We need to talk about IT. Not just IT: Welcome To Derry, which rolls out a bland-with-some-high-notes third episode, “Now You See It,” this week. But IT the creature, “the target,” the Deadlights, Pennywise The Dancing Clown, Bob Gray, whatever nom de horror you want to call it. And specifically, we need to talk about whether the fact that Welcome To Derry’s version of the creature seems to struggle mightily with being genuinely scary when the chips are down counts as a feature or a bug.
There is, after all, meant to be something mildly pathetic about IT. Both Stephen King’s original novel and its various adaptations emphasize that there is a reason, beyond simple taste, that the creature preys almost exclusively on children: Trapped in powerlessness, and at the mercy of both adult cruelty and their own imaginations, youngfolk are easy prey for a creature that’s often bizarrely unsophisticated in its predations. Series creator Andy Muschietti is certainly keyed into what a paper tiger his core subject is, ending his duology of films with the boogeyman being reduced to a pathetic, baby-esque state, having been defeated, basically, because it tried to pull its usual haunted-house bullshit on a bunch of grown-ass adults. Which is an interesting, nuanced take on a horror antagonist—but one that frequently leaves a TV series reliant on the creature for its big set-piece scares feeling more camp than catastrophic.
It’s not like Welcome To Derry can’t still be scary, after all: Our cold open tonight, which follows a young man exploring a fair sideshow in 1908, packs a pleasantly frightening punch, successfully channeling the chaos and allure of this kind of liminal space. Surrounded by sounds of playful violence—thrown baseballs, hurled knives, the pounding footfalls of a carnival barker who successfully zeroes in on his next mark—we watch young Francis Shaw be pulled in by the delicious paradox of horror: You don’t want to see it. But at the same time, you’ve got to see it. The sequence flirts with the idea that IT might be at work here—it’s to Welcome To Derry’s benefit that any scene of surreality has that threat looming over its head—but is more effective for the creature’s absence. This isn’t manufactured horror, as Francis is lured, unable to stop his own feet from shuffling forward, toward the “Skeleton Man” who lurks at the back of the freak show. This is the genuine, awful, gleeful stuff, the grisly building blocks from which nightmares and traumas are built.
Compare that with IT’s actual first appearance in “Now You See It,” which pops up in that same cold open, after the Shaw family car breaks down conveniently close to some Native kids selling water. A weird cut shows Francis befriending and playing with one of the group’s girls, only to run into a bit of the woods that the locals know to avoid. And, suddenly, we’re stuck in another game of lackluster supernatural peek-a-boo, as the creature begins stalking the young boy with the only tools IT seems to actually have at its disposal: quick camera cuts and big, gnarly teeth. Yes, there’s something kind of interesting in the idea that the creature pulled the Skeleton Man out of Francis’ head as a symbol of something that scared the shit out of him. But it’s certainly not scary, and it raises questions about how well this version of the creature, all gore and spectacle and teeth in your face, can be used for anything like actual terror.
If I seem fixated on this point, well, it’s partially because IT being scary feels pretty important to an IT TV show. But it’s also because there isn’t a ton else that happens in “Now You See It,” which steadily moves forward the pieces on each of the show’s (still entirely disconnected) plots. In Kid World, a new proto-Losers Club gets formed as Ronnie and Lilly bury the, um, hatchet over Lilly implicating Ronnie’s dad in the theater deaths and then recruit Will and his new buddy Rich to try to get a photograph of the creature stalking them. This culminates in a sequence in a graveyard that feels like it could have been pulled straight from some 2000s-era Disney Channel Halloween film, with the kids playing hot potato with their camera while being stalked on bikes by the unconvincingly floating spectral forms of some of their murdered friends. The whole thing looks incredibly cheesy, while attempts to make the audience think young Will might have gotten got right at the end of this section are undercut by the fact that there’s no way Welcome To Derry will pull the “establish a kid hero then abruptly kill them” twist twice. The need to deploy the creature a couple of times per episode to meet the spook quota really isn’t doing our boy Pennywise any favors here; the actual effect is to only underline how outmatched IT seems against bike-riding schoolchildren when it’s actually going in for the kill.
Meanwhile, over in Operation: Murder Clowns To Beat The Russkies, we get some backstory, as well as most of the episode’s best scenes. It turns out that that scared little boy in the cold open grew up to be James Remar, and the girl was local antiques dealer Rose (Kimberly Norris Guerrero). (The episode literally fades between the child and adult performers twice, as a kindness to the terminally inattentive in the audience.) Despite some lingering flickers of puppy love, the duo find themselves on opposite sides of a brewing conflict, since she and her community would desperately like the military to stop prodding at the child-eating alien in their backyard, while Shaw remains convinced that a spooky shapeshifter will somehow be the ultimately weapon to win the Cold War.
