Copyright Vulture
As someone who has read It multiple times, I appreciate that Pennywise is so much more than a clown. Adaptations have an opportunity to show off the myriad forms he can take, and Welcome to Derry has done a (mostly) good job of that so far. But it’s a little weird that we haven’t seen Bill Skarsgård yet, right? “The idea behind the delayed appearance is the buildup of expectation,” Andy Muschietti explained in a Hollywood Reporter interview. “When and where the clown is going to appear was a game that I wanted to play with the audience.” While I respect that rationale, the constant teasing of Pennywise is really starting to grate. “Now You See It” presents multiple chances for the dancing clown to pop up, only to pull back. Even as the show’s disparate story lines begin to cohere, it’s hard not to feel frustrated by this increasingly tedious restraint. Take the opening sequence, which flashes back to a 1908 carnival. It’s only natural to expect we’re about to get our first glimpse of Pennywise, but the sole clown we see is a boy watching the proceedings from a distance. (The familiar makeup suggests this may be a younger version of Pennywise, whose form It will eventually assume, but doesn’t that timeline seem off?) A boy named Francis visits a freak show and gets the crap scared out of him by a one-eyed old man, then runs out of the tent and straight into his father. “Don’t be a damn sissy,” his dad says, before presenting Francis with the slingshot he won for him. Soon enough, Francis has traded the slingshot to some Indigenous kids for the water they’re selling on the side of the road. He ends up befriending them, particularly a young girl named Rose. (As you may guess, she’s the same Rose we met last week, the proprietor of the secondhand shop the Hanlons frequent.) Francis later fails to heed Rose’s warning not to enter the forest, where he encounters the same old man from the freak show. The sequence starts off creepily enough with the creature lurking behind the trees, but once he morphs into a CGI monster who chases Francis on all fours, it presents the same bland scares as the It movies do at their worst — with the added disappointment of a carnival-based manifestation that’s not a clown. Francis is saved by Rose, who fires the slingshot directly at the monster’s head, giving both children time to escape. Back in 1962, Lilly leaves Juniper Hill with a higher dose of medication, which seems like the best-case scenario given the threat of lobotomy in the show’s opening titles. Her one ally, the as yet unnamed head of housekeeping, played by Madeleine Stowe, advises Lilly to make things right with Ronnie. She also offers some much-needed support on the flying-demon-baby front when she says, “If you tell me that you’ve seen the impossible, then I believe you.” (As refreshing as it is to hear this from an adult in Derry, I’m not sure it’s the best policy for a person who works with mental patients.) Regardless, making amends with Ronnie is harder than Lilly would like. Things are not looking good for Hank, with Chief Bowers conjuring up another witness who swears she saw him lurking in the shadows near the Capitol Theater that night, and everyone at school assumes Ronnie is the daughter of a serial killer. Rich says since Hank was arrested, the cops must have had evidence. “This is America, you can’t just throw people in jail for nothing,” he notes in one of the episode’s most darkly funny lines. “Are we talking about the same country?” Will astutely responds. But as Lilly explains to Ronnie, telling the truth now won’t do anything to absolve Hank — everyone already thinks Lilly is crazy. They’re going to have to get proof of the supernatural being that has been tormenting them, and snapping a photo with Lilly’s camera may just be their best bet. Some adults, it turns out, are well aware of the paranormal threat. Over at the Derry Air Force Base, Colonel Fuller confirms to General Shaw that the car they pulled from the dig site belonged to the Bradley Gang, but they haven’t been able to find anything hidden inside it. We learn a lot here, namely that they know about It (or “the entity”) and that it can take on different forms and operates in 27-year cycles. I’m not sure how I feel about the military being this knowledgeable, but much of it seems to come from what Rose told Shaw back in 1908. Yes, he’s the grown-up Francis, and he has the slingshot to prove it. Because they’re running out of time to find the Cold War–ending weapon they’re searching for, Shaw suggests sending Dick Hallorann up in a plane above Derry, where he may be able to use the slingshot — an object that put its mark on the entity 54 years prior — as a guide. Naturally, Leroy and Pauly are the pilots tasked with getting Dick in the air, and they’re advised to think of him as a “human compass” and go wherever he tells them. On the plane, Dick clutches the slingshot and begins sweating and muttering to himself before becoming unresponsive. When Leroy radios the base to ask for permission to return, he’s told to stay the course. Meanwhile, things are getting weirder for Dick. He starts moving to the back of the plane and looks down to see that his feet are in water. As a metal door closes behind him, he suddenly finds himself not high above Derry but beneath it — he’s in the intersection of the sewers known as the cistern, which movie fans will recognize instantly as Pennywise’s lair. Once again, we come agonizingly close to seeing the clown. His circus wagon opens, and from the darkness, two yellow eyes gleam back. But Dick’s grandma, hovering above with Pennywise’s levitating child victims, floats down with a warning: “He’s coming, Dickie, get out of here now.” There’s a close call when Dick opens the cargo door and nearly jumps out of the plane, but Leroy stops him just in time. Back on land, Dick has a warning of his own for Shaw. “It wasn’t supposed to see us; it wasn’t supposed to know,” he says. “I got a feeling we keep on like we’re doing, something bad is coming.” While I’m not sold on Welcome to Derry’s military story