IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 Recap: “The Pilot”

Welcome to Decider’s Him: Welcome to Derry Summarizes. There’s a lot to enjoy, with exposition taken from Stephen King’s 1,138 pages bookgiving us almost entirely new characters, fleshing out the town and its shapeshifting master known as Pennywise. So let’s float.

“The Aviator” opens at the Capitol Theater at dawn in 1962 Music man plays specifically the number”I’ve got a problem“Our kids’ kids are going to have trouble,” says one key line. In fact, no matter how this season’s battle goes, the next generation – the OG Losers’ Club we met 2017 movie— would return to the sewers in 1989. (Another Derry-flavored lyric: “My friend, you’re either closing your eyes/To a situation you don’t want to admit/Or you don’t realize the extent of the disaster.”)

Showrunner Hank Grogan and an angry guide disagree over how to deal with a pacifier-sucking kid named Matthew “Matty” Clements who keeps sneaking into shows. This argument would be moot, as it was the last time anyone would see the boy alive. His final moments on this earth were not the most peaceful, as he trudged through the cold, telling a family of four that he was going “anywhere but Derry”. A crooked little spelling bee in the car starts curdling as soon as the daughter opens a container of disgusting liver, prods, and sticks her sticky fingers in Matty’s face. And they are making a bewildering comeback in As for Derry, Matty wants out, but the best he’ll get is a family-wide chant of “Get out!” With the inimitable beat “You’ll Float Too”. The little son’s eyes droop to the side like Pennywise does when he’s about to sink his teeth into an innocent meal.

And then shit gets crazy. An expectant mother goes into obviously unnatural labor and an invisible creature stumbles in the darkness at her feet. A hideous baby bat flies in and begins wandering around the car (literally, the umbilical cord still attached) before launching himself at Matty, sending his lollipop flying out the window and into the sewer. Same thing He – she The logo from the movies rises above the water, followed by Welcome to Derry.

Cut to April ’62. A boy named Phil Malkin stands at the famous pipe with binoculars, Cataloging the aircraft you fly The local Air Force base, specifically the Cold War operation known as the Strategic Air Command base. In high school, Lily Bainbridge arrives to find her locker full of jars of pickles, a cruel reference to her father’s tragic death. Phil will relay the rumor that they “found parts of her father’s body in pickle jars all over Maine”; Lilly is now being mocked and called “looney” after having just been released from Juniper Hill Asylum. Her friend Margie consoles her, seeks Lily’s opinion on some new thick glasses (“I’m not going to spend the rest of the year looking like a weirdo”), and drops the word “craziest.” We meet Phil’s friend Teddy “Teds” Uris, who shares a surname with Stanley from The Losers’ Club and endures his friend’s plots about alien boys and the Air Force base. Phil is full of Ritchie “Trashmouth” Tozier-esque rapid-fire musings on things like the mysteries of bra geometry. (“Breasts aren’t that pointy. Are we supposed to believe that under the jacket there are only two pointy cones? Are the pointy cones better?”)

We’re also introduced to Major Leroy Hanlon, another familiar name: the Hanlon family will one day welcome Mike, the only black member of the Losers. Leroy’s played by Jovan Adepo, who had a cameo role in Stephen King’s 2020-21 remake of the miniseries. Attitude Like Larry Underwood. Hanlon is a Korean War vet who has been transferred to Derry with his family, and we will have to wait until next week to meet him. Racism is alive and well in Maine – historically The whitest country In the nation, unless this is the year that Vermont. Leroy, a self-described optimist, tells James Remar’s General Shaw that his father “always said there was nothing wrong with this country that couldn’t be fixed by what was right in this country.” That night, three men wearing gas masks jumped from Leroy’s sleeping car at gunpoint, demanded top-secret information about the plane and threatened his life before Leroy’s feisty compatriot Paulie Russo interrupted and intimidated them. It’s a chilling table setting for the dangers Leroy is sure to face.

