It was around the point that a military commando team was getting murdered by a big clown dressed like Uncle Sam—after following a Native guy with a magical rock down into some sewers in search of 13 other magical rocks, in the hopes that that they could use them to build a Pennywise The Dancing Clown Bomb that the Air Force could drop on the Russians—that I started to worry that IT: Welcome To Derry might just be kind of a dumb television show.
The battle between the show’s dumber and smarter aspects—the “fuck it, how goofy can we go?” extremism embodied by Bill Skarsgård croaking out “I want you” to some doomed soldiers who are apparently scared of, like, patriotic propaganda and those elements more rooted in the actual human emotions that IT feeds on—has been running since the series began, of course. But that doesn’t change the fact that “Neibolt Street” is a particularly weak showing for the forces of nuance. Outside of a typically good performance from Chris Chalk (who literally gets sucked into a whole different TV show for the back half of this installment), this is Welcome To Derry at its least thoughtful, and, consequently, its least scary. The best you can hope for through most of this is to enjoy the camp, and that’s a real waste of what Welcome To Derry can do.
We start with two quick scenes that serve as an aftermath to “The Great Swirling Apparatus Of Our Planet’s Function,” including a check-in on the aftermath of Dick Hallorann’s psychic interrogation of Taniel. Despite the young local being left foaming at the mouth, the recovered information—magic rocks, pillars, the house on Neibolt Street, etc.—all sounds like good news to General Shaw, with James Remar continuing to move heaven and Earth to try to make his endlessly chipper military man seem anything less than completely deranged in his pursuit of a plan that passed “whackadoo” a few convolutions ago and is now headed straight for full-blown “cockamamie.”
Meanwhile, we also get a follow-up to Margie’s bad day in shop class, as she and Lilly reunite over their now-shared knowledge that something nasty is hunting the children of Derry. Margie’s been the most interesting of the show’s kid characters by a fair margin ever since the series’ first episode, and Matilda Lawler demonstrates here, and elsewhere, that she can handle the show’s sometimes clashing instincts for comedy, horror, and drama in a way that her peers periodically struggle with. Her reconciliation with Lilly is a short scene, but since it’ll also turn out to be one of the only grounded, not-racing-toward-the-finish-line moments of this whole episode, it feels worthwhile to take a second to praise the fine work both Lawler and Clara Stack do here in capturing the emotions of the reunion.
Whoops, enough feeling! We’ve got to get to the next big reveal, as the kids meet up at the Derry Standpipe, only to find someone hiding there in wait: Matty Clements, apparently alive and…okay, not well, but doing a lot better than a kid who’s supposedly been in IT’s custody for four long months should be. Cue the little girl singing about that dang ol’ ribbon in her hair.
When we pick back up post-credits, it’s to the trundling machinery and beeping “backing up” sirens of a TV show in full-tilt construction mode, as Brad Caleb Kane’s script bends over backwards to build its way toward a conclusion that will see the kids, the military, and IT all running through the Derry sewers at the same time. The kids have “Matty,” and his revelation that Phil’s still alive down there, as their personal goad, information that eventually sees Lilly decide that there’s nothing to be done but to dole out some Valium, give a big inspirational speech, and lead her friends into a subterranean deathtrap. Credit where it’s due: Although we in the audience can be fairly sure that’s not really Matty Clements dangling salvation in front of the town’s heroic children—he’s been gone since January, and his statement that IT sleeps during the day is definitely a lie—the episode itself doesn’t tip its hand too much until the kids are already deep in the snare. (While I’m handing out plaudits, the slightly unfocused shot of the back of Matty’s head opening up to reveal IT’s teeth just before the episode’s big reveal is pleasantly nasty confirmation of the audience’s worst fears.)
The stuff with the military assault on the Well House is just pure goofball nonsense, though, and not even an especially fun version of it. On the surface, there’s nothing automatically wrong with doing a scene in a horror work where a bunch of hardened combat types run into something way beyond the limits of conventional warfare. But between the facelessness of the troops, the general cheapness of the sewer sets, and the very contrived nature of the plotting here, there’s very little to recommend about the hour’s confrontation between military might and a big, spooky clown. I found myself especially frustrated with the obvious, coincidence-laden swings that Kane’s script takes to slam the show’s various character groups together. I could almost, nearly buy that IT was deliberately setting Leroy up to shoot his own son, because we get evidence elsewhere that the creature has some sense of long-term planning. But everything to do with Taniel’s dropped magical dagger, which Lilly stumbles over right before Pennywise goes in for the kill—repelling the monster in the process—is the kind of half-assed it’s-Friday-afternoon-and-I-need-to-get-out-of-here screenwriting that borders on outright insulting.
