The only reasonable way I can think to approach “Winter Fire,” the season-one finale of IT: Welcome To Derry—sorry, that’s IT: Welcome To Derry: Chapter One, as the show loudly trumpets in its closing minutes—is the same way I’d try to come to terms with any particularly tough and gristly piece of meat. That is, hack away as much of the inedible and unpalatable connective tissue as you can in the hopes of finding something flavorful and nourishing underneath. So let’s reach for the cleaver, huh?
Because, make no mistake about it, this finale is one of the more ungainly “I told you that story so I could tell you this story, probably some time in Q4 2027” episodes of TV I’ve encountered in a good long time. (And that’s from both directions, actually, courtesy of a post-ending sequence that jumps forward to 1988 in a bald effort to justify this season’s Mrs. Kersh plotline, while also working in a quick Sophia Lillis cameo.) Lillis’ appearance dovetails nicely with the flash of Finn Wolfhard we got a bit earlier in the finale, when poor Pennywise The Dancing Clown is forced to lay epic amounts of track for potential prequel/sequel purposes when he reveals that his current opponent Margie Truman will eventually get married and give birth to IT’s co-killer, Richie Tozier. IT knows this, it tells us entirely unprompted, because it views time in a non-linear fashion. Margie and Lilly later saying this nice and slow, so everybody in the back can get it, means that this show can now justify launching a pre-prequel for itself by following the creature’s attempts to wipe out the bloodlines that lead to its downfall through time. The fact that this makes no goddamn sense in the context of anything that happened in either IT film, the other flashbacks we’ve gotten of Pennywise before, or the character’s basic behavior even in this specific episode doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that the show’s apparently inevitable next season has now been “narratively justified,” and it only took grinding this one to a halt to get it done.
If there’s an elegant way to impart this information, Jason Fuchs’ script and Andy Muschietti’s camera never find it—but that’s not a problem unique to those parts of “Winter Fire” dedicated to the show’s wider franchise duties. After all, it’s just as inept at adding even a single layer of naturality to the way the plotting here shoves all of our board-game pieces frenetically into place, so the show can have something approaching a meaningful climax on the frozen shores of the Penobscot River. The sudden revelation that our old friend the Magic Dagger starts acting like the One Ring if it gets moved even a couple of miles away from where it landed in Derry—because that’s its “home,” duh—at least has a bracing amount of narrative utility, allowing Fuchs to resolve Ronnie and Lilly’s lingering conflict, layer in some last-second “power of friendship” material for the group, and pace out the final confrontation to be one of the slowest-moving cliffhangers I’ve ever seen, all with a single plot point. But I also have a certain soft spot for the more nakedly expositional bit where Kimberly Guerrero busts out charts and maps to provide an exact geographical finish line for the episode’s final race, with Charlotte, Hank, and Leroy nodding along in plot-mandated comprehension as she explains that they have to get to the Magic Tree with the Magic Dagger before the monster clown can get across the river or everything will be lost.
Besides forcing Guerrero to deliver some lines that are just absolute video game fetch quest nonsense (“The earth is a conductor,” she intones with a matter-of-fact gravity I’ve come to think of in these pages as “Remar-esque”), there’s a bigger problem that this hefty bit of last-second construction imposes: Making the end of this conflict so concrete highlights how fast and loose the show has played with IT’s physical capabilities, which allow it to blanket all of Derry in icy fog at the start of the episode but then slow it to the speed of plot once the creature’s making its escape. Bullets inconvenience IT, unless they don’t; the Magic Dagger freezes it, unless the script needs that not to happen. To be clear, I’m not arguing that IT should have rules; its chimeric, unknowable nature is a huge part of what makes it scary. But by giving itself a very deliberate ticking clock for the creature to race against, “Winter Fire” invites these comparisons onto itself, creating situations where it makes what should be the show’s single most valuable asset—one of the scariest creations of one of America’s scariest brains, a monster designed to tap into our most primal fears, and one that had me, personally, scared shitless to reach my hand out into a darkened basement to feel for a light switch as a teenager for years—look either weak, foolish, or both. Tabletop game designers constantly caution dungeon masters not to stat out monsters and gods they don’t want to see killed or humbled by ambitious players; this finale is an able demonstration of why.
