Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a 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 entire series can be found on YouTube!

This week …. hey, where is everyone?

Episode 3.14 “Repetition”

(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired on February 5th, 1990)

After newspaper columnist Walter Cromwell (David Ferry) accidentally hits and kills a girl with his car, he finds himself consumed with guilt.  He also start to hear the girl’s voice in his head, demanding that he bring her back to life.  Walter just happens to have a cursed amulet, one that allows the owner to bring someone else back to life as long as he kills someone who is wearing the amulet.  Walter’s first victim is his dying mother.  But after he kills her, he starts to hear her voice demanding to be brought back to life.  So, Walter commits another murder, one after the other, trying to bring back to life every one who he kills.

This was an interesting episode because neither Johnny nor Jack were anywhere to be seen.  Instead, it was just Micki and she only appeared at the start and the end of the episode.  The entire episode focused on Walter and his descent into madness and, it must be said, that worked just fine.  This show’s strength has always been its collection of cursed antiques and this episode allowed us to see how one of them actually works.  We saw how the amulet manipulated Walter and how Walter himself became more and more hooked on using the amulet’s power.  I’ve always viewed the antiques as being a bit like drugs and their users being addicts and this episode certainly played into that theory.

This was an intense episode, featuring moody visuals and a strong script from David Lynch’s daughter, the future director Jennifer Lynch.  After last week’s odd episode, it was nice to see an episode this week that actually got to the heart of what this series was always supposed to be about.