David Blacker | Through the Shattered Lens

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, it’s all about Jack!

Episode 2.19 “The Butcher”

(Dir by Francis Delia, originally aired on April 24th, 1989)

Horst Mueller (Colin Fox), a Nazi scientist, uses a magic amulet to bring back to life the fearsome Col. Rausch (Nigel Bennett), a Nazi war criminal who was infamous for using barb wire as a garotte whenever he was carrying out executions. Rausch was killed during the war by a squad of soldiers led by a young lieutenant named Jack Marshak. Once Rausch is brought back to life, he not only sets himself up as a radio talk show host but he also seeks revenge on the men who killed him. One-by-one, he kills the members of the squad until eventually, only three are left alive, Simpson (Julius Harris), Shaw (John Gilbert), and Jack.

There were many episodes of Friday the 13th in which Jack was absent and described as being out-of-town while Micki and Ryan dealt with the latest cursed antique. This, however, is the first episode to feature Jack on his own. He mentions that Micki and Ryan are out-of-town, presumably because they’re tracking something down. This leads Jack to face Rausch with only the help of Simpson and Shaw. Watching this episode, one gets the feeling that Jack wouldn’t have it any other way. While this episode features all of the usual blood and melodrama that we’ve come to expect from this show, it also serves as a tribute to the friendship between Jack and his comrades-in-arms. Jack relates to Simpson and Shaw in a way that he can’t relate to the much-younger Micki and Ryan. If Jack is usually cast as a fatherly figure, this episode finds him working with equals and fighting against a monster with whom he has a personal connection. This is the rare episode to not feature any of Lewis’s cursed antiques. Instead, the magic amulet is one of the many artifacts for which Heinrich Himmler and the SS spent much of the war searching.

It’s a change-of-pace episode that gives Chris Wiggins a chance to show off his considerable talents an actor. Rarely has Jack been as haunted as he is in the episode and Wiggins’s sad eyes allow us to see what a lifetime of dealing with unbelievable evil would do to a person. In this episode, Jack is not just aware of the evil in the world but he’s also aware that he and his comrades-in-arms, the members of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” are aging and their time is passing. Jack and his friends are at an age where they should be enjoying their retirement. Instead. they’re still fighting against the legacy of Hitler’s evil.

This was a good and melancholy episode of Friday the 13th. This show could be uneven but episodes like this were good enough to make one mourn that the series did not last longer than just three seasons.

This week, Ryan and Jack go to a carnival!

Episode 2.7 “Wax Magic”

(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired on November 14th, 1988)

Unable to get a date, loser Ryan convinces Jack to go to a traveling carnival with him.

(Okay, maybe “loser” is a bit harsh. I like Ryan and I think John D. LeMay did a pretty good playing him on the series but seriously, in this episode, Ryan is oddly whiny. Then again, I would think that Ryan would be more careful about trying to date anyone, considering that everyone with whom he falls in love either dies or is his cousin, Micki.)

Ryan and Jack discover that the carnival has been rocked by a series of decapitations. Ryan suspects that it might involve the creepy wax figure exhibit that is run by Aldwin Chase (Angelo Rizacos). Aldwin is incredibly jealous of but also very abusive towards his wife, Marie (Susannah Hoffman). Whenever someone shows too much interest in Marie, they are visited by a wax figure of Lizzie Borden. Guess who Ryan develops an obviously doomed crush on?

This was an effectively creepy episode and, with its scenes of carnival goers losing their heads, it felt like it had more in common with the Friday the 13th movies than some of the other episodes. Towards the end of the episode, Jack and Ryan are actually attacked in the antique shop and it’s actually a bit jolting, a reminder that nowhere is safe. The show ends with a twist about Marie that’s not particularly but it’s effective nonetheless. In the role of Jack, Chris Wiggins gets to deliver another one of his monologues about the nature of evil and, as always, he pulls it off wonderfully.

That said, Micki is not in this episode and that’s unfortunate. Micki is the character to whom I relate, mostly because we’re both redheads with big boobs and, therefore, we share the same struggle. There have been plenty of episode where Jack was said to be off on another mission and, in those cases, that actually raised the stakes because it left Micki and Ryan without their mentor. But not having Micki present just felt weird. Unlike Ryan, I guess she was actually able to get a date.