Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for the IT: Welcome To Derry premiere, “The Pilot” (written by Jason Fuchs and directed by Andy Muschietti). Spoilers also include plot points from the films IT (2017) and IT: Chapter 2 (2019).
“You know what they say about Derry. No one who dies here ever really dies.” – IT: Chapter 2
Even though it appears IT, traditionally seen as the menacing clown Pennywise, met his death at the end of the film IT: Chapter 2, the wonderful thing about this Stephen King property is that the original book designed the character with so much lore, history, and backstory that the stories to tell about the town of Derry never truly have to die.
Set 27 years before the 1989 events of the film IT from 2017, HBO’s new series from Andy and Barbara Muschietti attempts to go back in time to look not only at the history of Pennywise, but also his inextricable link to the town of Derry, Maine, and why he has chosen this place and these people to terrorize.
Derry in 1962 is facing some of the same problems as Derry of 1989 (and 2016), as children have inexplicably gone missing, there are a series of unexplained phenomena, and there is general uneasiness in the otherwise peaceful, “normal” town. Episode 1 centers primarily around a young boy named Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt) and his mysterious disappearance in January 1962. The episode opens with a truly disturbing series of events where Matty, a troubled young boy, is kicked out of a movie theater for sneaking in, and then tries to hitchhike out of Derry.
He is picked up by what seems to be an idyllic family on their way to Portland, but things take a terrifying turn. The daughter starts eating liver with her bare hands, the mom talks about being impregnated by the father, the son begins the creepiest Spelling Bee we’ve ever seen, and Matty soon sees that even though they were first headed in the opposite direction, their car is actually headed straight back into Derry.
It’s at this point that the mother very graphically gives birth to some kind of freakish, flying demon-baby that attacks Matty before he can escape the car. We don’t see his death on screen, but like many of Pennywise’s victims before Matty (or, technically, after Matty), it’s implied that his is dead and Pennywise now has his body.
Four months later, spring has come to Derry, and the kids at school are dreaming about the summer ahead. Many things seem to be returning to normal, but some of the kids can’t stop thinking about what happened to Matty. Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) is a brilliant and thoughtful young Jewish boy who is studying for his Bar Mitzvah, but would much rather study his schoolwork to try to distract himself from the thought that he and his friend are partly responsible for Matty’s disappearance.
Teddy’s friend Phil (Jack Malloy Legault) is a conspiracy theorist peeping tom who strongly believes that Matty’s disappearance has nothing to do with the fact that Teddy and Phil forgot his birthday, and didn’t include him in their time sneaking up to the old watchtower.
Teddy has also recently become close with “Loony” Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack), whose father was killed a year earlier in a pickle-jarring company accident, for which Lilly feels responsible. She hasn’t (and can’t make herself) visited her father’s gravesite, and comments from her mother, as well as Teddy and Phil, make it seem that she is on medication so she doesn’t “have to go back” to Juniper Hill. In the Stephen King universe, that is Juniper Hill Asylum, where a number of horrific King characters have spent time, including Henry Bowers, who brutally murdered his abusive father in the first IT film.
Lilly begins hearing noises and singing from her bathtub pipes that she believes could be Matty, so she gathers Teddy and Phil, and, reluctantly, Phil’s younger sister Susie (Matilda Legault, the real-life sister to Jack Malloy Legault) to investigate. Their digging through old news files leads them to the last person who saw Matty alive. Ronnie (Amanda Christine) is another young woman, who works at the movie theater her father owns, and helped Matty escape when he was kicked out the night of his disappearance.
While first dismissive of their investigation, she changes her tune when she hears that the song Lilly heard in her bathroom was the song “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man, the film Matty was watching when he was kicked out. Reuniting with Lilly, Phil, Ted, and Susie, Ronnie and this group form our 1962 version of The Losers Club from the two IT films.
But their time together appears—at least based on events at the end of this first episode—to be short-lived. While going back to the theater to see if they can learn anything from The Music Man, Matty appears on the screen, holding something wrapped in a blanket. The kids at first scream for him to come to them so they can rescue him, but Matty’s face begins to morph into Pennywise before he opens the blanket and unleashes the same demon-baby from the episode’s opening into the theater.
The monster seemingly (but not definitively) kills Teddy, Phil, and Susie before Lilly and Ronnie can escape and lock it inside. Lilly escapes holding Susie’s detached hand, so she appears to be DEAD dead, but I do wonder if we will see Teddy and Phil in future episodes, perhaps still conscious and captive in Pennywise’s lair. There is a reference to Matty’s body never being found, so that is also a possibility here.
It will be quite a disappointment if these few minutes in the first episode are the only time this new Losers Club is together. The biggest strength of the two films was the brilliant casting of the 1989 kids and the chemistry they had together. This 1962 group has that potential, but certainly not if 60% of them just died.
In the B plot of this episode, two Air Force men have arrived in town for a new assignment. Major Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James) and Captain Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso) have been brought from their recent combat in Korea to learn the Air Force’s new state-of-the-art B-52 bomber plane and train the pilots who will eventually fly it.
Will Hanlon is (we strongly suspect) related to Mike Hanlon from the IT films and is likely Mike’s grandfather or older uncle. In the films, Mike is a late-joining member of The Losers Club because he is home-schooled and forced to learn the family trade at an abattoir facility that slaughters sheep. Major Hanlon mentions the rest of his family will be joining him soon in Derry, and we know from trailers of the show that his wife and a couple of kids will be integral parts of this season.
Immediately, Hanlon encounters some of the systemic racism that exists in the military, in Derry, and in the current environment in which this season is set. Even though they are in upper Maine, racism and prejudice still permeate this society, and we know from the events of the films that it is in no way eradicated, even decades later. Even though Hanlon has the full support of his commanding officer, we can suspect this will be a plot line of this season, perhaps leading to [REDACTED], a major event from the book, in which Pennywise is at the very center.
Hanlon’s loyalty to the military and the project is tested right away when masked men attack him in the middle of the night, demanding the plans and specs of the B-52, but Russo is able to help Hanlon fight them off. This is likely just a loyalty exercise the Air Force conducts to ensure confidentiality, but with all of the references to Russians and nuclear fallout and World War III in this episode, I suppose that can’t be completely ruled out.
Beyond that, Hanlon and Russo don’t have too much to do in this episode, but Hanlon’s role will surely grow as his family arrives and we learn what connection the Air Force’s “Special Projects” hangar has to what is happening in Derry.
I thought this premiere episode was adequate in setting the stage for what the citizens of Derry will have to deal with throughout the rest of 1962, but I am forcing myself to try and remain patient since this episode didn’t deliver on the level of scares and terror of the two IT films. Since the Muschiettis now have eight hours to play with, instead of a two-hour film, they can slow-play some of the reveals of the truly horrific things that are yet to come for Derry.