Luckily, it’s also a demonstration of some notable elements of Welcome To Derry’s better nature, even if, as predicted, the show never finds a message more interesting and meaningful to cling to than “Friends and family: good! The military murdering people to impose fear on Americans: bad!” (R.I.P. General Shaw: You certainly died dumb.) When Muschietti isn’t giving into his gorier impulses or trying to find more places to jam teeth into Bill Skarsgård’s face, he’s capable of a subtly horrifying visual here or there. I was especially taken with the bit where Pennywise calls the students of Derry High into an assembly, only to greet them with the puppeteered body of Principal Dunleavy. Seeing a grown man’s body hanging limp and used as a ventriloquist dummy is the kind of genuinely spooky imagery this show could have used a lot more of. (It’s a pity we have to get to the skull crushing and CGI light show so soon.)
It’s in its character work, though—always this show’s strongest element—that “Winter Fire” achieves some measure of saving grace. Whether watching Jovan Adepo’s Leroy talk Chis Chalk’s Hallorann out of suicide, or seeing Clara Stack and Amanda Christine sink their teeth into Lilly and Ronnie’s frustrations with both themselves, and each other, this episode gets closest to thriving when it focuses on people, not plot. Even Skarsgård gets a chance to add a few more notes to Pennywise’s emotional toolkit, projecting genuine confusion, and even a little fear, when Hallorann sucks the clown into a paralyzing fantasy that he’s just a delusional Bob Gray. And fuck, I’m not made of stone: When Rich’s ghost emerged from the fog to help slam the Magic Dagger home—tossing a middle finger the clown’s way in the process—I got a giddy little thrill.
I can hold on to those highs, almost all emotional in nature, while contemplating this finale—as long as I don’t start actually, y’know, thinking. Because that’s when my brain starts complaining about how little almost anything IT does in this episode makes sense. Or the way Hallorann asks “How much trouble could a hotel be?” while the show takes a little bow at how goddamn clever it’s being with its Shining references. Or thinking about the absolutely insane decision Charlotte and Leroy make at the end of the episode, choosing not to leave Derry so that they can join Rose’s secret organization of IT watchers—something there was absolutely no evidence of in the films. (Y’know, the ones where the grandson they’ve doomed to live in this hell town is getting constantly threatened by a murder clown with absolutely zero oversight?) Or the way the entire climax takes place on a massive sheet of ice, but people only slip or slide when the narrative absolutely demands it? Some of these are big structural defects, and some of them are just nit-picks. But they add up to an episode of TV that works intermittently in the heart but almost never in the head.
And that’s Welcome To Derry in a nutshell, really. It’s a series you can either appreciate on a strict gut level of spectacle—although I’d argue that it’s one of the least actually scary horror shows I’ve ever seen—or as a showcase of craft and performance. But as a cohesive story, it never came together, failing to grab hold of any major themes or ideas (beyond “murder clown scary,” I guess) or build anything satisfying beyond a handful of core character arcs. I come away from it unconvinced that Muschietti actually knows what was horrifying about Stephen King’s book, or even what could have been scary about this era of American history. (Has a series so deliberately set up as a period show ever cared less about its own historical context?) A crew of talented performers, and some genuinely stomach-turning effects shots, have worked overtime to give the series an energy it otherwise might have failed to possess. (I can still get a latent thrill from that opening car ride in the pilot, or Ronnie’s nightmare sequence in episode two, sequences that merged the visceral with the real in a way that mined both for genuine fear.) But a lot of that spark, if I’m being honest, seemed to desert the series once it had Skarsgård to fall back on for a more rote, if charismatic, flavor of menace. And if this is all Muschietti and his fellow writers and directors could think to do with this fantastic creation, in this rich an era of American history, then my vote is obvious after eight episodes of disappointed hopes: Down, I say, with the clown.
Stray observations
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- • I was really expecting the fog to be a whole “Pennywise pulls all of Derry into his nightmare realm” kind of thing, but, uh, no: It just makes everything cold. And foggy.
