Review: It: Welcome To Derry, "Winter Fire" | Season 1, Episode 8

Hey free subscribers—as its first season comes to a close, here's a preview of Zack Handlen's review of the season finale of It: Welcome to Derry. To read the rest and join the conversation on this and everything else we're covering, become a paid subscriber.

It’s been a running joke for the last couple of decades that Stephen King is terrible at endings. Like most bits of “common wisdom,” this isn’t exactly true–King has plenty of great endings in his work, and while he’s had his share of duds, it’s not as though his missteps stand out greater than any other prominent genre writer. But there is a kind of truth in it, I think, and it comes from the way King approaches storytelling. As he’s said in interviews, he discovers the “plot” as he writes, starting with a scenario or a situation and developing it out from there. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but it does mean that he often arrives at endings that could’ve used a little more planning or set-up. There’s occasionally a sense of “oh shit, I guess this needs to stop at some point?” and a lot of unexpected talk about the power of belief or previously unmentioned magical objects.

“Winter Fire” does have some of that feeling, although I’m not sure a better build-up would’ve helped. I liked this episode more than I was expecting to, largely because it delivers on the spectacle, but as an actual story it’s a mishmash of unearned emotional beats and forced nods to the “franchise” that make no real sense at all. As mentioned previously, I’m a bit of a sap, so I didn’t despise the sudden influx of sentiment; however, even I raised my eyebrows at how hard the show worked to try and make us cry about people (one in particular) who we barely knew. As for the callbacks (callforwards?), well, they were cute.