line yet, I do appreciate the way the show now connects Dick to the Hanlon family. After last week’s overly scattered installment, things are beginning to feel a bit more streamlined. Dick joins Leroy and Charlotte for dinner, where we learn more about the family. Charlotte was a history teacher back in Shreveport, but she has yet to find comparable work in Derry. There’s also the matter of her civil-rights activism, a clear source of tension between her and her husband. As Charlotte explains, barely suppressing her resentment, Leroy is concerned that her commitment to the cause could stall his ascent at work. Dick is sympathetic to Leroy’s perspective, noting that being Black in the military means having your personal life scrutinized, which is little comfort for Charlotte. Thus far, she may be the most compelling character on the show, particularly given that her natural inclination toward calling out injustice clashes with the deep-seated bigotry of Derry that Pennywise feeds on. I’m hoping we see more of her in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, our focus is mostly on Dick and Leroy. The latter realizes Dick was one of the men who broke into his room in the first episode because he could feel Dick reading his thoughts. “Stay out of my head,” Leroy cautions. “We clear?” Dick, who was able to instantly suss out his inability to feel fear, assures Leroy he’s not the kind of person Dick would ever want to cross. Let’s check back in with Charlotte and Leroy’s son. Will is enjoying burgers and milkshakes with Rich at the Derry Grill when Ronnie and Lilly show up asking for help. Knowing Will’s interest in science, Ronnie has correctly reasoned that he may be able to develop any photos they can snap. The boys don’t believe Ronnie and Lilly’s story about a kid-killing creature, but they agree to help anyway. (Rich calls out that Will may be motivated by his crush on Ronnie, which feels a little sudden until you remember they’re 12.) Over at the Derry Standpipe, Will smartly asks how they’re going to get the being to appear. Lilly says they could simply wait — or they could try to conjure it. When she points out that it’s appearing as their dead loved ones to scare them, Rich suggests it might be an orixá. His tío was a babalao (a Santería priest) who could conjure a spirit known as an orixá that could then take the form of its targets’ ancestors. The last thing we need is additional mythology here, and traditionally speaking, an orixá is more divine than evil, but it does give the 1962 Losers Club some direction. Rich believes he can mimic his tío’s ceremony to draw out the spirit, so they head to the cemetery with candles in tow. Sadly, this final sequence is the low point of the episode. Even amid some clunky exposition, Welcome to Derry has at least managed to offer compelling horror set pieces to keep heart rates up. The cemetery scene is … not that. After the orixá ceremony fails to conjure anything, Rich admits he thinks it’s made up — along with the idea of a shape-shifting monster that has been murdering the children of Derry. Ronnie storms off with Lilly following close behind, but as Will and Rich try to catch up to the girls, strange things start to happen. The ground of the cemetery opens up beneath them, and specters rise into the air. The effect here is not nearly as frightening as it should be, especially on a show whose premiere featured multiple children torn apart. These ghosts, which take the form of their dead friends, are mostly just goofy, with the shoddy special effects and glowy auras giving the whole thing a distinctly Haunted Mansion vibe; critically, the threat never feels real, which undermines any tension. After all the kids have been suitably spooked, Will finds his way into a crypt, where he snaps a pic of the creature advancing on him. “I should have believed you,” he later concedes to Ronnie, prompting a group hug. Back at school, they develop the photos, watching as the ghosts of Teddy and Susie materialize in the images. Will’s crypt photo is last, and while I know we’re meant to gasp at the reveal that it’s a clown, a blurry pic that looks like Pennywise if you squint is a deflating cliffhanger — and not enough to get this show back on track. Losers Club • Shaw and Rose reconnect at her store, where the general admits he had completely forgotten about her after he left Derry. She explains that the town has a way of making you forget things the farther away from it you are, a feature of Derry first established in It. • We see the local tribe meeting to discuss the military digs. Rose tells Shaw that her community is concerned about sacred remains being disturbed. “We can’t allow unmarked burial grounds to be destroyed,” she explains. The Native American burial-ground trope is prominent in Pet Sematary and the film adaptation of The Shining, the latter of which (as I noted last week) has been theorized to be about the genocide of Indigenous peoples. • The slingshot Rose wounds the old-man monster with recalls the slingshot Beverly Marsh uses to shoot silver slugs at Pennywise’s werewolf form. Because slingshots were much less common in 1989 than in the novel’s late-’50s setting, Muschietti left that out of his adaptations. • Chief Bowers taunts Hank by asking, “Do you know what they do to kiddie killers in Shawshank?” Shawshank Prison is perhaps Stephen King’s most iconic setting, most notably thanks to the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and the movie The Shawshank Redemption. But it is mentioned in many other King books and was prominently featured on the earlier King TV series Castle Rock. • Dick tells Leroy about his grandma, who also had the shine, and her spirit sounds the alarm about Pennywise in the cistern. Rose Hallorann’s full backstory — including the way she taught her grandson about his psychic abilities — is detailed in the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep. • For true King freaks only: The ball toss at the carnival features clowns and turtles, another nod to the eternal cosmic struggle between Pennywise and Maturin.
