There’s nothing surprising about the secret origin of Pamela and Jason Voorhees. Should there be? It might be nice, I suppose, but then there was never anything all that surprising about Friday the 13th to begin with. You’re not here to watch Crystal Lake reinvent the wheel, you’re hear to see it stud that thing with spikes and run people over with it. In that sense, this episode delivers. You may have seen this kind of super-child origin story done before, but rarely with the gusto you get here by the end.

The most interesting thing about Miss Pamela Scott, the future Mrs. Pamela Whittering, the future Ms. Pamela Voorhees, is her occupation: a nightclub singer successful enough to be invited on The Tonight Show, where period-accurate host Jack Paar (Marc D. Donovan) introduces her. This isn’t some Jane Q. Public, but a woman with charisma, artistry, and ambition. The episode’s cold open actually shows the opening Peacock/A24 production credits on an old cathode-ray TV that begins playing the show, another unusual flourish.

But then she begins miscarrying (or so it seems) while performing, with blood pouring down her legs on camera. After that, her euphemistically referred-to “friend,” Elias Whittering, takes charge. He’s the guy Hamish Linklater played last episode, and he was apparently even closer to Project Argonaut than he let on. And he tells Pamela she can get a potentially life-saving second opinion from the Houston-based clinicians in the employ of the same company where he works as a low-level food and drug developer…Bellflower.

What follows plays like an extended cross between Mad Men, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Prisoner. (There are many design touches and and plot beats that recall Patrick McGoohan’s paranoid masterpiece. Now playing on Criterion!) Pamela is subjected to a diet of pills and TV dinners provided to her by the same corporation that keeps giving her husband promotions while keeping them living well in corporate housing. Surely having to be restrained and bite down on a leather strap while they jab your pregnant belly with a syringe the size of a ferret is a small price to pay, right? Right?

Try telling that to Trish (Olivia Macklin), another, somewhat less reluctant, recipient of the treatments of Dr. Valentine (Jeffrey Bean), Bellflower’s head obstetrician. (Dr. Landau, whom we watch develop a guilt-driven drinking problem before our eyes, is his second-in-command.) When she starts to suspect that her Bellflower-executive husband and the doctors are lying to her about the treatments they’re giving her unborn baby, they whack her up with psych meds. 

But they either give her too few or, more likely, too many. After she delivers a stillborn daughter whose face, she says, would keep her from ever loving the child, she slits her own throat while Pam watches. Pam goes into shock, then into labor. Behold: Unto the world, Jason is given.

Things don’t go well. An extremely colicky baby with a strange cry that sounds more like a goat’s — or an adult’s — than a baby’s at times, Jason drives Pam to the brink of exhaustion and beyond. She winds up falling asleep while giving him a bath…but despite being underwater for untold minutes before Elijah, now her husband, arrives home and pulls him out, the baby survives. It’s clear by now, if it wasn’t already, that Elijah knows more about this kid than he’s letting on.

Four years pass, during which time Elias brings on Nora (Blair Sams), the woman on the other end of Pamela’s phone calls earlier in the season, as his personal secretary. Jason is frequently taken away from Pamela for various tests and procedures — experiments, in other words. When he comes home from one such session radioactive, on his fourth birthday no less, she can hide her suspicions no longer. Elias threatens to divorce her and take full custody if she stops the treatments. But when she finds a cache of drawings Jason has done of the horrors he experiences in Dr. Valentine’s clutches, she knows she has to act.

The episode’s final act takes place at a gala where Elias, now a head honcho at Bellflower, is to accept plaudits for his work doing…whatever it is he’s been doing. Wearing a diamond and ruby necklace for that just-decapitated look, Pamela attends out of obligation. But when she’s able to steal a set of keys from the drunken Dr. Landau, she ditches Elias’s big speech to seek answers on her own.

It’s too bad she couldn’t have at least read his notes first. Elias reveals that he’s been working on a project to design humans hardy enough to survive on the surface of an irradiated world following a nuclear war he says is inevitable. Bellflower has a test subject even now who displays the same resilience and ability to regenerate as a cockroach: Subject J. Okay, so the hundreds of other subjects have not fared quite as well. But hey, small price to pay for progress, right?

It’s unclear how long Elias has had this scheme in motion. Did he get together with Pamela, with whom he at least said he planned to raise their baby despite not being married at a time when this was quite frowned upon, with all this in mind? Whatever the case, the dude is a stone-cold sociopath, which makes him ideal for a C-suite position at a large corporation.

Using Landau’s keys, meanwhile, Pam finds her way through Project Argonaut’s door. What she finds insdie is a chamber of horrors, a wonderfully icky assortment of deformed and two-headed fetuses, stillborn babies covered with growths, miserable-looking genetic failures who still live on, and a series of children in iron lungs, one with his mouth literally sewn shut, another with a bag over their head to keep them from biting people. If you’re going to give Jason Voorhees a sci-fi origin story, this is the level of transgressive grotesquerie the super-slasher deserves.

Pam rescues Jason, but not before she settles things with Dr. Valentine. Shortly after he warns her that both she and Jason will suffer debilitating side effects if they leave and discontinue their treatments — in Pamela’s case, this would involve brain chemistry changes that have likely already taken place thanks to her course of experimental psych meds — she stabs him in the mouth with a drill, mutilating his face until blood covers the camera lens. I guess he was right about those brain chemistry changes. 

Pam and Jason make it out of there with help from Nora, who passes her her car keys and covers for her when Elias comes looking. Nora says she wasn’t aware of the full extent of the depravity; this is her chance to make up for it. It’s nice to see that not everyone’s a bastard or a psycho on this show.

Pamela drives Jason away through the rainy night, still in her formal attire, singing Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” I love her optimism!

It’s the usual combination of factors that makes this episode of Crystal Lake work. There’s fine acting by the two leads, in this case with Hamish Linklater stepping in for William Catlett as Linda Cardellini’s male foil, coupled with a willingness to go for broke on the gross-out stuff, in this case the Mütter Museum nursery where Jason and his unfortunate pseudo-siblings are all being held and experimented on. It’s B-movie stuff with the A24 imprimatur, and I can’t wait to see how it ends. Of course, this is a Friday the 13th show, so will we ever really reach the final chapter?

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.