2026 Crystal Lake S01E07: Friday…

• Directed by: Quyen Tran
• Written by: Laura Marks, Victor Miller
• Stars: Linda Cardellini, William Catlett, Gwendolyn Sundstrom
• Run Time: 51 Minutes

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

We see the events that led up to the birth of Jason and after, as Pam remembers them, and it’s a brightly colored hyper-reality of 1959 into the 1960s. With undertones of pregnancy/conspiracy/body horror that reminded us more than once of “Rosemary’s Baby.”

We both really liked this one, with Kevin putting it as his favorite episode of the season. Will they top it with the finale?

Spoilery Synopsis

It’s 1959, and we open on an old video of the Jack Parr Show, and we see that it’s Ms. Pamela Scott, a familiar face. Halfway through the live song, she starts bleeding and falls down. She’s having a miscarriage. Her boyfriend, another familiar face, works for Bellflower and thinks the company doctor, Landau, can fix her up.

Turns out, she hasn’t lost her baby. Dr. Valentine offers her a spot in their experimental clinical trials. Elias then proposes to Pam, and she accepts. She then meets Trish, another experimental mother. Trish hints that “the treatment” isn’t going to be fun.

Drs. Valentine and Landau have a whole mad-scientist lab for Pam’s baby. They strap her down and the treatment is not… fun. The baby is injected with a huge syringe full of green stuff.

Trish’s baby is stillborn on Friday the 13th. She says the baby wasn’t right, her face was just wrong. Trish then kills herself in grief, which puts Pam into labor. Elias explains that Pam had a baby under anesthesia, but she’s not allowed to see him.

Several weeks later, Pam, Elias, and lumpy-headed baby Jason go home. Elias has a new promotion and job; Jason’s mouth is weird, so he eats from a bottle. We then get a crying baby montage, and he doesn’t cry normally either. She then falls asleep, and he drowns in the bathtub.

Elias comes home and finds them in the bathroom. It’s all very traumatic, but then the dead baby starts crying again. They hire a nurse to watch over Jason after the accident; no one trusts her now.

Four years later, on Jason’s birthday, Jason is on many medications and Elias is being evasive about all of it. The kids go down to play in the bomb shelter, and they all see that Jason is highly radioactive; his hair is falling out as well. Elias is even more evasive now and threatens Pam. She looks at Jason’s drawings and realizes what the doctors have been doing to her son.

Elias gives a speech that explains their experiments were to make people who can survive an atomic blast. They’ve been fortifying humans to be stronger– like a cockroach. The test subject even has accelerated growth.

At the big party, she steals Dr. Landau’s keys and later uses them. She goes through the lab and sees all the other experiments like Jason. She goes right through Dr. Valentine– with a drill. She and Jason make their escape and start a new life.

Happy ending! Or at least for a few years…

Brian’s Commentary

We finally get the Bellflower story in this episode, and it was pretty much exactly what we expected. It’s all very colorful, reminiscent of “Mad Men.”

I liked it!

Kevin’s Commentary

Here we see that Jason is drownproof. He wouldn’t have actually died in Crystal Lake. And there is so much gaslighting Pam.

This episode does the most to present Pam and Jason as sympathetic characters and what a bunch of jerks the men who made it happen were. Though those men thought they were doing the best they could for the survival of the human race. So it’s complicated.

I’d declare this one my favorite episode of the season so far. What will they conclude with? And will there be a season 2?