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, Ryan discovers that Uncle Louis’s latest victim is his own father!

Episode 1.24 “Pipe Dreams”

(Dir by Zale Dalen, originally aired on July 11th, 1988)

Ryan has been invited to the wedding of Connie (Marion Gilsenan) and Ray Dallion (Michael Constantine).  Ray is Ryan’s estranged father.  As Ryan explains it to Micki, this is only the latest of Ray’s many marriages.  Ray has spent his entire life trying to get rich and he often neglected his son while pursuing his dream.  Ray will do anything to get rich.  Ryan feels that there are more important things than money, like tracking down cursed antiques.  Ryan decides to go the wedding but he brings his cousin Micki along with him for moral support.  I mean, considering that Micki has just lost two potential husbands in a row, why wouldn’t she want to attend a wedding?

As the result of inventing a new type of gun, Ray has come into money.  Ryan is horrified that his father would get rich off of weaponry but Ray explains that he was inspired by Uncle Louis.  If Louis could get rich just by running a rinky dink antique store, why can’t Ray get rich from his inventions?  Ryan explains that Uncle Louis got rich by selling cursed antiques and selling his soul to the Devil and now, Ryan and Micki spend all of their time traveling around the country (which is totally Canada, regardless of what the show occasionally claims) and trying to undo Louis’s evil.  Ray doesn’t seem to be particularly surprised by any of this.

Ray has an antique of his own, a pipe that Louis gave to him.  Whenever Ray smokes the pipe, it produces an orange smoke that disintegrates anyone that it surrounds.  You know that gun that Ray invented?  Well, it turns out that he didn’t actually invent it.  Instead, he stole it after using his magic pipe to kill the original inventor.  When Jack shows up for the wedding and informs Ryan of all of this, Ryan cannot believe it.  He may be estranged from his father but Ryan can’t accept that he’s turned evil.  But, as we all know from previous episodes, using the cursed antiques is like getting hooked on drugs.  Once you use it once, you become addicted to using it again and again.

This is yet another episode of Friday the 13th that ends with a freeze frame of someone sobbing.  In this case, it’s Ryan crying.  As easy as it id to poke fun at how often Ryan and Micki end up either sobbing or staring at the camera with a forlorn look on their face, it’s actually a sign of the show’s intelligence that it realizes and acknowledges that dealing with cursed antiques is going to take a mental and emotional toll on someone.  Both Ryan and Micki has lost a lot of people this season.  In this episode, Ryan loses his father and, due to the performances of John D. LeMay and Michael Constantine, it definitely carries an emotional punch.  Like so many of the “villains” on this show, Ray was not inherently evil.  Instead, he was a man who lost his soul due to Louis’s evil deal with the Devil.  The best episodes of Friday the 13th are tragedies and that’s certainly the case with this episode.