Even with the limitations of the It films hanging over the finale, Welcome to Derry manages to deliver a satisfying end to the season.
Photo: Brooke Palmer/HBO
Over the course of It: Welcome to Derry’s first season, I’ve done my best to meet the show where it’s at — sometimes more successfully than others. While I’ve appreciated sequences like last week’s Black Spot fire and the premiere’s bait-and-switch theater massacre, I’ve also grimaced my way through Periwinkle the Clown and the Haunted Mansion–coded graveyard ghost chase. In a larger sense, it has often been tough to understand why a prequel was the right approach for expanding the It story, given the obvious limitations at play. Knowing that Pennywise couldn’t be defeated outright made the finale a big question mark: How do you end a season in a satisfying way when your hands are tied? To its credit, Welcome to Derry does a decent job of landing the plane, but as with so many components of the preceding seven episodes, “Winter Fire” is best enjoyed without thinking too hard about it.
Once again, we pick up right where the last episode left off. I assumed the army would have to melt all the pillars to set Pennywise free, but no, one seems to have done the trick. There’s a heavy fog spreading over Derry — killing plants, inspiring creepy clown smiles, and, for some reason, freezing the Penobscot River like this is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. (I’m assuming; I only ever saw the trailer.) Pennywise is coming out of his cage, and he’s been doing just fine. In fact, he immediately takes control of Derry High School, inviting all the upperclassmen to a surprise assembly where he entertains them by tearing off Principal Dunleavy’s head, along with a little song and dance. With the doors barricaded, Pennywise hits them with the deadlights, and all the students go instantly catatonic as they float in the air. I get that this is the finale and the show wants to go out with a bang, but the sudden escalation of It’s power feels extreme (and makes his future attacks on the Losers’ Club look less impressive in retrospect). As Pennywise pied-pipers the children away, Lilly, Ronnie, and Marge discover missing-kid flyers for their classmates, including Will. “I want to kill that fucking clown,” says Marge before stealing a milk truck and driving her friends toward Pennywise’s circus wagon.
Meanwhile, the adults — Charlotte, Leroy, Hank, Dick, Rose, and Taniel — have convened at Rose’s for some much-needed exposition. With the cage opened, they have no chance of stopping Pennywise, Rose explains, but they can use the dagger as a replacement for the pillar that the military removed and melted down. It will need to be buried in the earth in front of the deadwood at the southern bank of the river, and before Pennywise gets there. (Kudos to Kimberly Guerrero for selling clunky lines like “It’s the furthest point that the dagger’s energy can still connect with the other pillars and restore the cage.”) While Dick should be able to use his shine to find the dagger, he first has to shut out all the dead people’s voices that have nearly driven him to suicide. Rose makes him a special tea using the Maturin root, which, she promises “will connect you to all things in the realm this evil came from,” noting, “Not all things there are evil.” I’ll do my best to explain this in the Losers’ Club section below. In the meantime, Dick takes a quick little trip to the macroverse and emerges healed. Better yet, he can now see the milk truck that Marge, Lilly, and Ronnie are driving, with dagger in tow.
Well, not driving for long — the kids hit a pothole, spin out, and crash into a tree. Minus some cuts and bruises, they’re fine, which is pretty impressive for 12-year-olds with no driving experience. The dagger, however, is making Lilly behave very strangely. She won’t let anyone touch it and bolts into the forest when Marge tries to grab it. As Dick guides the grown-ups to the kids’ location, we learn via more helpful exposition that the farther you take the dagger from its “home” under Neibolt House, the more it destroys your mind. “It drives you insane,” Taniel says. When they try to bury it, “the dagger will resist,” Rose adds. “It will fight back with a force that you cannot imagine.” For now, it’s just making Lilly very paranoid and creating a wedge between her and the others. The whole thing is so obviously an homage to the One Ring — the dagger even glows with ancient carvings! — that you almost expect Gollum to pop up. Instead, the kids wrestle for it and then tearfully make up, agreeing to switch off on who holds it as they get closer to Pennywise. And they’re closer than expected already, arriving at the bank of the frozen river and spotting the lights of the circus wagon in the distance.
