Episode
Friday the 13th: The Series: Jack-in-the-Box
Overview
A friend of Micki's, who works at a pool club, is drowned by two intruders. The widow inadvertently gives her daughter a jack-in-the-box from a sailor's museum, and the girl discovers that if she kills people with it, she can summon back the ghost of her father for a little while. When the jack-in-the-box opens, the victim is grabbed by a water spirit from a nearby source of water and drowned. The ghostly father isn't happy with his daughter's methods, but the girl's grieving mother has turned to alcohol. Eventually the ghost contacts Micki, who manages to show up in time to stop the girl from killing herself so that she can be with her father forever. Micki recovers the antique and the girl and her mother try to work things out.
Details
- Series
- Friday the 13th: The Series
- Season
- Season 3
- Episode
- Episode 17
- Air date
- 1990-05-05
- Runtime
- 45 min
Episode context
Jack-in-the-Box is Episode 17 in Season 3 of Friday the 13th: The Series. It aired on 1990-05-05. The runtime is 45 min.
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Episode 16: My Wife as a Dog
A lonely fireman is obsessed with his dog, loving it more than his shrewish wife. He is able to fulfill his fondest wish when he finds a cursed aboriginal dogleash that lets him slowly merge his wife and his dog into one being that will love him forever.
Episode 18: Spirit of Television
A psychic medium is dying of a rare degenerative disease. She stumbles upon a cursed television set, which allows her to put her customers in contact with the spirits of their dearly departed. Besides being paid a hefty fee for these real manifestations, she also gets a temporary 10-day extension of her life. The curse later sends the same spirits, horribly twisted and vengeful, after their ""loved one"" and kill them. The trio notice the pattern of deaths and a friend of Jack's tries to debunk the medium's powers. Eventually he commits suicide rather then let the spirits claim him, and the failure to follow through means the medium dies too.
More episodes from this season
Episode 15: The Long Road Home
In the first few minutes, Micki and Johnny recover a yin-yang amulet that lets the user switch bodies after killing someone. They steal it from a wife and her lover trying to kill her husband, and manage to escape. But, on the way back they run out of gas and stumble on a home lived in by two brothers. The brothers are psychopaths who have stuffed their family to keep around the house, and they want Micki. Johnny breaks his leg, but uses the amulet to switch places with the younger brother. He eventually convinces Micki of who he is, and they eventually manage to restore Johnny to his original body. The younger brother is killed, and the other dying brother uses the amulet to inhabit the stuffed body of one of his family members. However, Micki and Johnny manage to puncture enough holes in the animated body that all the stuffing is blown out by the high winds of a storm.
Episode 19: The Tree of Life
An exclusive fertility clinic is much mroe than it seems. It is run by a cult of female Druids who use a cursed fertility statue to expand their numbers. When infertile couples come to them, they use a ritual that kills the husband and results in the birth of twins: a boy and a girl. They only tell the mother that one child was born, and turn over the boy. They keep the girl to raise as a Druid priestess. A friend of Micki's is undergoing treatment, leading the trio to the clinic. They manage to break up the statue before the Druid priestesses can use a ritual to cause the fertility statue to replicate. The head Druids die, and the trio manage to reunite the young girls with their true mothers.
Episode 14: Repetition
In this unusual episode, none of the main characters appear except Micki very briefly at the beginning and end. A newspaper columnist accidentally hits a young girl who was wearing a cursed cameo. The silhouette starts harping at him in the young girl's voice to free her by killing someone else. The columnist then kills his ambitious, obsessive mother which frees the girl...but then the mother's voice starts haunting him. He kills a homeless man to bring her back to life, but then is haunted by that man's voice. Ultimately the columnist tries to reverse the curse by killing his mother and then the girl again, and ends up killing himself. At the end, a social worker stumbles across the locket and turns it over to Micki.
Episode 20: The Charnel Pit
Micki is sent through a two-way time portal contained within a painting and finds herself at the mercy of the Marquis de Sade.
