Welcome to Decider’s recap series of It: Welcome to Derry. This show delves into the rich tapestry of Stephen King’s epic 1,138-page novel, introducing a fresh set of characters while expanding on the eerie town of Derry and its infamous, shape-shifting menace, Pennywise. Let’s dive in.

The series premiere, “The Pilot,” kicks off at the Capitol Theater in early 1962, where The Music Man is being screened, emphasizing the song “Ya Got Trouble.” A significant line warns, “Our children’s children gonna have trouble.” Regardless of the outcome of this season’s confrontation with It, the next generation—the original Losers’ Club from the 2017 film—will find themselves battling the same evil in 1989. Another fitting lyric: “Friend, either you’re closing your eyes/To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge/Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster.”

Inside the theater, projectionist Hank Grogan and a disgruntled usher argue over how to handle a boy named Matthew “Matty” Clements, who persistently sneaks into screenings with his pacifier. This debate turns out to be pointless as it marks the last time Matty is seen alive. His final moments are far from serene as he hitchhikes in the cold, telling a family of four he’s headed “anywhere but Derry.” The car ride takes a bizarre turn when the daughter starts playing with a container of liver, smearing it on Matty’s face. As they inexplicably drive back into Derry, Matty wants to escape, but all he gets is the family chanting “O-U-T!” with the same chilling rhythm as “you’ll float too.” The young boy’s eye eerily shifts, mirroring Pennywise’s gaze when preparing to devour his prey.

Then chaos erupts. The pregnant mother enters an unnaturally accelerated labor, and a mysterious creature emerges in the dark. A grotesque bat-like infant, still tethered by its umbilical cord, flutters frantically inside the car before lunging at Matty, sending his pacifier out the window and into the sewer. The familiar It logo from the films emerges from the water, followed by the words Welcome to Derry.

Fast forward to April ’62. A boy named Phil Malkin is at the iconic standpipe, using a spyglass to track airplanes heading to a nearby Strategic Air Command base, a relic of Cold War tensions. Meanwhile, at high school, Lilly Bainbridge discovers her locker stuffed with pickle jars, a cruel nod to her father’s untimely demise. Phil shares the chilling gossip that “they found her dad’s body parts in pickle jars all over Maine.” Lilly, recently released from Juniper Hill Asylum, now bears the stigma of “looney.” Her friend Margie offers comfort, asks for Lilly’s opinion on her new oversized glasses (“I’m not going through the rest of the year looking like some bug-eyed freak”), and uses the slang “ginchiest.” We also meet Phil’s pal Teddy “Teds” Uris, who shares a last name with Stanley from the Losers’ Club, and endures Phil’s wild theories about alien invaders and the Air Force base. Phil is a whirlwind of thoughts reminiscent of Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, questioning the design of bras with musings like, “Boobs aren’t that pointy. Are we supposed to believe that under a sweater is just two pointy cones? Are pointy cones better?”

We’re also introduced to Major Leroy Hanlon, another familiar name: the Hanlon family will one day welcome Mike, the sole Black member of the Losers. Leroy’s played by Jovan Adepo, who gave a great turn in the 2020-21 miniseries remake of Stephen King’s The Stand as Larry Underwood. Hanlon is a Korean War vet who’s been restationed to Derry with his family, who we’ll have to wait till next week to meet. Racism is alive and well in Maine—historically the whitest state in the nation, unless it’s a year when Vermont is. Leroy, a self-described optimist, tells James Remar’s General Shaw that his father “used to always say there’s nothing wrong with this country that can’t be fixed by what’s right with this country.” That night, three men in gas masks jump a sleeping Leroy at gunpoint, demanding top secret aircraft information and threatening his life before being interrupted and scared off by Leroy’s feisty compatriot Pauly Russo. It’s a chilling table-setter for the dangers Leroy is sure to face.

