It: Welcome to Derry Series-Premiere Recap: We’ve Got Trouble

The irony of the title Welcome to Derry jumps out right away — we’ve been here before. Whether your first exposure was reading Stephen King’s 1986 epic It, watching the 1990 miniseries of the same name, or seeing 2017’s It and 2019’s It: Chapter Two in theaters, the cursed town of Derry, Maine, is well-trod territory. HBO’s new extension of franchise IP intends to capitalize on that feeling of familiarity, plunking us back down in the home of Bill Denbrough, Ben Hanscom, Beverly Marsh, Mike Hanlon, Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak, Stan Uris, and, of course, Pennywise the Dancing Clown. (The latter by way of outer space, but let’s not get too in the weeds yet.) The new series, however, jumps back 27 years from the 1989-set It movie to bring us to 1962, an earlier cycle of Pennywise’s periodic rampaging. The show is a “welcome” to Derry in that it’s a prequel to the story we already know, but it also hits several of the classic It beats.

Like, for example, starting the story with the death of a child. This time, it’s not poor Georgie Denbrough, but Matty Clements. A 12-year-old who reads younger thanks to the pacifier he’s sucking, Matty has snuck into a showing of The Music Man at the Capitol Theater. (The song “Ya Got Trouble” becomes an effective if unsubtle motif throughout the episode.) After getting chased out by an usher, Matty decides he’s had enough of Derry and attempts to hitch a ride out of town with a seemingly kind family: a man and his pregnant wife with their son and daughter in the backseat. It’s not long, though, before he realizes something is off. The little girl is eating chunks of liver from a Tupperware, the mother is calling her daughter a harlot (“couldn’t glue those legs together if you tried”), and the little boy is spelling words like “maggots” and “strangulation.” When Matty sees that the car is headed back to Derry instead of to Portland as promised, he tries to grab the wheel and inadvertently hits the mother’s baby bump, which induces a speedy labor. She gives birth to a horrifying monstrosity, a winged and deformed demon baby with black holes where its eyes should be. (I miss Pennywise, but kudos to Welcome to Derry for finding a brand-new and instantly memorable form for It to take.) The baby flies around the car until it finally lunges at Matty’s head, making him the show’s first casualty.

The opening is gross and admirably strange, with director Andy Muschietti recapturing the weirdness of his It: Chapter Two. What follows hews closer to his first It movie and therefore feels like a slightly less inspired retread. We meet our new preteen outcasts: “Loony” Lilly Bainbridge; her popularity-seeking bestie, Marge; alien obsessive Phil; and Phil’s best friend, Teddy. Unbeknownst to Marge, Lilly and Matty had a history. In a flashback, he takes her to the Derry Standpipe, where she opens up about the traumatic death of her father, who was crushed in a machine at his jarring plant. Although she deflects when Matty tries to kiss her, Lilly clearly feels a connection to him. Phil and Teddy, meanwhile, were Matty’s presumed friends, but they were never all that close. (Matty’s mom had to pay them in candy to attend his birthday party.) There’s less of a personal investment here than in It, where Bill is driven by a desire to find his missing brother. But as in that story, Matty’s body still hasn’t been found, which has prompted his former associates to mull over his whereabouts — and to feel some guilt over their roles in the alienation that they believe may have driven him from Derry.

Then they start seeing things. In true Beverly Marsh fashion, Lilly hears a voice from her bathroom-sink drain: Matty singing “Ya Got Trouble.” When she tries to make contact and beg him to come home, he yells back, “He won’t let me!” and pokes two bloody fingers out of the drain. Naturally, no one believes her — the fingers are particularly improbable — with Marge warning Lilly not to let cool girl Patty hear her talking crazy. Phil and Teddy are equally unconvinced that Matty reached out through the pipes, though Teddy is a little gentler. He’s receptive enough to ask his father about it later over Shabbat dinner, wondering if a kid could be taken and kept underground. His dad shuts him down with stories of his grandparents escaping Buchenwald (a classic Jewish child experience), where prisoner skins were turned into lampshades. “We are Jews, Theodore. We know better than anyone the real horrors of this world,” Teddy’s father says. “Reality is terrifying enough as it is.” That night, Teddy’s reality becomes much more frightening when he has his first vision of It, as his bedroom lampshade transforms into the stitched-together faces of death-camp victims, trying to scream through lips that have been sewn shut. While the Welcome to Derry premiere is heavy on exposition, these moments of ghoulish original horror are striking.

Phil instantly believes Teddy about the lampshade, which also makes Lilly’s bathroom-drain story seem more likely. The three new allies know that nobody is going to take them seriously — to say the adults in Derry are unhelpful is a massive understatement — so they decide to go into investigation mode, another echo of Muschietti’s It movie. With Phil’s little sister Susie in tow, the kids’ microfiche sleuthing leads them to an article about Matty’s disappearance that mentions Veronica “Ronnie” Grogan as the last person who saw Matty alive. Ronnie, who is about their age, works at the Capitol Theater alongside her father, Hank. And she’s none too pleased when Lilly, Phil, Teddy, and Susie show up asking about Matty. What they don’t know, she explains, is that the police hammered her with questions after Matty vanished in an attempt to pin the crime on Hank, who as a Black man in Derry makes an easy scapegoat. But when Phil chastises Lilly for “chasing a song you heard in the fucking sewers,” Ronnie’s interest is piqued. She’s also heard voices coming from the pipes: kids screaming and calling her name. And she knows the song “Ya Got Trouble” is from The Music Man, the movie Matty saw the night he disappeared.

