Summary
It: Welcome to Derry remains flawed in terms of its broader storytelling, but it’s also consistently delivering truly nasty body horror that pushes the boundaries of what seems acceptable or possible on mainstream TV.
It’s hard to critique It: Welcome to Derry. It has been since the beginning, really. On the level of its broad storytelling, it leaves a lot to be desired, with two pretty ill-fitting concurrent storylines playing out simultaneously, and little overlap as yet. It occasionally overindulges in thoughtless CGI-driven excess, as in that dreadfully cheap-looking graveyard chase. There’s a lot of exposition, especially here in Episode 4, the wordy title of “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” giving away a tendency to verbosity. And yet the show also regularly includes gross-out body-horror of a kind that strains the limits of what you’d think was possible or acceptable on mainstream TV. There’s a sequence in this episode so effectively nasty that it’s worth the price of admission just to discuss it afterwards, or to deliberately not tell your girlfriend – who can’t tolerate anything to do with eyeballs – about it so that you can laugh when she’s blind-sided by it later. Though maybe that’s just me.
But you get the idea. This is a show that is supposed to make you feel a bit sick and shocked, and it accomplishes that regularly enough that it’d be misguided to claim that some of its storytelling woes are a major deal-breaker, even if they remain a bit of a problem either way. The best and worst of Welcome to Derry lives in this episode, sharing the space like Pennywise lurking in the forest, bound by the Natives who encircled his lair with a now-broken boundary. But more on that in a bit.
The theme of this episode is ignorance, though it takes many forms. But you can see the same idea rippling through Derry’s entire history, from the time of Pennywise’s original arrival to the present day, when innocent Black men are being locked up for crimes they didn’t commit to appease the prejudicial instincts of a blinkered era. The key recurring motif is that someone has always known what was going on, and that their warnings about it have always fallen on deaf ears.
Consider the kids, who are pretty pleased with themselves about having captured incontrovertible photographic evidence of Pennywise, which they present to Chief Bowers as though it’ll sway him to their point of view. It doesn’t, though. The kids aren’t believed; they’re mocked. And when they protest, Bowers threatens to send Lilly back to Juniper Hill. Pay attention to how readily any perceived “other” status is weaponised in this episode; how it has been all throughout the season, really. All the kids are dismissed unfairly because they’re kids, but the targeting of Lilly’s perceived mental illness is telling. It isn’t particularly far removed from women being burned at the stake on suspicion of “witchcraft”.
This is the kind of thing that Pennywise feeds on. These are the attitudes it wants to fester. Also telling: At school, the Pattycakes have a plan to make fun of Lilly using a popular jock who is pretending to have the hots for her, but the plan requires Marge’s complicity. Pennywise doesn’t intervene until Marge starts having second thoughts and seems on the brink of confessing the truth to Lilly. At that point, her eyes – presumably a point of some internal self-loathing, given the dorky glasses – swell out of her head like bulbous traffic cones, and she attempts to cut them off first with a chisel and then, more successfully, with a band saw. It’s a truly nasty sequence that works on its own terms by just being horrible to watch, but also as a reminder that Pennywise is tormenting Marge here simply for considering doing the right thing.
The ostracisation of Lilly works either way. She might not have had a chance to fall for the jock ruse, but the other students, responding to Marge’s wailing, find Lilly pinning her to the ground, holding a bloody chisel. Looks like she’ll be heading back to Juniper Hill after all.
It: Welcome to Derry Episode 4 also represents a clear turning point when considered in light of this underlying ignorance-is-bliss theme, since it’s the first time that the parents – or any adults, really – have believed their children about what they’re seeing. But here in “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function”, both Charlotte and Leroy take Will’s claims about the kids’ recent experiences seriously, landing themselves in more trouble.
Taylour Paige and Jovan Adepo in It: Welcome to Derry | Image via WarnerMedia
Charlotte takes a more terrestrial approach, recognising that in his efforts to clear Ronnie’s father’s name, Will is resisting Derry’s racist attitudes. She starts leaning on the Derry PD with threats of playing phone tennis with enough influential people to bring the department into disrepute, getting her face time with Hank, who is partly taking the rap for the crime because his alibi will reveal that he spent the night with a married white woman.
Leroy, meanwhile, takes Will fishing, where in a brief horror sequence, he’s almost pulled under the water by a vision of his father horribly burned and mangled by a plane crash. The show isn’t clear about whether this is a kind of flash-forward, since Leroy keeps going up in the air to look for Pennywise at the military’s behest, or an outgrowth of his longstanding fear of his father dying in a wreck after what happened to him in Korea. It’s probably the latter, but you never know.
Either way, the encounter leaves Will with visible wounds. Since Leroy knows the military is looking for something deeply evil hidden in Derry, and that they’re utilising the services of someone who is explicitly supernatural to do it, Leroy is the first adult character who truly buys what the kids are experiencing. He goes to Dick about it. Then, after Will spots Pennywise staring into his bedroom window from the street outside – Leroy does, admittedly, initially blame this on Charlotte having made a scene with the police – he goes to General Shaw for a full explanation. And he gets one in the form of Dick using his Shine to psychically interrogate Rose’s nephew, Taniel.
Through his powers, Dick is able to dredge up a pretty artless recounting of Pennywise’s origins from the perspective of the Natives, who took pains to contain his obvious evil until European settlers ignored all the warnings and made the situation worse. Now, Pennywise is partly contained within a boundary formed by the scattered remnants of the space rock he hurtled to Earth in, fashioned into daggers and artifacts by the Native people, and buried in a wide perimeter encircling the western forest.
These days, Pennywise has a more specific home, finally revealed at the end of the episode: The Well House.
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