Sans skates, Lilly, Ronnie, and Marge head out onto the ice and toward Pennywise, passing a long line of floating kids along the way. They get close enough to the wagon to see Will hovering above, but he’s just out of reach when they try to pull him down. Worse, the commotion has gotten the clown’s attention, and he pops out from the back of the wagon. “Look who’s decided to join the circus,” he growls as he advances on them. Ronnie has the dagger, which is enough to hold him off, but he retreats into the fog where they can’t see him. That allows him to extend his arm and grab Marge’s leg, pulling her away from her friends. Once Pennywise has her alone, he drops a bomb. “I’ve always wondered how you’d taste, Margaret Tozier,” he says, and while she doesn’t recognize her married name, we do. Yes, Marge will grow up to be Margaret “Maggie” Tozier, mother to Richie. And in case that wasn’t clear enough to viewers, Pennywise pulls out another missing-kid flyer, this time with Finn Wolfhard’s face on it.
I take no issue with the reveal itself — commenters on these recaps had guessed Marge’s identity already — but Pennywise’s specific knowledge of the future and his time slippage are genuinely confusing. “The seed of your stinking loins and his filthy friends bring me my death,” he tells Marge. “Or is it birth? Tomorrow? Yesterday? It’s all the same for little Pennywise.” Regardless of what it all means, Pennywise knows enough to know that killing Marge would prevent Richie from being born. He’s about to eat her and preemptively break up the Losers’ Club when he suddenly freezes in place. All the deadlights-afflicted kids, Will included, fall down onto the ice and wake up.
Dick has done what he did to Taniel and broken into the creature’s head. Pennywise is, at least temporarily, trapped in a nightmare of Dick’s making, where he’s woken up in 1908 as the real Bob Gray. Imagine the horror of being treated like a human even as you protest, “I am a god, an eater of worlds.” Embarrassing! The parents, meanwhile, have arrived on the river and reunited with their children. Leroy and Taniel decide to bring the dagger to the deadwood together, since it will take the strength of both of them to push past its resistance. They don’t make it very far before the military — monitoring the situation from a distance — opens fire. Leroy is shot in the leg, but Taniel takes a fatal bullet to the neck. Shaw tells his men to secure Leroy and find Dick so they can stop whatever he’s doing to Pennywise. I understand that the general is not what you’d call a rational thinker, but after what he’s already seen, you’d think he might reconsider his plan to unleash the creature on the country. Given the fog and frozen-river situation alone, it’s clear Pennywise’s next move after escaping Derry would be apocalyptic. Trying to talk sense into him would be useless, however, so a wounded Leroy hands off the dagger to Will and gives him instructions on where to bury it, reasoning that Will and his friends will be able to get to the deadwood without the military spotting them. It’s a bold move with trigger-happy soldiers in the vicinity, but there aren’t any good options here. And the father and son do share a sweet moment, as Leroy comforts Will and tells him he loves him.
Shaw and Pennywise have a less sentimental face-to-face. “All these years, wondering if you were real or just a little boy’s nightmare — look at you, you’re both,” he tells the still-frozen clown. (Shaw put an awful lot of effort and military resources into his project for someone who apparently had doubts about the creature’s existence.) Just then, Dick loses his hold on Pennywise, who snaps back awake. Shaw’s feeble “it’s okay, you’re free” doesn’t do much good in the end. Pennywise remembers their 1908 encounter and hastily eats the general’s face. (And nothing of value was lost.) At the same time, the kids are getting closer to the deadwood, even as the dagger fights against them. Now awake (and with a fresh meal in his tummy), Pennywise skips across the ice to intercept them. Leroy gets the upper hand on the soldiers and is able to steal a gun. He blows off the clown’s head twice, but there’s only so much you can do to slow down a god and an eater of worlds. And though the kids have reached the deadwood, they don’t have the strength to drive the dagger into the earth. When Pennywise transforms into a giant bird — really more of a bird-bat-dragon hybrid — it looks like all hope is lost. But wait, the ghost of Rich has arrived to help! It’s “a motherfucking miracle,” as Dick puts it. With ghost Rich’s help, the kids sink the dagger into the ground beneath the deadwood, and the Pennywise bird is knocked back onto the ice by a beam of light. Now back in clown guise, his face quickly shifts between past forms before he erupts in fire and light. The cage is back in place, and Pennywise has a very long nap to take.
