Crystal Lake's Finale Attempts To Fix A Longstanding Friday The 13th Plot Hole

This article contains major spoilers for "Crystal Lake" Season 1.

At long last, "Friday the 13th" fans have something new to enjoy. "Crystal Lake" is now streaming on Peacock and it serves as the first full-length project in the beloved horror franchise in more than 17 years. Not counting last year's official short "Sweet Revenge," the last time we saw the slasher on screen was when the "Friday the 13th" remake conquered the box office – then Jason Voorhees vanished. But he's back and this prequel does a lot of work to deepen our understanding of the Voorhees family.

"Crystal Lake" gives us a bloody Jason Voorhees origin story, one focused largely on Pam Voorhees (Linda Cardellini), a single mother grieving for her young son Jason who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. In the aftermath, strangers arrive at her door, setting off a disturbing chain of events. The series mostly takes place in 1972, eight years before the events of the original horror classic. The show's big mission is to show us who Pamela Voorhees really is, but it also tries to fill in a plot hole that has existed for 45 years.

Director Sean S. Cunningham went from children's movies to horror with "Friday the 13th," which was produced by Paramount Pictures. It was never intended to start a franchise but when it hit big, the studio rushed a sequel. As fans will surely recall, the original movie saw Pam as the killer, taking revenge on behalf of her son, presumed dead after drowning in the lake. At the very end, the final girl Alice (Adrienne King) is attacked by Jason emerging from the depths of Crystal Lake.

That version of Jason was notably a young boy but in "Friday the 13th Part 2," he was a full-grown man.

The "Crystal Lake" Season 1 finale, aptly titled "The Final Chapter," reveals that Jason did indeed survive his supposed drowning in the lake — and he's all grown up now. Pam even remarks, "You're so big." This version of Jason is closer in size to the one we see on screen in "Part 2," with the bag on his head and everything. Jason Voorhees didn't get his signature hockey mask until midway through "Friday the 13th Part III."

As for how Jason survived? The big "Crystal Lake" Jason Voorhees twist will leave many "Friday the 13th" fans furious but, in essence, it's revealed that his father Elias (Hamish Linklater) used his son in a series of experiments to see if man can survive nuclear fallout. They spliced him with cockroach DNA, turning him into a human/roach mutant, thus explaining his supernatural-like ability to survive. Yes, really.

Setting that bizarre craziness aside for a moment, this doesn't fully explain how or why Jason got so much bigger from the time he drowned to when we see him roughly a year later. In the early episodes, he's a tiny boy, played by Callum Vinson. The show doesn't explicitly explain the growth spurt but it probably had something to do with his cockroach DNA. What it does do, however, is make it clear that Jason was big during the events of the original "Friday the 13th."

The "Crystal Lake" ending is all about how the Voorhees legend is born. It answers the "Part 2" big Jason question but raises others. Namely, why the heck was Jason a boy at the end of the original movie when he's pretty darn big at the end of this show?

Alice, one of the better final girls from the "Friday the 13th" franchise, was clearly attacked by a smaller Jason emerging from the waters of Camp Crystal Lake. Mind you, this was a full eight years after the "Crystal Lake" Season 1 finale, meaning Jason only had time to grow even bigger following the events of the show. So, why the heck was he so darn small in the original movie's ending?

It's worth remembering that this wasn't intended to be a franchise. Paramount wanted a sequel so the producers and "Friday the 13th Part 2" director Steve Miner pretty much ignored the ending of the original so that Jason could come back as the killer. The franchise has generally played it fast and loose with its own lore. By the time the sixth entry, "Jason Lives," arrived in 1986, Jason Voorhees became a full-on supernatural being.

This to say, when that young Jason emerged from the water, none of this was planned. So, how do we explain it? The longstanding proposed explanation, which isn't explicitly laid out in the movies, is that Alice hallucinated Jason attacking her. That wasn't really Jason. It was a post-distress nightmare.

With the release of "Crystal Lake" as a canon project within the franchise, we essentially have to accept that Alice's Jason attack in "Friday the 13th" didn't really happen. Either way, big Jason is canon by 1972, thus reframing our understanding of how things unfold in the early movies. Is it a little wonky? Yes, but that's nothing new for this franchise. 

"Crystal Lake" is streaming now on Peacock.