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, a crib from the Titanic demands blood!

Episode 1.25 “What A Mother Wouldn’t Do”

(Dir by Neill Fearnley, originally aired July 18th, 1988)

After being told that her unborn child should be aborted because it’s just going to die anyway, Leslie Kent (Lynne Cormack) seeks peace inside an antique shop called Curious Goods.  The shop’s owner, Lewis Vedredi (R.G. Armstrong), shows her an antique crib that he says was on the Titanic.  Leslie is intrigued by the crib and, six months later, she is overjoyed when her friends reveal that they have purchased the crib for her as a gift.  Seriously, who wouldn’t want a crib that was once used by a baby who probably drowned in icy water when the Titanic sank?

The crib does have a special power.  It can cure sick babies!  Of course, the cure only works if the crib’s owner first kills seven people in a body of water.  After baby Allison is born, Leslie and her husband Martin (Michael Countryman) start killing random people in an effort to save their baby’s life.

It presents quite a moral quandary.  If Micki and Ryan don’t retrieve the cursed crib, Leslie and Martin will continue to kill.  However, if they do get the crib, Allison will die.  Are they prepared to sacrifice an innocent baby just to get their hands on the crib?  To its credit, Friday the 13th: The Series didn’t shy away from these questions.  In this episode, the villains are not unsympathetic.  Martin hates to kill but he’s trying to save his baby.  As for Leslie, the episode’s title says it all.  What wouldn’t a mother do to save the life of her baby?  As disturbing as the murders may be, they’re nowhere near as frightening as the cold and clinical way that Leslie is ordered to get an abortion at the start of the episode.

In the end, both Martin and Leslie end up sacrificing themselves to save Allison’s life.  But Allison disappears from her crib, leaving a terrified Micki to wonder if the evil within the crib has taken her.  Fear not.  As the final shot show, her babysitter Debbie (Robyn Stevan), grabbed the now healthy baby from the crib and then got on bus to start a new life.  The baby looks up at her and smiles for the first time.  Awwwww!

This was a good episode, with Micki and Ryan both coming to realize that the owners of the antiques are often as much victims as those they harm.  Chris Wiggins dif good job of portraying Jack’s single-minded determination to find all of Lewis’s cursed antiques while Lynne Cormack and Michael Countryman were poignant as two villains for whom you couldn’t help but feel some sympathy.

Next week, season one comes to an end!