After school, Lilly recalls the dearly departed Matty showing her the boys’ little clubhouse atop the standpipe on New Year’s Eve. In the present, she hears his voice emanating from her bathtub drain, reprising “Ya Got Trouble.” Anyone worried about blood and/or gluey hair spraying in Lilly’s face, Bev Marsh style, can rest easily, although she does witness two bloody fingers pop out as Matty croaks that “he won’t let me” escape. A key question is crystallizing: will these kids each represent an analogue to the Losers’ Club we know and love? Lilly could be Beverly, Teddy’s got his Stan parallels, Phil is most definitely Richie—and they all have some Bill Denbrough in them, trying to stay level and get to the bottom of the disappearance of Matty.

At his own house, Teddy’s father blesses their dinner and asks how his son’s bar mitzvah preparations are going. (Also a Stan plot in It.) Teds runs Lilly’s theory by his dad: “Do you think somebody could kidnap a kid 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 the Buchenwald concentration camp, while the skin of those murdered in Hitler’s genocide was known to be used for lampshades. “We are Jews, Theodore. We know better than anyone the real horrors of this world. Reality is terrifying enough as it is—cut it out with the fantasy,” he admonishes. This comes minutes after Hanlon’s appraisal of the American experiment—is it optimism, or is it fantasy?

Now our runner-up for scariest scene hits. Teds tries to read himself to sleep with an issue of Detective Comics where Batman and Robin fight Clayface, who—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—“can mold his body into any shape!” Teddy thinks a flickering lamp is a lightbulb issue and is quickly corrected: this is a supernatural concern. The lamp gives Teds a glimpse at the exact nightmare his dad recounted at dinner. God, this scene is discomfiting, and the skin-lamp is just wretched. 

Lilly, Teddy, and Philly decide to consult one of the last people to see Matty alive: the Capitol projectionist’s daughter Veronica “Ronnie” Grogan. She deduces that what Lilly heard coming out of the drain was a Music Man tune, and Ronnie’s been hearing similar impossible things. She offers to screen the scene for them at the theater. It’s the same moment we opened the episode on…until it’s not. Matty shows up in the crowd onscreen holding a blanketed bundle, accusing his sorta-friends of abandoning him to his dark fate. Then his mouth starts to distend in a Pennywise-ish fashion, and you’ve gotta wonder if it’s dicey for returning director Andy Muschietti & Co. to channel one of the most alarming scenes from It: the projector in the garage. In that one, Bill’s mother transforms, click-by-click-by-click, into Pennywise, who suddenly clomps off the screen and into real life in giant form. 

Turns out Welcome to Derry was right to give it a go, because this four-minute sequence is the most disturbing part of the premiere. Matty throws his bundle forward and the bat-baby spills out into the real world, looking much freakier in the dark theater than it did in the car. The screen goes a melty orange, red light strobes, and our three main kids plus Phil’s little sister Susie shriek and flee. And then, in genuinely shocking fashion, kids are being torn into pieces and scattered all about the theater. This show just planted its flag: the children don’t always make it out alive when It stirs from hibernation. In fact, they rarely do.

Lilly escapes to the lobby, where Ronnie wants to know what the hell just happened in there. Lilly realizes she’s still holding Suze’s hand, and only her hand. An epic scream cuts straight to the type of jarring, perky musical cue the It movies adored, specifically “Lolita Ya Ya.” Welcome to Derry, baby—we’re back.

QUESTION CORNER

• How will this generation affect It’s slumber and return?
• Did It manifest in the form of a whole family in that opening scene? Granted, if you’re looking for hyperspecific rules and answers about this monster, you’re never going to be satisfied. But still, what did happen there?

STEPHEN KING TRIVIA CORNER

• The bat-baby is kind of a combination of two creatures from the Jade of the Orient restaurant scene in It Chapter Two, where one fortune cookie births an insectoid monstrosity with a crying baby face, and another cracks open just enough to reveal a batlike wing that zooms it around the room.
• In the girls’ bathroom stall, Alvin Marsh’s name is graffitied with a heart. That’s Bev’s dad. Somebody actually likes that sick fuck.
• The names Matthew Clements and Veronica Grogan come straight from the novel, introduced a mere page away from each other—although only as victims after the fact, not actual characters. Clements was a 3-year-old discovered dead in a culvert after riding his tricycle; Veronica, a 9-year-old from the Neibolt Street Church School, was found in a storm drain.

Zach Dionne is a Mainer writing in Tennessee; he makes Stephen King things on Patreon.