Stuck in the middle of it all are Mike Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) and the episode’s standout MVP, Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann. If nothing else, “Now You See It” is a great showcase for Chalk, whose Hallorann moves through the world with a mix of ease and guardedness that makes him seem like the only guy in Derry who knows exactly how bad an idea General Shaw’s big plans for peace in our time might be. And this feels especially true after an airborne scouting trip (with Hanlon and his buddy Pauly as pilots) doesn’t do much to find where the creature is actually lurking…but does clue IT in that someone is looking for it, while also giving Hallorann a near-death experience (and our first non-credits glimpse of Pennywise proper in the series) in the process.
I’ll confess to a certain amount of affection for this objectively ridiculous “let’s try to militarize the shapeshifting clown alien” plot, which lands in an enjoyable goofy place for me, buoyed by how firmly both Remar and Chalk commit to what they’re doing. (The military has, among other things, noticed the 27-year cycle thing, categorizing different sets of incidents as clearly being caused by IT’s effects on the people of Derry.) It helps that Welcome To Derry seems to simply do better when it’s focused in on its adult cast: Observe the sequence where police chief Clint Bowers slowly turns the screws on Hank Grogan, for instance, and most especially the post-mission segment where Hanlon has Halloran over to his house for dinner.
That dinner-table conversation is a fascinating three-way game between Chalk, Adepo, and Taylour Paige, as the episode steadily tracks what both is, and is not, left unsaid between these three adults. (This is part of what often turns me off about the kid scenes, now that I think about it: True to life or not, Welcome To Derry’s scripts seems to think children broadcast every thought and feeling in their heads, while watching these three not say things is some of the most riveting TV of the hour.) The wry, world-weary irony with which Chalk plays Hallorann gives contrast to both Hanlons in fascinating ways, creating both bonds and tensions between them. The vibes only get more interesting when Mike confronts Hallorann in private about him both Shining around in his head and being one of the gas-mask dudes from the attack from “The Pilot.” Chalk gets the line of the episode when he reassures Hanlon that, having witnessed how ice-cold calm the man’s brain is with a gun in his face, “You are not the kind of fella I am likely to fuck with, Major.”
Which is all to say that, three episodes in, Welcome To Derry remains a well-acted, interestingly plotted drama for adults that only grudgingly seems to share time with a much-less accomplished children’s horror show. I dearly want these two sides of the series’ brain to be in fuller conversation with each other, for the horror to bleed into the adult world, and for more psychological nuance to pop up among its kids. (And for both, I want the monstrous vortex at the center of this whole thing to be capable of generating actual frights.) For now, though, it remains a show where you pick and choose a few high spots amid a buffet of far more prosaic fare.
Stray observations
- • The slingshot here feels like an attempt to reincorporate a small plot point excised from Muschietti’s IT movies, where Bev Marsh shoots Pennywise in the head with one, solidifying the idea that IT can be harmed. (Bev uses a big piece of rebar to similar effect in the films.)
- • For all the buildup it got, Juniper Hill actually seems pretty chill. It even comes complete with Madeline Stowe, doing what I can only assume is a Twelve Monkeys callback by being the one adult who believes Lilly about what she saw.
- • Bowers is obviously a pretty crappy cop, but he does seem to actually prove that Hank Grogan wasn’t where he said he was on the night the theater attack happened. (It’s weird to see that kind of detective “gotcha” moment come from a character we’re clearly meant to loathe.)
- • Re: Hallorann’s claim to have slept with Aretha Franklin – Franklin was an established artist by 1962, when this episode takes place; she was also only 20. Hallorann’s age isn’t said here, but Chalk’s 47, so….
- • IT’s tendency to attack people via dead family members, while occasionally present—mostly with George Denbrough—wasn’t nearly as pronounced in other versions of this story.
- • The Shaw/Rose confrontation also reestablishes the weird effect that IT/Derry has on memory once people leave the town.
- • For the second episode straight, IT doesn’t deploy Phil’s corpse the way it does Teddy and Susie’s. Is he still alive somewhere down in those sewers? (Or did the show just decide that two spooky dead kids was enough?)
- • I don’t know that there’s a really good way to shoot kids riding bikes for TV, but one that didn’t immediately make me think of this scene from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace would have been good.
