However, not only do I sincerely hope this isn’t true, I also just don’t think it is true.
From a creative standpoint, I don’t see the value in such a decision. I’m always open to being proven wrong by the series itself, but it would seem to me that making Jason some kind of scientific experiment would pull focus away from Pamela and the mother-son relationship that is so ripe for exploration within this series. I don’t need some lore-dump about how Jason is able to survive all these various stabbings and gunshots in subsequent years; I just want a compelling horror story about these characters at this critical juncture in their lives. But furthermore, I find it incredibly hard to believe that after so long trying to get a Friday the 13th project off the ground that Peacock or A24 would be particularly gung-ho about such a revisionist effort.
This is the relaunching of a potential cash cow (or it should be anyway; the finances of streaming services very much escape my grasp, but I have no doubt that Crystal Lake will pull in huge viewership upon debut), and that’s the kind of thing that studios and executives are much more inclined to be extremely safe with, rather than eager to rock the boat. Hell, there was a whole other version of this that was scrapped before this one came to be due to “creative differences,” so I have a hard time imagining that they scoffed at Bryan Fuller’s take but were willing to double down on a "Jason is a science experiment" take.
To me, the most obvious answer here is that the laboratory is a byproduct of the unreliable narrator at the series’ center: Pamela Voorhees. This murderous matriarch has gone completely insane by the time she shows up in the first movie, having full-blown conversations with herself as Jason and Pamela simultaneously. So, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the marketing team found this to be a compelling shot that could spur potential conversation, even though it's little more than a fever-dream hallucination within the show’s actual context. I suppose we’ll all find out for sure when Crystal Lake releases in October, but I would be shocked if the show actually went this route, if amusingly intrigued.
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