After school, Lily remembers the dearly departed Matty showing her the Little Boys’ Club over the main pipe on New Year’s Eve. In the present, she hears his voice emanating from her bathtub, repeating “Ya Got Trouble”. Anyone worried about blood and/or sticky hair being sprayed across Lily’s face, Beef Marsh style, can rest easy, though she did witness two bloody fingers sticking out as Matty screamed “he won’t let me” escape. The main question that emerges is: Will each of these kids be a counterpart to the Losers’ Club we know and love? Lily could be Beverly, Teddy has his counterpart in Stan, Phil is definitely Richie – and they all have some Bill Denbrough in them, trying to stay level and get to the bottom of Matty’s disappearance.

At his house, Teddy’s father blesses their dinner and asks how preparations for his son’s coming-of-age party are going. (Also Stan V’s Plot He – she.) Teds runs Lily’s theory by his father: “Do you think someone could kidnap a child and keep him underground?…in the sewers, for months and months, hurting him, or – I don’t know.”) His father points out how Teddy’s grandparents escaped Buchenwald concentration camp, while it was known that the skins of those killed in Hitler’s genocide were used to make lampshades. “We are Jews, Theodore. We know better than anyone else the true horrors of this world. Reality is terrifying enough—cut it with fiction,” he warns. This comes minutes after Hanlon evaluated the American experience. Is it optimism or fantasy?

Now we’ve got second place for the scariest scenes. Teds tries to read himself to sleep with a problem Detective comics Where Batman and Robin fight Clayface, who – stop me if you’ve heard this before – “can shape his body into any shape!” Teddy believes the flickering bulb to be a light bulb problem and is quickly corrected: this is a supernatural concern. The lamp gives Teds a glimpse into the exact nightmare his father told him over dinner. God, this scene is confusing, and the leather lamp is just miserable.

Lily, Teddy, and Philly decide to consult one of the last people to see Matty alive: Capitol showrunner’s daughter Veronica “Ronnie” Grogan. She concludes that what Lily heard coming out of the drain was… Music man Tune in, and Ronnie was hearing similar impossible things. Offer to show them the scene in the theater. It’s the same moment we opened the episode…until it isn’t anymore. Matty appears in the crowd on screen carrying a covered package, accusing his friends of abandoning him to his dark fate. Then his mouth starts to swell up in a Pennywise kind of way, and you have to wonder if it’s too risky for returning director Andy Muschietti & Co. To direct one of the most disturbing scenes from He – she: The projector is in the garage. In that story, Bill’s mother turns, click by click, into Pennywise, who… suddenly He exits the screen and enters real life in giant form.

It turns out Welcome to Derry He was right to try it, because this four-minute sequence is the most disturbing part of the premiere. Matty throws his pack forward and the bat-kid emerges into the real world, looking even more terrible in the dark theater than he did in the car. The screen turns melting orange, the red light flashes, and our three main kids plus Phil’s little sister Susie scream and run away. And then, in truly shocking fashion, the children are torn to pieces and scattered all over the stage. This show has just planted its flag: kids no Always get him out alive when he wakes up from hibernation. In fact, they rarely do.

Lily flees into the hallway, where Ronnie wants to know what the hell happened there. Lily realizes that she is still holding Suze’s hand, and… only Her hand. An epic scream that cuts straight to the genre of discordant and playful musical cue He – she Favorite films, specifically “Lolita Ya Ya.” Welcome to Derry, baby, we’re back.

Questions corner

• How will this generation affect its hibernation and return?
• Did that manifest as an entire family in that opening scene? Granted, if you’re looking for very specific rules and answers about this beast, you’ll never be satisfied. But still, what happened there?

Stephen King Trivia Corner

• The baby bat is a kind of combination of two creatures from the Jade of the Orient restaurant scene in It is the second chapterwhere a fortune cookie spawns an insect monster with the face of a crying baby, and another cracks open enough to reveal a bat-like wing that zooms around the room.
• In the girls’ bathroom stall, Alvin Marsh’s name was written in the shape of a heart. This is Bev’s father. Someone actually likes that sick fuck.
• The names Matthew Clements and Veronica Grogan come straight from the novel, and they’re just a page apart from each other – though they’re only victims after the fact, not real characters. Clements was 3 years old and was discovered dead in a stream after riding his tricycle. Veronica, a 9-year-old from Nebault Street Church School, was found in a storm drain.

Zach Dionne is a writer from Tennessee. he Stephen King makes stuff on Patreon.