Review: IT: Welcome To Derry, "The Thing In The Dark" | Season 1, Episode 2
An early Halloween drop sees HBO's prequel showing its true form
Free subscribers, here's your reminder that Zack's coverage of IT: Welcome to Derry is headed behind the paywall. Here's a preview of his review of the second episode, launching early for the holiday.
So, now that the first round of child actors have been sacrificed, it’s time to figure out what It: Welcome To Derry actually is. An anthology series where different batches of pre-teens are gruesomely dismembered in semi-ironic ways? Not really. A school drama with kids struggling to fit into the brutal social dynamic of their peers while facing off against an unearthly foe? A little, but not exactly. A military thriller about America’s over-reach in trying to fight the Cold War? More than you’d expect. A domestic tale of two different African American families trying to survive in small town Maine? There’s a bit of that too.
It’s a hodge-podge, I guess, and that means it’s going to be hard to review this episode by episode until we see the whole picture. But in “The Thing In The Dark,” we start to see the bones of a structure. On a basic level, those bones are solid enough. The dialogue felt a little less strained here, and there was a surprising amount of nuance to some of the conversations between adults—not a lot, but more than I was expecting after last week. There are also two more grotesque horror set-pieces to marvel at, although neither of them end in a fatality.
There’s no subversive rug-pull this week, which is a relief. I don’t think anyone dies, although poor Lilly does end up getting sent to a sanitarium, and Ronnie’s dad ends up arrested after the locals strong-arm the chief of police. “Dark” at least tries to start building up a sense of what Derry is, how wrong Derry is, with one sequence in particular helping to establish why the never-ending stream of disappearing children hasn’t draw wider attention. But the show seems determined to mix the stupid and the smart–it makes for a competent viewing experience, but one that still threatens to go off the rails at any moment.
