Why I Stopped Watching Crystal Lake

A bad mid-season run ended all my desire to watch more

The Crystal Lake show was a long time coming because we haven’t seen a Friday the 13th story in so long. I was so excited for it, as they were aiming to touch new ground with it being a prequel story about Pamela  Voorhees. The casting was great as well. I got a little over halfway done, so I think I have a good reason to stop watching it, as I’ve seen enough of it.

Most of what I’m going to be talking about are spoilers in the show, not the ending of the show, but mostly spoilers in the first couple of episodes. I had a hard time getting into a couple of episodes as well, as they seem to really just drag out and could’ve been cut.

They could’ve really just turned this into a three-hour HBO special or something. I don’t think it could’ve been turned into a movie with all the moving parts they have, but I do see a good three-hour or 3- to 4-hour type thing. 

I thought the show started really strong with the first episode, but it seemed to really go downhill around episodes four and five

 I think the biggest problem I have with the show is how they decided to rewrite a little bit of the history. In the show Crystal Lake, they end up re-creating scenes from Friday the 13th and change a little bit about them. Instead of it being Pamela Voorhees who kills all the counselors, they ended up having a new character kill them.

They started to cover the grounds of the first movie and change what happened, especially in the opening scene of the first movie. And in that opening scene, we see two counselors get killed, and we assume it’s Pamela Voorhees by the end of the movie. But instead, we end up having a brand new character be the one who kills them, and it’s basically this little girl. 

I don’t necessarily love the fact that they’re rewriting history. I think that’s what kind of turned me off to the show and made me want to stop watching it. Also, the Carrie show was going on at the same time, and that one definitely kept my attention a lot longer. Even though I think the Carrie show didn’t end well, I was thoroughly entertained by every episode of that show. Whereas in Crystal Lake, some of the episodes felt like they dragged a little bit too long. Some of the writing felt questionable, and I got to a point where it felt unwatchable to me. 

I don’t think the Friday the 13th movies are the greatest movies by any means. I know exactly what kind of movies they are, and they’re not trying to be anything more than that, really. So I don’t wanna come off as pretentious when I’m saying I don’t like how they rewrote it, seeing as the movies are not this masterpiece of filmmaking. But I don’t understand why they did what they did with the new characters.

The new characters they added in the show that don’t really cross over to the movies seem to be pretty well written, and I had a good time watching them. I really enjoyed the interactions Pamela Voorhees has with the town sheriff. I felt that they had pretty good chemistry together, and it was interesting to see her painted in that light. 

I was surprised to see as much of Jason Voorhees as we did. Especially when he’s super young, and he’s just a kid running around saying silly things. It seems kind of silly that he would turn out to be this massive killer when he is the super innocent kid.

I don’t mean to say he has to have some kind of serial killer background to become this monster, but he seemed a little bit too innocent to become a killer. Sometimes not knowing their backstory will make them better, like Michael Myers in the Halloween movies. I know that they eventually went into his backstory with that as well, but watching that first movie really gives such a great Fog over his character.

Some of the scenes with Jason as a kid kind of made me cringe, and it felt silly. I know they were trying to make him wholesome and to make his death even more sad so that we would feel more for Pamela Voorhees. Of course his death is, and it’s very tragic, and the way they go into it, I think, is pretty well written. The way they go into the whole tragedy of losing a son at such a young age is good.

We see how it affects Pamela and how it kind of turns her into this monster, so to speak. I didn’t really have a problem with that. I just felt like maybe we shouldn’t have seen as much as Jason as we should have. Maybe just a couple of scenes instead of littering more and more throughout the story. 

I think if they had cut a couple of episodes and made it a little bit more straight to the point, and decided to cover the events leading up to the first film, I think that would’ve been a little bit better. For a lot of people who aren’t super familiar with the Friday the 13th franchise, that might not really be that big of a deal for them. I’ll definitely admit that some of the Friday the 13th movies do blend, so people might be confused or not really know that they were overlapping with the show and movies. 

As a longtime fan of Friday The 13th, I was really excited to see the show, but I’m sad to say that I was disappointed

 I might finish it one day, but there are so many better things to watch, and when the show doesn’t necessarily hook you after a couple of episodes, it’s hard to consider watching more. Maybe it does get better, but I don’t really feel like sinking the time to watch it. Each episode is an hour long, and it’s on a streaming service that I am not familiar with.

Crystal Lake is on Peacock, a streaming service that many people don’t have compared to Netflix or HBO Max. There are so many streaming services out there, and it’s so hard to watch shows nowadays because it seems like each of them is on a different service. I know one day a lot of them will end up consolidated into one, and they’ve kind of started to do that with Hulu and Disney+.

There are just too many things working against it from a story perspective and just the fact that it’s an inconvenience. Most people probably watch the show in a week or two just by doing the free trial of Peacock. I’m not a big binge watcher, so that’s another strike against me, I guess.

I was a massive fan of the Friday The 13th video game as well, and I hope that they continue to try to do more Friday the 13th media projects. I know that they are planning on making a new Friday the 13th game, and I hope they keep some of the elements from the earlier game and it would be neat to see Pamela he’s added in from the show.

I like what they did with her character. I just don’t like some of the story elements that they added with it. There are so many Friday The 13th movies, so I don’t feel too bad about it being thrown in the mix because there are so many that I don’t like in the series.

There are also plenty of worse entries in the series than Crystal Lake, so it’s got that working for it as well. It tries to take itself serious, which is another thing that I plotted on as it’s definitely trying to do something different.