As with so much of Welcome to Derry, the denouement is a mix of good and not-so-good. Because we’re not talking about actual children but rather actors saying lines written for them by adults, can I admit that I thought Marge’s eulogy at Rich’s funeral was … bad? Total word salad about friendship, though I guess that’s to be expected from a 12-year-old. At the same time, I was very moved by Dick telling Rich’s parents that their son has his hand on their shoulders and will always be with them. (Dick can see dead people in a good way now. Don’t get too hung up on the logistics.) Similarly, I liked Lilly talking to her father at his grave, but was less enthused about her conversation with Marge, who has decided that Pennywise might now travel back in time to kill their parents. I’m really hoping that’s not the setup for season two that it sounds like. If Pennywise can consciously murder their ancestors, “I guess it’ll be someone else’s fight,” Lilly concludes, and I sigh deeply. Finally, as touched as I was by Will’s good-bye to Ronnie before the Grogans leave Derry for good — he promises to write her so she remembers him and they share their first kiss — I was not sold on the Hanlons’ decision to stay in Derry. You mean to tell me that it’s Charlotte, the only sensible person on this show, and not her now-honorably discharged husband, who decides that they should stick around and take over Rose’s farm? Make it make sense! It doesn’t help that the scene ends with the ludicrous title reveal, It: Welcome to Derry: Chapter One. Not since High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.…
But that’s not the last scene in the episode, which, of course, can’t resist a quick trip to the ’80s. It’s 1988, 26 years since Ingrid was carted off from the Black Spot fire, and she’s been a patient at Juniper Hill ever since. When she hears screaming down the hall, she takes a break from her clown painting and wanders toward the commotion. Another patient, Elfrida Marsh, has hanged herself in her room. Elfrida’s husband, Alvin, and her daughter, Beverly, are crying over her body. While I admire the show’s ability to sneak in a cameo from Sophia Lillis — without the horrifying de-aging technology used in It: Chapter Two — the final scene feels a little cheap. After spending a season trying to make us care about original characters, the show falls back on the beloved movie ones. But I will give Welcome to Derry’s first season credit for its haunting last line. As Ingrid surveys the scene, she and Beverly lock eyes. “Oh dear, don’t be sad,” Ingrid says, consoling her. “You know what they say about Derry: No one who dies here ever really dies.”
• Buckle up, because we’ve got a lot to cover here. I don’t need to point out all the movie connections in that final scene, including the return of Joan Gregson as an older Ingrid, but it does answer the question of why Beverly sees Mrs. Kersh in It: Chapter Two. Pennywise is exploiting Beverly’s traumatic memory of her mother’s suicide, including the repeated line “No one who dies here ever really dies.” It’s a clever enough retcon, not that I really needed it.
• We also have that brief cameo (via photo) from Finn Wolfhard’s Richie as Marge gets an unwanted look at her future. I’m not going to touch on the “Wait, Pennywise can time travel?” question here, because I have a separate in-depth breakdown you can read. What I enjoyed most about the Margaret Tozier reveal was Pennywise’s riff on “beep, beep, Richie!” when he hits her with a “beep, beep, Margie!”
• Because Marge never leaves Derry, she presumably remembers everything about what happened in 1962 — that would explain why she named Richie after Rich. But it also implies that she started dating Wentworth Tozier knowing that they had to get married and have a kid, which is awkward.
• The show heard your complaints about Pennywise not taking on the form of a giant bird and picking off people trying to escape the Black Spot in last week’s episode. The creature he turns into on the frozen lake isn’t a bird exactly — at least not a hawk or kestrel, as Will describes it in the book — but those talons certainly recall King’s original text.
• The Maturin root that Rose gives Dick is a reference to Maturin the Turtle: Guardian of the Beam, brother to It/Pennywise, and accidental creator of the universe. In the novel It, Bill meets Maturin during the Ritual of Chüd and gets invaluable advice on defeating Pennywise. The show has done a good enough job of referencing the character without scaring off non-King readers with a mystical space turtle. (Meanwhile, I have brought him up in my recaps most weeks.)
• While we’re on the subject, Dick’s Maturin root–induced trip seems to show him the macroverse, which is — as Rose explains — the realm that It came from before crash-landing on Earth. It’s also home to Maturin, who is likely the person Rose hopes to connect Dick to as a cure for his incessant haunting.
• At the end of the episode, Dick tells the Hanlons that he’s leaving Derry to work as a cook at a London hotel. “I mean, how much trouble can a hotel be?” Dick asks, which is not exactly a rhetorical question to anyone who has read or seen The Shining. At some point, Dick will take what he’s learned in London to his role as cook at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado.
• The Hanlon sheep farm is part of Mike’s backstory in It, so we obviously had to get there eventually, even if I don’t entirely buy it as Charlotte’s choice.
• There’s a lovely reference to Mike in Will’s promise to keep writing Ronnie letters from Derry so she doesn’t forget him. In It, Mike is constantly writing down the history of Derry so that it’s preserved. He’s also, of course, the only member of the Losers’ Club to stay in town after they defeat Pennywise as kids. When all the others have forgotten, it’s Mike reaching out to them that starts to bring their memories back.
