If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger. This maxim was a favorite of United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It seems to be the approach favored by the increasingly unhinged Pamela Voorhees as well, and with similarly grisly results. 

The problem Pam faces is, you’d think, pretty insurmountable. She came across her erstwhile “daughter” Grace, high as a kite and murdering camp counselors Barry and Claudette. She finished the job on Claudette herself. She manages to convince Grace the kids were already dead when she got there, sparing her any guilt. She also tells Grace the attacks were the work of the drug-crazed hippies. And she knows she needs to get the bodies out onto the water to whisk them away and hide them. Beyond that, what should she do?

“It won’t work,” says a familiar voice.

Jason appears to her, looking like he did on the day he drowned. “It’s their fault,” he tells her angrily of the hippies. “They should take the blame.” She begins mimicking his voice in response. 

“Kill them, Mommy,” he says. “Kill them,” she says along with him. Thus begins the New Jersey Hippie Massacre.

Pam heads to where the hippies are still tripping for our first big killcrazy rampage of the season, an absolutely bugfuck slaughterfest of the classic Friday the 13th variety. Shutterbug gets stabbed in the eye right through his beloved camera. Rhiannon (April Consalo) gets her throat slit while fucking Gabe (Philip Themio Stoddard)…and her body continues to bounce up and down on him as she bleeds out. This is impressively fucked up.

Harmony, aka Mary Ann Sacrimoni, is the only hippie who manages to escape, starting her psychedelically colored van and peeling out of there when Pam heads off to tend to Grace. Plato (Nate Kelderman), the hippie ringleader, tries to steal the canoe and take off…but by the time Pam gets there, Grace is out cold and Plato is dead, with the machete she tossed into the lake mysteriously buried in his skull.

A mass murder like this brings in the state police, who take over the case from Chief Lee. Right now, the missing Harmony is their lead suspect — it certainly isn’t Crazy Ralph, who’s been in lockup ever since Dorfman, by now at open war with Lee, brought him in for the dead hitchhiker. Set free by Lee since he obviously didn’t do it, he winds up telling Pam about his sightings of that strange figure in the woods, who she now openly speculates is Jason.

“If that thing was your boy,” he says, “it’s not anymore. And someone’s gotta do something about it.”

Pam plans to, alright. While coaching Grace on how to keep her story straight, she learns about the location of Jason’s hidden shack. Pam travels there with supplies and finds his toy gun, which she’d also seen that strange figure using in the distance earlier in the episode. She sets out treats and camping supplies and waits for him to return. When he does, however, he somehow sneaks past her and trashes the place while she’s out looking for them. The look on her face is one of heartbreak and rejection. 

But Pamela isn’t the only woman having life-and-death adventures this episode. As Lee’s reporter sister Briana digs deeper into Bellflower, she receives an envelope full of files on the subjects of Project Argonaut, all of whom are dead…except her brother’s friend Pamela. When Dr. Landau, the whistleblower who sent her the files, arranges a meeting at an amusement park, he gets killed in broad daylight on his way over to her.

Instead, a Bellflower executive played by the great Hamish Linklater sits down beside her instead. This smooth talker has an answer for everything, which he presents as a great boon to her. After all, the mighty Bellflower Corporation does not grant on-the-record interviews every day. He accepts responsibility for the failures of Project Argonaut, but defends both the project and the company’s over-the-top methods of keeping it all under wraps as necessary in a world that just doesn’t understand nuance.

“Progress and innovation always require a certain amount of risk,” he says, sounding like an AI CEO.

But when he reacts with surprise to the news that two company henchmen wound up dead in a small town in New Jersey, Briana realizes this “interview” is really a fishing expedition, and he’s there to find out what she knows, not the other way around. Stabbing a goon in the leg with her key, she makes a break for it and escapes. She places a call to her fellow reporter Nate (Jason Fuchs) just in time for him to whisk away those files before Bellflower goons ransack her desk, with the help of her own editor. 

Wisely, Briana takes the whole story straight to Lee, files and all. She’s aghast to learn Levon has slept with his lady…and worried that it’s only a matter of time before Bellflower connects her to him and comes to Crystal Lake in full force. Their only option is to confront Pam directly with what they know.

By the time she gets home from the woods, the Brooks siblings have shown themselves in. Lee has found the other half of the broken scissors he found in the half-eaten pelvis in the woods. 

“Make sense of this for me, Pam,” he says. There’s pleading in his voice, but it’s not a request.

I love how directors Celine Held and Logan George handle Pam’s reaction, visually heightening the tension with every shot. The three characters are shown in tight closeups. Shots cut from Pam’s eyes to Lee’s gun, then to her kitchen knife. A split diopter shot places her frantic face in the foreground and the window in clear view in the background — one last chance to make her escape. Instead, she sits down and prepares to tell her story, for the very first time. We’ll have to wait until next time, most likely a classic penultimate flashback episode, to find out what that story is. On a show this gleefully gross and ambitiously batshit, I can’t wait to find out.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.