HBO - It: Welcome to Derry Season 1 Nuclear Family Recap Review
Full disclosure: This episode made it hard for me to sleep well at night. This television broadcast has terrifying images, painful moments, and the overall tone of cruelty that I cannot shake. For me, it is a hallmark of great horror.
I remember feeling that way when I read the 1986 novel "It". Stephen King's epic picture of the small town of Derry, Maine, a town haunted by a monster, a town haunted by a child-eating clown. I first read it in middle school, when I was around the age of its young heroes – I am now closer to the age of their adults – and it hit me like a crazy car. Besides being King's most terrifying book and his most tragic book, it is also his most cruel: a nightmarish dive into the horrible realities of child abuse and small-town closure, transformed into the supernatural.
I did not feel that same level of terror from the two films that came as prequels to this series, "It" (2017) and "It Chapter Two" (2019), both from director Andy Muschietti. That is why I am happy to report that the very first scene of this first episode of "It: Welcome to Derry" is more horrifying and disturbing than anything in both movies.
The story begins with a little boy named Matty Kimmens watching "The Music Man" in the theater. Sadly, the scene of Robert Preston's Oscar-winning small-town con man Harold Hill performing the immortal musical-theater banger "Ya Got Trouble" is not enough to distract Matty from his troubles. Neglected, abused by his family, and having lost his real friends, he is kicked out of the theater by an usher for refusing to pay. Luckily, the theater-loving Hank and his daughter Ronnie, cover for the boy. They are taking a big risk because they are Black people in a white town.
While hitchhiking home in the freezing cold outside, he is picked up. His rescuers are a classic nuclear family straight out of an early 1960s city commercial: a beautiful mother, a smiling, bespectacled father, and two and a half kids. Only radio broadcast warnings about nuclear tests shatter that comforting moment.
It is immediately clear that this family is very different from Matty's family. The younger brother starts compulsively repeating words he picks up from their dark conversation, including words no one said. The older sister opens a jar containing a liver, dips her fingers in its fly-infested juice, and puts her fingers on Matty's face. The mother and father start making inappropriate sexual comments about each other and about their children. The brother's eyes become very strange. It is very thrilling for the movie viewers.
Then the pregnant mother gives birth in the car to a terrifying, transformed baby with two heads and bat wings. As the mother pulls the umbilical cord, the car spins weirdly, and the thing flies directly at Matty. The next thing we know, he is sucked up through the shattered, blood-splattered rear passenger window – along with the pacifier he still uses for comfort at age 12 – and into the churning river below.
The family that picked up Matty – the entire family, including the child and the car – is Pennywise. They are It, and they tortured and killed a child.
It gets worse. Later, we meet Phil and Teddy. Two nerdy but charming kids, who, as one might guess, will play a key role in this season's group of outcast kids competing against Pennywise. They read and make comic books, they talk about the paranormal, and they wonder why bras are so pointy. Phil also has an adorable little sister named Susie, a painfully pretty girl who, based on my own experience as a parent, reads as neurodivergent.
By the time the episode ends, three children have been murdered alive.
Here is the great twist of this episode: the child actors playing these roles are acting wonderfully. And they are playing their roles with the full conviction that this season will end with them fighting a giant clown-spider in a sewer. Their personalities and the dynamics between them are complex and engaging. Teddy also has a connection to Stanley Uris, a co-hero of "It".
They are all also very cute. They are funny, witty, rude, silly, imperfect, and sometimes crude,l but basically lovable, as teenagers usually are. And they all go through the usual stages of discovery related to Derry's dark secret.
They hear voices from the sewer. They see terrifying and strange things, their dead friend's fingers emerging from the drain, a lamp made from the still-screaming faces of Buchenwald prisoners.
Phil and Teddy soon team up with "Loony" Lilly Bainbridge, a fellow student who was institutionalized for a while after her father died in an accident at the horrible, unfortunate, slightly comical pickle factory. The schoolyard rumor is that pieces of him are in the pickle jars all over New England. She is largely ostracized, as if her father's death and her crazy grief are contagious.
Months have passed since Matty disappeared on New Year's Eve. Lilly was his only true friend and the source of his secret love. The night he disappeared, she rejected his advances. After hearing something calling her from her bathtub drain, something that sounds just like him, and reaching out with his fingers to reach her, she turns to Phil and Teddy for help. She mistakenly believes they are also Matty's friends; in reality, they spent time with him because they were bribed to do so, and even then, they bailed on his birthday party.
Although they seem doubtful at first, the boys all get involved after Teddy has a nightmarish experience with a lampshade. Together with Susie, they look for information about Matty's disappearance using the microfilm machine in the library, contact Rose as his last known contact, and screen her father's print of "The Music Man" at the theater to listen to "Ya Got Trouble" for clues.
Naturally, you think you are watching your young heroes, introduced just like the bands of kids fighting evil in "It", "The Goonies", "The Monster Squad", and "Stranger Things". But just when you think you have understood the show, the twist comes back.
That is when Matty appears in the movie Magic, right there on the big screen, along with the two It-children he took his final ride with. While his friends are signaling for him to come home, he loses the transformed baby, laughing with teeth, a white face. Screaming horrifically uneven and truly disgusting laughs – loud sounds are one of the show's great weapons – it also rips the limbs from Teddy, Phil, and Susie's limbs, covers Lilly, and Rose tries her best to help. We are left with the image of Lilly screaming, still holding Susie's severed hand.
In a side story, Major Leroy Hanlan of the US Air Force goes to Derry with his friend Captain Paulie Russo to work as a pilot on an experimental new line of B-52 bombers. The very day he arrives, he faces a full assault by masked men for racial disrespect and trying to collect classified information, helping Paulie chase them.
He also attracts the attention of an unnamed military member, who is Black like Hanlan and works as a driver for the base's racist white Commander General Shaw. Without going too much into King lore, both Chuck's character and the Air Force's secret Maine project have some significance.
The wonderful thing about this horror episode is how little it relies on your knowledge of the source material to deliver its message. "Welcome to Derry" makes clear what the movies largely missed: "It" is about the unique vulnerability of children to violence and hate. The creative team deserves immense praise for taking the risk of alienating audiences with difficult-to-watch material, made even more difficult by truly terrifying sound and creature design.
None of this relies on Pennywise's most famous form, which we do not see at all. But Bill Skarsgård returns to that role, the immortal clown-monster with orange hair who returns to the surface of Derry for food once every 27 years. His time has finally come.