Episode 13: Midnight Riders
Micki, Johnny, and Jack are taking a break, and star-gazing in Jack's old hometown. However, a ghostly biker gang, the Midnight Riders, rolls into town. At the same time, Jack's father Cawley, who has been gone for ten years, also shows up. The gang is out for revenge, as they were falsely accused of raping a girl who lied to protect her reputation and explain the fact she was pregnant. Jack's father was one of the ones who killed the gang and hid the secret. It turns out that Jack's father is also a ghost: he died at sea, but has returned on the anniversary of the gang's death. The girl and the others who participated in the gang's death are killed, and after a brief reunion with his son, Cawley's ghost disappears as well.
Episode 12: Epitaph For a Lonely Soul
A lonely, somewhat twisted mortician stumbles upon the cursed properties of an antique embalmers' aspirator. He can use it to kill one person, to resurrect another without memory. He kills someone with it and then uses it to resurrect a young woman he has fallen in love with. Unfortunately, the woman's husband begins to suspect, and the resurrected woman starts to remember her past life. Ultimately the mortician is killed after he starts a fire, and the women decide to remain in the fire and die again, leaving the trio to recover the indestructible antique from the ashes.
Episode 11: Year of the Monkey
The trio track a cursed tea set to a samurai, Musashi: an honorable man, but one who refuses to give them the antique unless they aid him in recovering a mystical set of oriental monkey statues (which represent See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil). A wealth Japanese industrialist, Tanaka, has them, and they reward his honorable behavior with success in business. Now he is almost ready to die, and the magic of the statues require that he use them to test the honor of his three children to see which one will inherit. Each monkey gives a child magical powers, but the two sons abuse their power and fail to act honorably. Forced to choose seppuku (ritual suicide) they refuse, and the monkey statues then kill them. each death further reinvigorates Tanaka. The daughter passes her test, but is then required to use the statues to kill her father. She refuses, and kills herself. Musashi then confronts his old friend Tanaka and tricks him into killing the unarmed samurai. Having acted dishon
Episode 10: Mightier Than the Sword
A famous author of real-life biographies of serial killers, famed for his insights, owes his success to an antique pen. He writes out his story of a serial killer's murders, then uses the pen to ""inject"" them with the story. The curse then turns the victim into a serial killer controlled by the story and forced to go out and kill. Eventually they are captured and then the author extracts the evil just as they are executed, leaving them confused and then dead. Micki becomes the author's next victim. Fortunately, Jack and Johnny stop her before she can kill anyone other than the author himself.
Episode 9: Femme Fatale
Desmond Williams, a director, is obsessed with the role that his now-aged actress-wife played 50 years ago: that of femme fatale Lili Lita in a film-noir crime film. He finds a cursed reel that lets him bring the Lili character to life, by pushing an innocent female victim into the film itself while its playing. The victim is forced to relive the entire movie...which ends with the character they are stuck as being killed. Meanwhile, the movie version of Lili emerges into the real-world for the same period of time. To stay alive, Lili must convince Desmond to kill her aged real-life counterpart. The character is also increasingly dissatisfied with her limited ""life"" as a sex toy for Desmond. Ultimately, the aged actress shoots her husband when she finds out what is going on, and decides to enter into the film (replacing a trapped Micki) so she can have her youth back. Trapped with nowhere to go when the film ends, the film Lili is destroyed for good.
Episode 8: Night Prey
20 years ago, a man's fiancee is stolen by vampires and transformed into one. Obsessed, he hunts vampires until the modern day, when he stumbles upon a cursed antique cross that lets him not only repel vampires, but incinerate them. Of course, he must kill someone to get the cross to work. Jack's friend, a priest, is the first one killed by the cross and Jack becomes involved as a result. Ultimiately we find out that the man's fiancee is now a willing vampire. Ultimately, everyone is killed, including the vampire hunter and his fiancee.