Summary
It: Welcome to Derry delivers its weakest and silliest horror sequence in “Now You See It”, but it also gives us our first proper glimpse of Pennywise in all his glory.
I think it’s safe to say that It: Welcome to Derry has been much better than anyone expected it to be. The reasons are numerous, but you can boil it down to two things if you really want to: Scenes of proper horror, usually bookending each episode, and an underlying affection for the source material, not just Andy Muschietti’s two movies but also the original text and Stephen King’s wider connected universe in all its questionable coke-binge glory. Episode 3, “Now You See It”, really embraces the latter of these two elements, but for the first time, it struggles a lot with the former, especially in a hilariously cheap-looking climax that is genuinely so rubbish it undoes a lot of the good work elsewhere.
This, I think, is what happens when you essentially give a show carte blanche, which is a double-edged sword. You want someone like Muschietti to have the freedom to build a suspense sequence out of pickles, but the flipside of that is sometimes having to endure elaborately indulgent ideas that a more rigorous editing process would have wrung out. Guadalís Del Carmen and Gabriel Hobson wrote this episode, and Andrew Bernstein directed it, but there’s a flexing, balls-to-the-wall quality to its swansong that feels like it’s coming from further up the chain. The tendency of It: Welcome to Derry to constantly one-up itself at every turn is a worrying impulse when it began with the birth of a baby monster. In comparison, dodgy CGI ghosts are a small affair.
But I won’t dwell on this point since there’s plenty to unpack elsewhere. “Now You See It” opens in 1908 with a clarifying flashback explaining grown-up General Francis Shaw’s determination to locate and – since he’s a representative of the U.S. military – presumably weaponise Pennywise. And yes, I know that Pennywise is only the name of It’s clown manifestation, but everyone knows what I mean when I say it, so I’m going to continue using it as a catch-all for the “Entity” hidden under Derry that Shaw has spent his life obsessing over.
He has a good reason, at least. When he was a kid, he was terrified by a creepy old dude in a fairground attraction and was mocked by his father for it. Later, after trading the slingshot his father gifted him for some water, young Shaw and the slingshot’s recipient, a Native girl named Rose, encountered Pennywise in the forest – manifesting as the creepy old dude Shaw saw at the fair – and fought it back with that very same slingshot. Since then, Shaw has known that something was lurking in the forests, and that is underpinning his present-day search, which includes tearing up local Native ceremonial grounds, putting him slightly at odds with a grown-up Rose, whom he hasn’t seen for the intervening half a century.
There’s a subtle implication that Rose – or at least her tribe – might be more in-the-know about Pennywise than it seems, with the recent excavation of the Bradley Gang car proving that the military is on the right track and that some kind of intervention needs to occur, but it’s unclear for now. Shaw does have something resembling a cheat code informing his search, though, in the form of Dick, who continues to use his shine to look for Pennywise, this time accompanied by Leroy and Captain Russo. Even Dick is rattled when Pennywise seems to detect him, which is precisely the opposite of how things are supposed to work.
A still from It: Welcome to Derry | Image via WarnerMedia
It: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 builds an interesting relationship between these two. It toys with the idea that they’re becoming firm friends at least in part because they’re two Black men in a vehemently racist culture, but they’re also deeply mistrustful of one another; Leroy is creeped out by Dick’s “gift”, and Dick is unsettled by what that gift reveals about Leroy’s already-established inability to experience fear. This has come up a few times now, and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s building to an obvious conclusion of Pennywise conjuring something so horrific that it rattles even him.
Anyway, there’s probably less of this show’s equivalent of the Loser’s Club in “Now You See It” than there has been in previous episodes, but they’re still around, and thankfully, none of them are killed off (yet). Lilly returns from the mental hospital – her stay there could have been extended and focused on more, I think, but whatever – with an idea of proving Ronnie’s father’s innocence by photographing “It”, a task that requires the technical know-how of Will – who is nursing a crush on Ronnie – and Will’s new BFF, Rich. So, we have our core group of kids now after the premiere’s theatre fake-out.
Rich proves his usefulness by having some degree of knowledge about vaguely supernatural cultural traditions, so the kids – on their bikes, like a placeholder bit of nostalgia to tide us over until the final season of Stranger Things – head out to the graveyard to try and summon the entity. This is what justifies that ludicrous set-piece involving a bunch of cheap-looking ghosts who float like they’re being dragged around on wires, and it’s such a step down when compared to every scare sequence the show has produced thus far that it’s really distracting and dramatically inert. You know that the same trick with the kids isn’t going to be wheeled out again so soon, so none of them feel particularly imperilled, and the antagonists here have nothing on the demon baby from the premiere, the living womb that terrorised Ronnie in her bedroom, the screaming flesh lamp, or even Lilly’s dad’s pickle-head.
But it’s a short sequence to endure, and it builds to the first proper glimpse of Pennywise himself, in full clown regalia, as the camera settles on the developing photograph of his yellow peepers. “It looks like a clown,” one of the kids says. Indeed, it does.
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