Season 1, Episode 1 ‘The Pilot’
Full disclosure: This episode made it hard for me to get a good night’s sleep. There are horrific images, excruciating moments, and an overall tone of queasy cruelty in this hour of television that I simply couldn’t shake. To me, that’s the mark of great horror.
I recall getting that feeling from reading the 1986 novel “It,” Stephen King’s epic portrait of a small town in Maine called Derry that is haunted by a demonic, shape-shifting, child-eating clown. I first read it in middle school, when I was the same age as its young protagonists — I’m closer in age to their adult selves now — and it hit me like a possessed car. Beyond being King’s scariest book, and his grossest, it is also his cruelest: a nightmare dive into the horrible realities of child abuse and small-town closed-mindedness, transmuted into the supernatural.
I did not get that welcomely awful feeling from the two films to which this series serves as a prequel, “It” (2017) and “It Chapter Two” (2019), both from the director Andy Muschetti. Which is why I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that the first scene of this first episode of “It: Welcome to Derry” is scarier and more disturbing than everything in the two movies combined. With Muschetti once again behind the camera for the premiere, he and the showrunners, Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, serve up a perfect nightmare of mounting panic and terror. (Fuchs wrote the episode.)
Our story begins with a small boy, Matty Clemens (Miles Ekhardt), watching “The Music Man” at the movie theater. Sadly, Robert Preston’s Oscar-winning turn as the small-town con man Harold Hill, seen here performing the immortal musical-theater banger “Ya Got Trouble,” is not enough to distract Matty from his woes. Neglected and abused by his family and bereft of real friends, he is chased out of the theater by an usher for refusing to pay. Fortunately, the theater’s cinephile owner, Hank (Stephen Rider), and his daughter, Ronnie (Amanda Christine), cover for the kid. Because they are Black in a very white town, they’re taking a big risk.
In the freezing cold outside, Matty is picked up while hitchhiking home. His rescuers are a classic nuclear family from an early 1960s sitcom: beautiful blonde mom (Zoe Barrett-Wood); smiling, bespectacled dad (Mark MacRae), two and a half kids. Only the radio broadcast’s warnings about nuclear testing threaten to sour the comforting moment.
It’s clear early that this family is very different from Matty’s own. But it soon becomes apparent just how different. The little brother (Lochlan Ray Miller) starts compulsively spelling words plucked from their increasingly dark conversation, including ones no one has said. (“L-I-E-S.”) The older sister (Audrey Wellington) opens a container of liver, dips her fingers in its fly-infested juices and sticks her fingers in Matty’s face. The mother and father start making inappropriately sexual comments about each other and their kids. The brother’s eyes go wonky, in a way that’s chillingly familiar to viewers of the films.
Then the very pregnant mother gives birth, right there in the car, to a horrifically mutated baby with two heads and bat wings. After flapping grotesquely around the car while Mom tugs at its umbilical cord, the thing flies directly at Matty. The next thing we know, the pacifier he uses for comfort, even at age 12, is sent soaring through the shattered, blood-spattered rear passenger window and into the surging river below.
The family that picked Matty up — the whole family, including the baby and even the car — are Pennywise. They are It, and they tortured and killed a child.
It gets worse. We next meet Phil (Jack Molloy Legault) and Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler), two nerdy but charismatic kids who, one assumes, will form the core of whatever group of outcast children takes on Pennywise this season. They read and make comic books, they talk about paranormal phenomenon, they wonder why brassieres are so pointy and so on. Phil also has an adorable little sister, Susie (Matilda Legault), a painfully cute kid who, based on my own experience as a parent, reads as neurodivergent.
By the end of the episode, all three children have been butchered alive.
That’s the episode’s greatest trick, obviously. The talented child actors who play these roles are perfectly cast, and they play their parts as if fully confident that this season will end with them battling a giant clown-spider in a sewer. Their personalities and interpersonal dynamics are complex and engaging. Teddy is even related to the “It” co-protagonist Stanley Uris.
They’re all adorable too — funny, witty, vulgar, dorky, imperfect and occasionally mean but basically lovable, as adolescent children tend to be. And they all go through the usual steps of discovery regarding Derry’s dark secret. They’re hearing voices from the sewers. They’re witnessing strange and terrifying things — their dead friend’s fingers emerging from the drain, a lamp made of the still-screaming faces of Buchenwald prisoners. (Unlike the films, which largely eschewed the book’s close-to-the-bone engagement with mid-20th century horrors, this show is willing to go there, from the Holocaust to American racism to atomic anxiety.)
Phil and Teddy are soon approached by “Loony” Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack), a classmate who was briefly institutionalized after her father died in a horrific, and unfortunately slightly comical, accident in a pickle-jarring factory. (Schoolyard rumor has it there are pieces of him in pickle jars all over New England.) She has since been largely ostracized, as if her father’s death and her maddening grief were both contagious.
By now it has been months since Matty’s New Year’s Eve disappearance. Lilly was his only real friend and the object of his secret crush, who rejected his overtures the night he vanished. After hearing him, or something that sounds like him, call out from her bathtub drain and even stick his (?) fingers out to reach for her, she turns to Phil and Teddy for help. She falsely believes they were also Matty’s friends; in reality, they hung out with him only because they were bribed to do so, and even then they bailed on his birthday party. (Teddy is racked by guilt over this, just as Lilly feels guilty for declining Matty’s advances.)
Although they are initially skeptical, the boys go all in after Teddy has his nightmarish experience with the lampshade. Together with Susie, they look up info on Matty’s disappearance using the library’s microfilm machine, get in touch with Rose as his last known contact and screen her dad’s print of “The Music Man” at the theater to relisten to “Ya Got Trouble” for clues.
Naturally, you assume you’re looking at your young heroes, who are being introduced the same way similar crews of evil-battling kids were introduced in “It,” “The Goonies,” “The Monster Squad,” “Stranger Things,” you name it. But just when you think you’ve got the show figured out, the nightmare returns.
That’s when Matty magically appears in the film, right there on the big screen, alongside the two It-children with whom he took his last ride. As his friends beckon to him to come home, he smiles a toothy, white-faced grin and sets lose the mutant baby. Horribly disproportioned and emitting a genuinely unpleasant scream — loud sounds are among show’s greatest weapons — it savagely tears Teddy, Phil and even Susie limb from limb as Lilly cowers 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 plot, Maj. Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) of the U.S. Air Force moves to Derry with his buddy Capt. Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso) to serve as a pilot in an experimental new line of B-52 bombers. Within a day of arriving, he endures racist disrespect and an all-out attack by masked men trying to extract classified information, whom Pauly helps chase off.
He also attracts the glowering attention of an as-yet unnamed enlisted man (Chris Chalk), who, like Hanlon, is Black and who serves as the driver for the base’s antiracist white commander, Gen. Shaw (James Remar). Without getting too deep into King lore, both Chalk’s character and the Air Force’s secret Maine project are of some import. (Ditto the recurring turtle imagery.)
The marvelous thing about this horrifying episode is how little it depends on your knowledge of the source material to convey its message. “Welcome to Derry” is making a point the movies largely missed: “It” is about the unique vulnerability of children to violence and hatred. The creative team deserves enormous credit for taking the risk of alienating the audience with material this difficult to watch, made even more difficult by the truly ghastly sound and creature design.
None of it relies on Pennywise in his most famous form, which we don’t see at all. But Bill Skarsgard will be returning to the role, just as It returns to the surface of Derry every 27 years to feed. The orange-haired clown-monster who abducts terrified children is immortal, and his time has come around at last.
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