Before we get to the episode’s final scene, let’s take a moment to talk about the other major story line of the Welcome to Derry premiere: the arrival of Major Leroy Hanlon and his fellow airman, Captain Pauly Russo, to the Derry Air Force Base. (The premiere is cleverly titled “The Pilot,” a nod to Leroy’s profession and the fact that this is a pilot episode.) Both Korean War veterans, Leroy ranks higher than Pauly but gets a chillier reception as one of very few Black soldiers on the base. This quickly comes to a head when Airman Second Class Masters refuses to salute his superior, forcing an intervention from General Shaw. None of this is particularly surprising given the time period and Derry’s long-running tradition of racism and broader bigotry. Muschietti touched on this in his movies — the bullying of Mike Hanlon and the hate-crime murder of Adrian Mellon — including the way Pennywise fosters and foments the hatred already lurking in the hearts of Derry’s citizens. The show, however, promises to delve deeper by focusing on the Hanlon family and featuring the story of the Black Spot, a nightclub for Black soldiers that was burned to the ground by a white mob. The 1962 event was alluded to in the 2017 It and is detailed as one of Mike’s historical interludes in the novel. (Those interludes, which document Derry’s appalling past, have been planned as individual seasons of Welcome to Derry.)

We get a little more of Leroy’s backstory when he meets with General Shaw, who is working hard to establish himself as one of the good guys. (I suspect we’ll soon learn otherwise.) After assuring him that Masters is being punished with latrine duty and a citation for his racist insubordination, Shaw says he’s heard all about Leroy’s bravery in combat. For his part, Leroy doesn’t want to talk about Korea, a conflict he believes was left unfinished. Shaw shares that Leroy will be flying the new B-52 — right into the heart of the enemy, if it comes to that, so he can “finish what you started.” I confess I’m much more interested in Leroy’s family life, which we have yet to see, than I am in military intrigue, but there’s certainly something strange happening at the Derry Air Force Base. In his room at night, Leroy is ambushed by a group of men wearing gas masks who threaten to shoot him if he won’t reveal the B-52 specs. Is this a test, or are they spies? And how does the base’s restricted area for special projects connect to the larger story of the season? Pauly arrives just in time to fight the men off before we can learn more, so this particular plotline remains nebulous.

There is more resolution to the Derry kids and their investigation of Matty’s disappearance, on the other hand, though not in the way I expected. Under cover of darkness, Lilly, Teddy, Phil, Susie, and Ronnie bike over to the Capitol Theater, where Ronnie will screen The Music Man to see what clues it holds. Maybe Matty was trying to send them a message through the song, they reason. As the “Ya Got Trouble” scene plays on the big screen, the group is stunned to find that Matty is in the movie, holding a swaddled baby in his arms and singing along with the denizens of River City. They’re able to get his attention from the audience — he breaks the fourth wall and walks forward, while the movie dims around him. “You’re the reason I’m in here,” he tells them. “’Cause you lied. ’Cause you weren’t there.” As Matty’s mouth curves into a Pennywise smile, he throws the baby through the screen. It emerges as the same nightmarish creature from the opening scene, now giant and even more bloodthirsty. Ronnie watches helplessly from the projection booth as the baby flies around the theater, brutally tearing the others apart. With the sudden reveal that most of these kids aren’t our heroes after all, Welcome to Derry delivers a stunning bait and switch. Ronnie and Lilly, the latter still clutching Susie’s severed arm, appear to be the only two to make it out of the theater alive.

Losers Club

• As a Stephen King obsessive, I’m thrilled to be covering It: Welcome to Derry for Vulture this season. I’ll be using this space to discuss the nerdy Easter eggs and book references that seem worth mentioning — along with any other odds and ends that don’t make it into the recap.

• The most notable connection to It here is the Hanlon family. Leroy Hanlon is Mike’s grandfather, who made a brief appearance in the 2017 movie. Welcome to Derry will also introduce a young Will Hanlon, Mike’s father.

• Teddy Uris (or “Teddy Urine,” per the graffiti on his locker) is most likely Stan’s uncle, or at least would have been if he’d survived to adulthood. While he’s not named in the episode, Teddy’s older brother is likely Donald, Stan’s father and future Derry rabbi.

• Veronica Grogan is a name pulled from the original novel, where she’s mentioned as a friend of Beverly’s. (We’re following a different timeline, but I’ll leave out any other details in case the show pulls more from the source material.)

• Matthew Clements also comes from the book. He’s name-checked as a 3-year-old who is murdered by Pennywise, and whose voice Beverly later hears coming from her drain.

• The turtle charm that Matty gives Lilly is significant, as is her assessment that “turtles are good luck.” Turtles are indeed a big deal in this world, and there’s a reason Muschietti has included so many references to them in his adaptations. In Stephen King’s Dark Tower book series, Maturin the Turtle is one of 12 beings known as Guardians of the Beam. He shows up in It as the creator of the universe and a source for good, making him the cosmic opposite to It/Pennywise, whom Maturin refers to as his brother. Bill Denbrough is hit with this lore dump in the novel’s Ritual of Chüd, but Muschietti never quite got there in It: Chapter Two.

• Derry proudly identifies itself as the birthplace of Paul Bunyan, and Leroy reads an article about the giant Paul Bunyan statue being approved. That’s bad news for Richie, who will one day be attacked by the statue as another embodiment of It.