Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 22 (The Pirate's Promise)

The premise of Friday the 13th: The Series was pretty simple.  Two cousins inherit an antique shop from an uncle only to find out that some of the items are cursed.  They rename the shop Curious Goods and run it as a front so that they might track down those cursed items that Uncle Lewis unleashed on the world.  They then store the items in a vault so that no more harm can come as a result of those items.

This week, it’s a cursed foghorn.  Cousins Micki and Ryan travel to a coastal town only to find that it was sold to someone who was traveling and can’t be reached.  Well, maybe not.  The guy who sold it, Joe, lures a young lady back to his cool lighthouse only to show her the nifty foghorn that he supposedly sold to some unnamed person.  He then kills the woman, drags her down the stairs and hands her over to a cloaked figure in a rowboat.

The town was founded by the crew of a ship.  They mutinied, setting their captain adrift.  It turns out that the cloaked figure is the ghost of said captain.  He’s using Joe to kill the descendants of the crew, who all miraculously still live in the town.  Oh, and each crewmember has exactly one descendant, each of which is really easy to find and subdue.  (No one has left town nor have they received any martial-arts training.)  Micki and Ryan retrieve the foghorn only after Joe has killed all of the descendants and subsequently died as the final victim of the curse.

My first obvious complaint is that each crewmember had exactly one descendant.  The town was founded in 1720, meaning that something like 12-15 generations have passed.  How is it that each generation had only one child?  Assuming two children per generation, you should be talking 4,000 descendants.  Plus, given that no one seems to move out of town, there might be people descended from several people on the ship.

Another thing I noticed is that Micki and Ryan dropped the ball on this one.  If the curse is that descendants have to die and that Joe seemingly completed his mission, the artifact would be useless.  Even if the curse would allow someone else to use the foghorn, there are no more descendants left.

This curse also seems awfully specific to me.  Most of the cursed items are generic.  Cursed items could be used by anyone and applied to anyone.  I’m assuming that the nature of the curse wasn’t determined until Uncle Lewis’s deal with the devil, but I could be wrong.  It is an interesting curse, at least.

Overall, the episode is fairly decent.  The show at least put some effort into the history of the item.  I just think a few points could have been done better.  At the very least, Joe was lucky that none of the family lines had died out.

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Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 9 (Root of All Evil)

One of the things about Friday the 13th: The Series is a lack of explanation as to how the cursed items work.  In the pilot, it’s said that Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil and that, as a way for fortune and immorality, he sold those cursed items to unsuspecting customers in his antiques shop. After his death, his niece and nephew were left to clean up the mess with the help of an old business partner of his.

This episode starts with a mother and son doing some yard work.  The son becomes possessed with rage and shoves his mother into a mulcher/wood chipper.  The next scene is in curious goods some time later.  Jack, the old business partner, finds a letter addressed to Lewis.  In it, he finds references to knowledge from below, indicating that the writer knew about the cursed items.  Also enclosed is a $100 bill.

This leads Jack, Micki and Ryan to track down the sender.  They find a vacant house, but they know that the item is the aforementioned mulcher, as the return address matched an entry in their ledger of items that Lewis sold.  They are able to track down the mulcher to the maintenance crew at n estate that’s about to become a park.

Smitty is the new owner of the mulcher.  He has no idea what it is.  However, Smitty has an employee named Adrian.  Adrian becomes possessed much like the son did in the opening scene.  When someone tries to hit Adrian up for some hush money, Adrian feeds the guy to the mulcher and receives a few bills, all dated 1937.

For those wondering, there is no Series 1937 American currency in any denomination.   There is Series 1937 Canadian money.  Given that the currency shown is American and the show is filmed in Canada, I think the person checking facts for the show might have gotten the countries mixed up.

At any rate, Adrian soon realizes that the richer the person is, the more money he gets.  Adrian is in luck, as the estate he works on has lots of rich people walking around.  He tries to mulch people as quickly as he can, resulting in a bag full of cash.

During all of this, Micki’s fiancé, Lloyd, pays a visit to the antique store.  At the beginning of the series, Lloyd and Micki were engaged to be married.  Inheriting the store put that marriage on hold.  It’s somewhat surprising that it took this long to deal with it, but it was bound to happen.  Micki tries showing Lloyd around, as he has a right to know what she’s doing.  He doesn’t buy any of it, even when he sees her help get the mulcher back.  In the end, she decides to stay with Jack and Ryan; Lloyd goes home without Micki.

Overall, the episode is still a little thin.  The episodes seem to be relatively self-contained so far, with this one being a notable exception.  If not for the engagement aspect, you could have watched a lot of the episodes out of order.  There’s very little continuity so far between each episode.  In fact, if this was the first episode you watched, it would probably be easy to figure out what’s going on.  (There wouldn’t be many revelations going back and watching the pilot episode.)

Also, it seems like much of the episode is spent trying to contain the artifact.  Jack, Ryan and Micki seem to find the mulcher rather quickly, meaning there has to be a good deal of chasing people around.  (I suspect that this is why this episode was chosen to deal with Micki’s engagement.  They held off until they needed the filler.)

This episode, like many of the others, probably could have been shortened to a half-hour format.  Either that, or find something else to fill the time.  Some of the items have a historical connection, but little is said about it.  Here, we just have a garden tool that seems to spit out money.  There’s no debate on what determines a person’s worth.  The resulting cash is simply a function of their net worth.

I’ve decided that I’m going to finish out this season.  I’m really hoping that the episodes get better.  This one at least shows some promise.  I hope that it’s not misplaced.

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