Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, time stops.

Episode 2.9 “13 O’Clock”

(Dir by Rob Hedden, originally aired on January 2nd, 1989)

Wealthy but dorky Henry Wilkerson (Ron Hartmann) owns a watch that he inherited from his father.  The watch can stop time at exactly one a.m., giving the owner the chance to do whatever he or she wants for an hour while the world is frozen.  The only catch is that someone has to be murdered before the watch will do its thing.  Henry, like his father before him, has killed a lot of people and stolen a lot of money while the world was frozen.  But then Henry is murdered by his wife, Reatha (Gwynyth Walsh), who wants the watch for herself and her adulterous, criminal lover, Eric (David Proval, who later played Richie Aprile on The Sopranos).

When Jack reads a series of newspaper articles about a bunch of murders and thefts that all seem to take place near the subway station at one in the morning, he figures out that someone is using a cursed watch.  (Actually, it’s kind of strange just how quickly Jack manages to figure that out.  Jack, is there something you need to share with everyone?)  Micki and Ryan investigate the area around the station and they meet two homeless teenagers, Skye and Johnny-O  (played by Ingrid Veninger and Jason Hopley).  Skye witnessed Reatha killing Henry and she is about to become Reatha’s next target.

This was one of the better episodes of Friday the 13th.  The scenes where time froze were remarkably well-done, with the world not only stopping but also transforming into black-and-white.  Only Reatha and anyone who is with her can move and they are also the only things not stripped of color in the frozen world.  The sight of Reatha, Eric, and eventually Ryan walking through the frozen and eerily silent subway station is a surprisingly powerful one.  This is an episode that really does seem to capture what it would be like to actually live in a world where magic collides with everyday, mundane reality.  The special effects earned this show an Emmy nomination and it was certainly deserved.  They’re still effective, even when viewed today by eyes that have been jaded by too much CGI.

Reatha, Eric, and Henry make for a memorable trio of villains and Gwynyth Walsh especially deserves some credit for fearlessly embracing the melodrama in her performance as Reatha.  If you ever wondered what would happen if a femme fatale from a classic noir made a deal with Satan, Reatha is your answer.  I will admit that I cringed a little when the homeless teens showed up but Ingrid Veninger and Jason Hopley were well-cast and they turned their stereotypical characters into sympathetic human beings.

I wish this episode had been a bit clearer on how the stopwatch works.  At the end of the episode, Reatha and Eric appear to be permanently frozen in time but they’re frozen in a very public place and you really do have to wonder what’s going to happen when people notice two monochrome people standing frozen on the train tracks.

But that’s a minor quibble.  Overall, this was a superior episode of Friday the 13th.