This review may contain spoilers for “IT: Welcome to Derry” and “IT”
Cold, wet air sticks to your skin. It’s a rainy May morning. Avoiding puddles, you carefully balance on the curb. Forming around you are hundreds of miniature streams, eventually combining into one. You follow the rushing river, stopping at the drain. Water flows into the sewers, the sound overwhelming your senses. A gloved hand emerges from the sewers, extending and contorting its way towards you as you try desperately to crawl away.
You wake up in a sweat, the rain pittering outside of your window. A few years ago this nightmare plagued children around the world, and now IT’s back for more. “IT: Welcome To Derry”, is a prequel to the 2017 remake of Stephen King’s iconic horror novel, “IT”. The first episode aired on Oct. 26, and subsequent episodes come out every Sunday until Dec. 29, completing season one.
Being a period piece, the 2016 “IT” harps on the social injustices that are faced by minority groups throughout the 1980s, with a group of seven adorable seventh graders who are being terrorized by an evil alien named Pennywise that takes the shape of various fears. By the end of the first move, the kids, dubbed the ‘losers club’, kill Pennywise. Until of course, he comes back years later, forcing the now grown-up losers club to once again face their fears and kill the clown for good.
Sure, it seems like the story was wrapped up pretty well. But “Welcome To Derry” provides an excellent extension to the story through its new main characters. By the end of the first episode, half the characters we originally assumed to be the new iteration of the losers club ends up brutally mangled in a 10-minute long gore-fest that quickly establishes that these characters have no plot armor and are completely at the writers will.
But what does this mean for the integrity of the characters? While of course it’s expected that the show about a cosmic entity that possesses the form of a clown and eats children has horror elements, these horror elements really only appear to affect the children. In several scenes these 11-year-old children experience extreme forms of body horror, while the worst that the adult main characters receive is a jumpscare. Shows like “Welcome To Derry” thrive off of shock value, but at times the mature themes just feel crudely misdirected towards the children.
You can push aside the lack of trauma the adults experience due to them having to experience the evil that Pennywise is literally leaching into the town, causing fear and hate to take over lives. But it feels like the child actors are carrying the storyline and it leaves the viewer wondering why they would include such a large array of adult actors, just for them to basically do a whole lot of nothing-burger the entire show.
Where this show falls short is its adamant attempts to be scary and shocking while trying to appeal to everyone. You can’t appeal to the Bible-thumping grandmas, so you include adults in the show who are also being terrorized. But then you shift the focus away from the kids, upsetting the book purists. So you write a lazy military plotline, where the U.S. government is trying to militarize a cosmic beast that kills children, so the adults have something to do, and you can appeal to everyone. But in doing so, you take what could have been a great storyline and story, and you add and take away elements to the point that it feels ridiculous.
Stephen King doesn’t know how to write girls. This isn’t something new, and in the wise words of “Girls” fans, when asked why Lena Dunham doesn’t include any diversity in the show: ‘she writes what she knows’. Luckily, “Welcome To Derry” avoids the pitfalls of its predecessors. One of the main characters, Lilly, is fleshed out to the point that she has something traditionally reserved for men in television, mental illness. Although Pennywise’s antics no doubt caused many to believe that Lilly was crazy, it didn’t help that Lilly had a psychotic break years ago after the death of her father, and was then sent to a mental hospital, where, through the show credits, we can see they lobotomize children.
So when Lilly is finally free, she is adamant about not going back to the hospital; she’ll do whatever she can to not be institutionalized again. Except even after she does whatever she can to not be institutionalized, she ends up back there anyway. But instead of showing us, or even telling us, what is happening in that hospital, the show instead opts to have a time jump to Lilly’s release, and then proceeds to not mention what happened in the hospital, or address whether Lilly will return to it again.
This is a part of the show’s fatal flaw; it refuses to elaborate or provide context for viewers. HBO just believes that every viewer of the show will have watched not just the original “IT” movies, but also have knowledge of the mystical power of the ‘shine’, which connects the majority of the characters that survive in Stephen King’s universe through telekenesis and telepathic abilities. It seems like the writers of the show watched the 2016 movie, got upset that they removed details from the book and dumped all of those into the show without providing any context to the audience.
It’s not causing the audience to be in suspense or have them stay in discomfort and unease throughout the show; it’s really just lazy writing. If you can’t tell the millions of viewers that tune into the show every week what is happening in your show under the pretense of suspense, you’re just being a jerk. When the show very rarely elaborates and follows up on its plotlines, it’s fun to watch. Viewers want to see plotlines from episode one followed up in episode three, not episode three of the next season.
Ultimately, this show is just alright. There really isn’t anything notable in the show that sets it apart from everything else on air right now. “Welcome To Derry” only contributes to the television fatigue that is occurring right now, and its success wouldn’t occur without a serious lack of proper horror media in pop culture. If you want to watch something that you don’t have to think about too much, this show is great to wind down to.
