Review: IT: Welcome To Derry, "The Pilot" | Season 1, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium's coverage of HBO's newest franchise extension, It prequel It: Welcome to Derry. As always, Zack's first review of the show is free, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To keep reading and join the conversation, upgrade your subscription here.

Hard to know where to begin with this one. It: Welcome To Derry opens with a gory, goofy mess of a pilot, a hodgepodge of clichés and extreme “the fuck?” moments that has its charms, provided you don’t intend on taking any single part of it seriously. There are attempts at subversion and playing audience expectations against them; there’s also evidence that the It movies’ reliance on “quiet… quiet… quiet……..LOUD SCARY SHIT” is still in full effect here. Nothing in the story offers much reason to keep watching, but the visual inventiveness of the episode’s handful of horror set-pieces (in particular the opening and closing scenes) have enough energy to make this more than just a throwaway. 

I’ve read Stephen King’s It several times (I don’t know how many), and I saw It: Chapter One in theaters. I liked it at the time, mostly because it wasn’t a complete disaster, but the more I thought about it, the worse it got; so bad that I’ll admit to never getting around to seeing Chapter Two. (Perhaps that makes me less qualified to review this shlock, I’ll leave it up to you.) Chapter One shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of “The Pilot”—the scares are just unexpected enough to make them memorable, but the setting and characters have all the depth of an amusement park ride. 

There’s subversion here, sure. After a terrific opening sequence, the episode spends most of its time establishing the dynamics of a small group of school kids trying to solve the mystery of a friend’s disappearance. They get what they assume are messages from their friend begging for help, but when they follow the clues, the dead friend unleashes a monster on them which kills most of the group. Viewed conceptually, it’s a bold bait and switch; after forty minutes of getting to know the gang, we see most of them die just at the moment where it seems like their story is taking off. Wake up, chuckleheads. This ain’t your daddy’s Pennywise, or something to that effect.

It’s impossible to judge how effective this will be going forward. Right now, while I appreciate the novelty, I’m not really sure what’s gained from it. I’m a horror fan, but I have a lukewarm relationship with “mean” horror stories and films; there are times when the cruelty is effective and powerful, and there are other times when it feels like an artist just pushing buttons because they know they’ll make a loud noise. This feels like the latter. Yes, it’s shocking to see children ripped apart after we were lead to believe they’d be important characters, but right now, all it really seems to have done is make it so we’ll need to spend another episode next week getting to know completely new people. 

Still, it’s something at least. The best parts of “The Pilot” have a chaotic, aggressive strangeness to them, an energy that grabs your attention; the worst parts are when there are no monsters on screen and that energy quickly ebbs away. When it comes to world-building and story development, this episode more or less sucks on toast.

Welcome to Derry is set in 1962. It looks decent enough; there are repeated references to “Duck and Cover,” the Cuban missile crisis has an immediate relevance, everyone’s wearing period appropriate clothes. But there’s no real effort to make characters actually behave in ways that feel appropriate to the era. It sounds weirdly prudish, but the kids all swear too goddamn much. I’m not saying children don’t curse, but I don’t really believe that the word “fuck” was that prevalent in a pre-Internet, pre-paid cable era. 

Putting that aside, there’s no real sense of place here either, which is kind of a problem in a show where the setting is literally in the title. The only real read I can get off of Derry right now is that everyone seems to kind of hate everyone else; and while that would absolutely be appropriate in Stephen King’s version of the story (although even then, some of this is a bit much), I’m guessing that the show isn’t planning on establishing Pennywise as a cosmic villain. There’s too much “secret military project” nonsense going around, and there’s no impression in this episode that Derry has a reputation among the locals for being a dangerous place.

Why, then, do school kids put together a bizarre elaborate prank to torment Lily, a girl whose father died in a horrible accident? Kids can be absolute bastards for sure, and bullies exist in every era, but this prank—which involves stuffing her locker full of jars of pickles (her dad died in a pickle factory) and rigging one of the jars to fall when she opens it—feels like something a sadistic adult would come up with, not a twelve year-old with a limited budget. There’s no audience for the gag either. Her classmates glance her way, a few laugh, but the ratio of effort to result is so absurd as to border on self-parody.

I’m harping on this, but it’s indicative of a show that is, so far at least, incapable of building a world that feels like more than just a collection of clichés from other shows and movies. Even when it’s not being cliched, there’s an unreality that makes it hard to engage with the material. 

Take the scene where Leroy Hanlon, a major brought in as part of a secret military project, is assaulted by two men in gas masks in the middle of the night demanding he tell them state secrets. Hanlon refuses, and with the help of a friend manages to fight them off. My guess is that this is just an effort by his superiors to make sure Hanlon is worth trusting with the real project they’re working on (which will probably have something to do with killer mutant bat thing), but what’s bizarre is that neither men show any urgency after their assailants run off. No immediate “We need to sound the alarm because there are enemy agents on the base,” just a “whoa, that was wild!” as if nothing in the world exists outside of the room they’re in. It’s easy to gloss over, but moments like this—unreality with no real purpose other than writers not bothering to think things through—dominate the episode, making those times without anything nasty to focus on ring hollow and forced.

It will be interesting to see how this develops going forward. I’ll be surprised if Welcome To Derry ever becomes a good show, let alone a great one, but the nastiness and the inventiveness of the episode’s two big setpieces were enough to make me not regret watching it. As mentioned, I have my reservations about the whole “killing three kids who were set up to be main characters” bit, but it could work. And even if it doesn’t, I am always up for some creative horror trash.

Stray observations

• I think I’ll be able to enjoy this one more if I don’t associate it with the novel, but there are a couple of nods here worth mentioning. Lilly, the girl with the dead dad, swaps a charm with Matty, the soon to be dead kid, and gets a turtle in exchange; the Turtle is important to IT’s cosmic mythology, although I’ll be surprised if any of that figures in here. Teddy, the extremely Jewish kid who gets shredded in the final scene, is Teddy Uris; I’m guessing his brother will grow up to be Stan’s dad. And of course there’s Leroy Hanlon, Mike’s grandfather. The scene where Matty talks to Lilly through the tub drain is a riff on a similar scene in the novel, worth mentioning here if only because the other horror sequences are entirely new.
• This is an incredibly small nitpick, but: when the kids do research about Matty’s disappearance, the newspaper article says that a girl (Ronnie Grogan, the other survivor) was the last person to see him alive. It’s necessary that the article says this, because it leads to the kids seeking out Ronnie to ask what happened, but in the opening scene, it’s actually the pissy usher who’s the last person to see Matty, chasing him out of the building and threatening him. 
• I don’t understand why Lilly’s dad died in a pickle factory. Maine is not really famous for its pickles. It is known for lumber mills, which is something that would actually make this feel more like a real place.
• The design of the bat monster thing, with its second head poking out of its chest, is cool. And I really did enjoy the cold open; it wasn’t very Pennywise (It changes shape at a whim, but it rarely does groups), but it was surprising and upsetting in the best ways.