PeacockHorror franchises aren’t exactly known for their rigorous worldbuilding. With enough time, the story inevitably devolves into the absurd as each sequel tries to outdo the rest. That’s how we end up with a Druidic cult in a Halloween movie, “dream demons” in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the Illuminati in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But no film franchise has gone quite as wild as Friday the 13th. Even though the first movie confirmed that Jason Voorhees was, in fact, just his grieving mother, Pamela, the sequels brought Jason back as an immortal zombie. Over time, this devolved into some of the strangest choices in horror movie history, including an odd body-swapping element involving slug-like parasites and even sending Jason into space. Peacock’s new series Crystal Lake was supposed to be a definitive prequel that would, somehow, make the retcon of Jason surviving his original drowning actually make sense. It does in fact do that, but the complications it incorporates throughout are just as weird as the original movies themselves, all leading up to a timeline that makes even less sense than before. Crystal Lake was marketed as an origin story for Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), but it doesn’t exactly slot into the greater franchise as a whole. In the original 1980 movie, Jason drowned more than a decade ago, and Pamela wreaked havoc on the horny camp counselors years later on his birthday to get revenge. But in Crystal Lake, Jason drowns in 1971, not 1957. That changes everything, from the costuming, to the strange people Pamela encounters in her grief-fueled murder spree.This shift in the timeline was very purposeful. “These movies came out of a decade when America was going through a massive identity crisis,” showrunner Brad Caleb Kane told Vulture. “In the ’50s and ’60s, America was one way and then you have the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, the student riots, the Manson murders — that sort of dark turning of the hippie movement, the failure of that movement, in a way. Nixon lying to the people: We realized as a nation that we can’t trust institutions anymore.” Pamela Voorhees gets the spotlight in Peacock’s new prequel series. | PeacockAs a creative choice, this is one of the show’s greatest strengths: the story explores the rise of “est Standard Training,” the self-improvement classes that were massively popular in the early 1970s, as well as the rise of psychedelics in the hippie movement. But as an origin story, it falls flat. How are we supposed to believe this is the mother of Jason Voorhees if he was born a decade later than before? If you can ignore that glaring plot hole, there is a lot to be enjoyed here. The central mystery is hiding in plain sight from the get-go (albeit not very well), and the introduction of Levon and Brianna Brooks (William Catlett and Devin Kessler) as a sibling cop/journalist duo allows for their plotline to run like an HBO crime thriller while Pam is still in a psychological slasher. The gore is also there in healthy supply, but even that has a weird streak. For some reason, most of the murders in this show are mouth-related. From Pam picking a tooth out of her knuckle in the show’s first moments to multiple exposed jaws, there’s an oral fixation present that isn’t ineffective, but can be a tad distracting. A flashback episode is the strongest — and strangest — in the series. | PeacockAll this builds up to the penultimate episode, “Friday...,” which is the best episode thematically and aesthetically, even if it has the most baffling plot. Set in 1959, it follows Pamela through her pregnancy with Jason in an off-putting 1950s idyll that’s somewhere between The Stepford Wives and Don’t Worry Darling. The longer that episode goes on (fueled by a typically stunning performance by Hamish Linklater) the more Pamela’s story shifts from psychological horror to straight-up sci-fi. Maybe to the more seasoned Friday the 13th fans, this is a great way to explain Jason’s apparent immortality, but instead it just seems like it undermines the entire meditation on Pam’s grief over her son. While there’s a lot to be liked here — it’s certainly more entertaining that HBO’s horror prequel series It: Welcome to Derry — there’s just so many topics addressed, and nothing feels fully-formed. Perhaps a hard-core fan would find what they’re looking for here, but as a TV show — much like Jason himself — it can’t seem to tread water. Crystal Lake premieres on Peacock on October 15.