- • For the love of god, can the show please be clear on whether this monster can teleport? He seems to go from atmospherically grinning in the Hobby House to the school pretty damn quick.
- • In King’s novel, the Deadlights are the purest expression of IT’s actual form, and the effect of looking at them is fairly mind-destroying. Here, he seems to mostly use them as a convenient way to pack people up for storage, with them none-the-worse-for-wear.
- • I’ve enjoyed Matilda Lawler’s performance as Margie throughout the season; her “I wanna kill that fucking clown” manages to sound plausibly pissed off.
- • After all the ways the show has tried to talk around race, it was kind of weird to hear Pennywise straight-up crack a racist joke about Will while on the phone with Leroy, almost in passing.
- • We get a couple of good Jovan Adepo/Chris Chalk scenes tonight, most notably when Leroy begs Dick not to kill himself (before he can be of use to him). They’re probably the show’s most consistently interesting pairing.
- • Speaking of: Taylour Paige continues to be under-served by these scripts, but Charlotte gets one good scene of kicking her husband’s ass for dragging her family into this nonsense.
- • “So if this dagger is made of the same rock, we can use it to replace a Pillar, and re-lock the cage?” “Exactly! And hopefully save your son. If Mr. Hallorann can find it before the creature reaches this point. On the southern bank of the river, there’s a great pine, a deadwood that’s stood there before even our ancestors. It’s the furthest point that the dagger’s energy can still connect with the other Pillars and restore the—” Okay, sorry, I was going to type out the whole minute-long litany, but then I died of Exposition Poisoning. R.I.P. me.
- • I noted this last week, but the “maturin” root Dick uses to magically find the dagger and cure his brain ghosts is named after a sort of benevolent turtle god in the original novel.
- • “That wasn’t a one-eye thing; it was a pothole thing!”
- • “The sequence of infinite recursive Dicks was pretty neat” is a sentence straight from my notes.
- • Welcome To Derry dares to ask: Can peekaboo be scary? (No.)
- • I think I’ve vented my spleen on the time travel stuff sufficiently, but it is sweet to realize that Margie will end up naming Richie after Rich.
- • Fucking good brakes on that delivery van, huh?
- • The body count in the final confrontation is shockingly low: just Taniel and Shaw!
- • Speaking of, Shaw is a dopey, cliché character, but James Remar really does give it his all.
- • All my complaints about mechanics aside, having Pennywise skip merrily toward his goal is a strong, surreal visual.
- • The adults are hilariously ineffectual at the climax; once Leroy’s gun jams, all the other grown-ups holding assault rifles either just stand around yelling or literally toss them away while their kids save the day. (Rose tries, right at the end, but by then IT has decided it’s a gargoyle now.)
- • One line of dialogue from the kids, acknowledging that they felt Ghost Rich helping save things, would have been sweet. Two would be glaringly obvious. This show, obviously, goes for a third, with Will smiling and going “Rich!”
- • Rich’s parents are very polite toward all the weirdos giving speeches and ominous pronouncements at his funeral. (Margie’s very sweet eulogy comes straight from King’s IT, by the way.)
- • “Winter Fire” is also an IT reference, of course, a line from the love poem Ben writes for Bev. If it has anything to do with the plot of this episode of television that takes place firmly in mid-summer, besides setting up that Bev cameo at the end, your guess is as good as mine.
- • The final glimpse of the Derry sign has an emblem for “The Legion Of White Decency,” the group that burned The Black Spot in the original book. Could be a weird Easter egg, could be setting up something for next season (which will have its fair share of Easter eggs already, ho, ho, ho).
- • I audibly groaned at the “Chapter One” fade-in.
- • Linking Mrs. Kersh to Bev’s mom’s suicide—which would help explain why Pennywise is able to tap such a traumatic memory as a weapon in 2016—would be an interesting character point in a TV show about Bev Marsh. This isn’t one, so I mostly got caught up on the oddness of a 23-year-old Lillis playing an even-younger version of her 15-year-old self.
- • And that’s Welcome To Derry! Interesting failures are still interesting, first and foremost, and I’ve been really happy to pick through this very odd, fitfully smart thing with y’all.
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.
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