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Another year, another Stephen King movie comes to a close.
Season 1 of ET: Welcome to Derry It concluded on Sunday night with the eighth episode, entitled Winter’s Fire. The finale tied up loose ends, wrapped up pressing stories and revealed just how high the stakes are with this iteration of King’s classic killer clown. However, it appears that co-creators Andy and Barbara Muschietti, like Pennywise himself, along with showrunners Jason Foxx and Brad Caleb Kane, have a long game planned for the prequel. Horror series.
If their plan comes to light, we’ll get three episodes here, each set in the past. This means that the second season will take us back to 1935; The third will take him back to 1908.
Instead of indulging too much in Stephen King’s Easter Eggs and character references scattered throughout the show, I’ll focus on some of the key events that happened in this episode and why I think they made this final season worth watching. So, there it is Main story spoilers belowBut don’t expect a rabbit hole filled with red thread connections. This is what Reddit is for.
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Will’s class is in the spotlight
Bill Skarsgård stars in IT: Welcome to Derry.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this series is the disturbing lengths it goes to in order to create horror. There have really been some Disturbing sequences All season long. The ending has a few of them, but there’s one in particular that I can’t get out of my head: Pennywise’s school performance.
One of the pillars keeping the extra-dimensional entity in a cage was removed by the military in Episode 7, unleashing Pennywise to do his best against the townspeople of Derry. Instead of just taking one or two kids into a violent fit, he went and took them all in a scary scene where he found the clown performing a vaudevillian act that ended with his head split open and all hell broke loose.
Will Hanlon and the rest of the kids are taken by the creature’s dead lights, leading what I can only describe as a Pied Piper-style procession of the kids to their doom. I’ll admit that there were a few plot points that seemed trite throughout this eight-episode run. But the visuals (even those generated by CGI) provided a sinister tone. I can only imagine that if the show continues, things will get even more disturbing. I’m here for that.
Dick Halloran’s Redemption
Jovan Adepo and Chris Chalk star in IT: Welcome to Derry.
Dick Halloran, who you may know from The Shining, plays a Stephen King vehicle in the novel IT, a reference to a catastrophic fire at a place called The Black Spot. This little detail was expanded upon in Episode 7 of the previous HBO series, and thankfully, Halloran’s role in the show was much bigger than that tragic event.
Throughout the season, Halloran’s character has been given delightful new shades, thanks to a brilliant performance by Chris Chalk. Until that penultimate episode, Halloran did what he was told and served in the military as their psychological secret weapon. His skills helped them track down one of the ancient pillars that kept Pennywise imprisoned. Once that was removed—once Dick’s mental lockbox was opened, freeing the dead spirits and voices that haunted him—the man lost his will to continue.
That was until Leroy Hanlon asked for his help in finding his missing son. Instead of using his brilliant powers to benefit the military-industrial complex, he did his part to slow Pennywise down, resulting in the kids winning and putting Pennywise back in his cage.
Where will he go from here? As he tells Leroy after all the events have calmed down, there is a hotel that employs him as a chef. “How much trouble can a hotel cause?” He said in his last scene. Oh, Dick. If only you knew.
Beep beep, Margie
Bill Skarsgård stars in IT: Welcome to Derry.
Much of the episode takes place on an icy lake. Lily, Ronnie, and Marge got the pole a good distance away before the military intervened. After that, Marge broke up with her friends. This was her first direct encounter with Pennywise, and while it was quite terrifying for the young lady, it was very rewarding on a narrative level.
It turns out that Marge here is the future mother of Richie Tozier, played by Finn Wolfhard in IT: Chapter One. This is noteworthy because we now gain insight into the character’s name, as Marge’s first love, Richie Santos, sacrificed himself in the Black Spot Fire to save her life. This revelation might also explain why once she becomes his mother, she ends up being overprotective of him.
“The stinking seed of your loins and his friends bring me my death. Or is it birth?” Pennywise says.
Time seems to be nothing but a flat circle for Ol’ Pennywise, prompting Marge to express legitimate concern that the supernatural clown might be targeting her ancestors and her friends’ ancestors to prevent them from being born, thus preventing all of this from happening in the first place. If you want to break your mind, just sit with that thought for a while. Talk about a horror remake that will set the fandom on fire.
About that last moment…
I wasn’t a huge fan of Ingrid Kirsch’s story, although it would have been nice to see Pennywise in the past, before he started eating kids and everything. However, the final moments of the finale put an interesting nail in the proverbial coffin by showing her aging in a mental institution.
The year 1988, 26 years later, finds her interacting with a young girl after the girl’s mother is found hanging in her room. That girl is Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis reprising her role), and she’s crying. Her father is there too, pushing her hard, alluding to the abuse that followed Elfrida March out of the picture.
“You know what they say about Derry. Nobody ever really dies here,” Kirsch tells Beverly, further connecting the series to the films that put the Muschiettis on the map.
When all was said and done, I was pleasantly surprised by IT: Welcome to Derry. It introduced a new and beloved Losers Club, expanded on some classic Stephen King stories and upped the ante on what Pennywise the Dancing Clown could actually do. It turns out he has a bunch of violence up his sleeve.
This show is a reminder that I would never turn down a trip to King’s troubled town of Derry, Maine. Although this trip was much more satisfying than that Castle Rock It was eight years ago. Hopefully we get a season 2, because I can’t wait to come back for more.