I suspect the full arrival of Skarsgård as Pennywise is meant to paper over some of these obvious cracks, but I’ll double down on my assertion that this specific version of the character just isn’t very scary when he’s placed front and center before the camera. (I think it’s somewhat to do with the makeup and the actor: Part of what makes clowns scary, for me, is the way their cosmetics naturally emphasizes the sags of the human face, but Skarsgård’s face is so angular that it always reads as too slick to be really scary. But I digress.) If the creature really was actively engineering Leroy’s errant gunshot—putting the military man’s killer instincts to work to provoke him into a horrible mistake—I’ll concede that that carries some actual weight of horror (even if the episode itself only seems loosely interested in cranking up that tension). But once the mask is off, Pennywise mostly just serves as a big, snarly monster—and one who gets scared by, and runs away from, magic rocks, which is mildly amusing at best and just plain dopey at worst.
Where “Neibolt Street” works, it does so in small doses and mostly in the margins. There’s something interesting, for instance, about hearing Rose and her people talking clinically about the creature’s cycles—including the fact that Derry’s general vibe of murderous anger is picking up quickly as the 1962 cycle escalates toward its inevitable, and terminal, gout of violence. The “Mommy’s Little Helper” sequence gets some queasy tension and laughs out of showing the kids stoned out of their gourds—even if it amounts to absolutely nothing once they’re actually facing down the creature. (On a similar note, Leroy seems pretty damn jumpy for a guy who’s supposed to have gotten his ability to feel fear knocked out of his head, huh?) And while I continue to get less than the show seems to want me to out of Lilly’s relationship with asylum housekeeper Ingrid, the reveal that she’s married to Stan The Butcher—and, specifically, the sudden reveal of him stewing in the darkness of their home in a fit of seething husbandly brutishness—makes for one of the only quality scares of the evening.
But there’s only so much that marginal moments can do when the main event seems like it can’t think of anything more meaningful to achieve with a creature this rich in metaphorical power than slap some clown makeup on a weak copy of Freddy Krueger and call it good. I’ve bemoaned this before, but a creature that manipulates, draws out, and devours human fear is an incredible opportunity for thematic storytelling, one that the IT movies had to race past in their efforts to condense 1,100 pages of book into two regular-sized movies. A TV series could luxuriate in this material, use those things our heroes are most afraid of to sharpen and define their characters. But beyond having Pennywise toss out a “Duck and cover!” when he’s going into chase mode, “Neibolt Street” just isn’t interested in using IT to reflect on either Derry’s characters or its culture. Instead, it chooses to double down on the magic rocks—which is, I regret to say, exactly the sort of thing a dumb television show might do.
Stray observations
- • Leroy and Charlotte maintain their status as the only good parents in this entire town, past or future, by moving Will out of Derry the second they find out it’s a cage for a child-eating monster.
- • “29 Neibolt Street. It’s an abandoned home atop a tunnel system that leads directly to the 13 Pillars.” Bless him, Remar really does try to sell these video game cutscene-ass lines.
- • I skipped over the Hank Grogan plotline in the recap proper, but the suggestion that IT engineered his accidental jailbreak gives some hints about where we might be headed in terms of the Black Spot arson that’s set to end the ’62 cycle. (Also, there’s a weird misdirect where it’s suggested he’s taking Ingrid hostage, only for it to be revealed that she’s his secret lover.)
- • The most interesting plot development of the whole episode is probably the one that centers on what happens to Hallorann, who gets sucked underwater by IT early in the military raid and then tortured by a vision of his gun-toting grandfather. The lockbox stuff in this sequence is all pulled directly from Doctor Sleep, by the way, where Dick teaches it as a ghost-containment technique to Danny Torrance—the suggestion here being that he’s just had his third eye permanently jammed open.
- • Chalk is good as ever in these scenes, projecting an almost childlike fear mixed in with his bravado; if you want to hear him talk about his process for approaching Hallorann, check out our interview with him.
- • When I’m doing second and third passes on an episode for stray observations, my hope is always that I’ll see something I missed in a scene I didn’t like, something that’ll help me get a more appreciative handle on it. But no: The Uncle Sam thing is just pure Nightmare On Elm Street silliness.
- • Farewell, Pauly. You died as you lived: in a way generally superfluous to meaningful events.
