RECAP: ‘IT: Welcome To Derry Episode 1’ — “The Pilot”

HBO Max’s IT: Welcome to Derry is based on Stephen King’s deeply beloved (and terrifying) novel, but it also expands on the two films Andy Muschietti put into the world, bringing Pennywise to new audiences. Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs join Andy Muschietti as showrunners and help expand the world of Derry. IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1, titled “The Pilot,” takes audiences to a time before what we see in the two-film series. 

To start, Welcome to Derry Episode 1 is doing a lot. It begins in the Capital Theater, where a young boy with a yellow pacifier is sitting in an auditorium, only to be chased out for sneaking in for free by an usher. As the owner notes the boy’s home life and lets him go, we follow him as he hitchhikes out of Derry, stuck in the snow, and is picked up by a couple on the way to Portland. 

In the shadow of the Cold War, the family sits in the car, with ice on the windows, the worry of the Soviet Union’s possible nuclear attack on the radio. The daughter is pulling liver out of a bloody tin, the brother is spelling words that become increasingly terrifying. From “trouble,” he spells “kidnapping,” “strangulation,” “necrosis, “and the family quickly becomes a nightmare as the young boy struggles.

The mom’s aggression gets worse and worse, and then she gives birth in the car in a graphic scene that leaves nothing to the imagination. Who does she bear, of course, but a terrifying demon baby who tears apart the car as the family laughs. Then the boy’s pacifier flies out of the car, drops into the river near Derry, and floats down the sewer. And that is just the cold open for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1’s cold open sets up the jarring transitions to come.

As the story continues, audiences are brought to the northernmost US Air Force base, which, of course, calls Derry home. Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) and Pauly (Rudy Mancuso) ride in from the plane, passing a totally not ominous facility. We know that Hanlon is waiting for his family to join him, and he’s looking to settle down in the most normal of towns. Which we know of course, is not what he’s about to get in Derry. 

The bulk of their time in IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 is about introducing characters. For the military, we see Major Hanlon meet his crew, with one obviously racist airman named Masters who refuses to salute him. General Shaw (James Remar) corrects the airman, but the tension in the air is high. It’s accentuated by another Black soldier driving the General, staring blankly at Hanlon. As an audience, we know there has to be something more there. 

While the General respects Hanlon because of the Korean War, Hanlon is haunted by the war. Major Hanlon shares that he joined the Air Force because he accompanied crop dusters as a child. As Hanlon and the General talk, we hear the Major explain that he’s in the Air Force to make his father proud, but, even more importantly, to be what’s right with the country, to fix what’s wrong. 

Where IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 spends time establishing who Hanlon is and the obvious racism in Derry, it does come out of left field after the cold open. For a story often focused entirely on the children, audiences get a lot of Major Hanlon. Even more interesting, we get a Cold War story at the same time.

These moments aren’t bad, but they are jarring to transition to. It’s less about the racism Major Hanlon is facing and more about the focus on a new bomber and the Air Force in general. A military base is the last thing I want to see when watching a series expanding Stephen King’s IT. 

Outside of Major Hanlon and the airbase, the new group of kids we will be following also starts to take shape in Welcome to Derry Episode 1. We first meet Lilly (Clara Stack) as she opens the door to her locker only to find that it’s filled with pickle jars, one smashing at her feet.

Her friend Marge (Matilda Lawler) keeps her company as others laugh, and the camera then moves to the next two children in this story, Phil (Jack Molloy Legault) and Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler). Phil is obsessed with aliens, and Teddy’s locker is tagged with an obscenity. Once again, our Losers Club starts to take shape, or at least we think it is. 

Teddy is studious, and Phil is boisterous. But Teddy’s silence has a meaning when we see the two at Teddy’s house. And it’s because of a kid named Matty Clements (Clara Stack). Nobody found, just gone. While the episode doesn’t spell it out just yet, we know that the boy from the beginning is Matty. Finally, it makes sense, even if we haven’t even seen Pennywise yet. 

“The Pilot” seems like it’s entirely about setting up the cast, until it lets chaos take over.

Just as Matty’s identity is confirmed, Lilly has a flashback, one where she and Matty head to the top of the tower in Derry, looking down at the town. The tower is a decent spot for Matty, Teddy, and Phil, but the two of them are close to each other. It’s here that we understand the pickle “joke pulled by Lilly’s bullying. She lost her dad, who worked at a jarring facility. It’s a bit over the head, but by just 20 minutes in, our core group of kids is established. 

Things are taken a step further when Matty tries to kiss Lilly with New Year’s Eve fireworks in the background. It was the last time she saw him, and unfortunately, it’s what she thinks of when she looks at her homemade charm bracelet. The larger picture we get painted for Lilly is that she’s still grieving her father, compounded by the fact that she believes that she was the reason that he father died. And now, she doesn’t have Matty either. 

After her mother belittles her grief, Lilly hears Matty’s voice in her tub drain. Se yells for him to come home, and then a bloody finger comes up the drain, saying, “He won’t let me.” The next day at school, Lilly is scared. Hoping to confide in Marge, she’s let down. Instead of taking her seriously or consoling her, Marge tells Lilly to stop making it hard for herself to make it easy to be her friend. Lilly, who is called Loony by the kids at school, is disregarded.

When Marge, Lilly’s only friend, doesn’t believe her, she heads to meet Teddy and Phil at the tower that Matty showed her. While they don’t immediately believe her, Teddy tries his best to be kind instead of mocking her. Phil, on the other hand, not so much. 

But, as you can expect, IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 doesn’t let the audience wait too long to deliver on Lilly’s story when it comes to Teddy. At the dinner table, Teddy asks his father about Matty in a roundabout way. He asks if it’s possible to keep someone underground. To which his father tells him of the horrors of the Holocaust, and what his family has survived. The point is to show that there is too much horror in the world, and to indulge in fantasy. 

Still, one thing his father says sticks with Teddy. He tells him that the Nazis made lampshades made of the skin of concentration camp victims, only to be followed by Teddy seeing his lampshade with Teddy’s face stitched onto it. The audience knows that Derry’s evil has started, and so do the kids. 

When Teddy tells Phil, his best friend knows that he isn’t lying. And so, they head to the library, and the library leads them to Ronnie (Amanda Christine), the daughter of the Capital Theater owner’s daughter. Only after trying to send the children away does she hear about the voices in the pipes, and she turns around, terrified. Ronnie has heard the voices, too.

With five kids pulled together in IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1, it looks like we have our new Losers Club.

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 continues with Ronnie bringing the kids to the Capital Theater, with Teddy’s little sister Susie (Matilda Legault) also in tow. Ronnie lets them into the theater to watch The Music Man, a musical with the song that Lilly heard Matty singing in the drain. The theater is dimly lit as Ronnie sets up the projector, only to show Teddy, Lilly, and Phil crying as they think about Matty and what they could have done differently. 

The grief the kids feel is what is pushing them to solve the mystery in the pipes. It’s holding them together as they sit in those theater seats. Grief, once again, is pushing the new Losers Club, it seems, at least right now. Yes, they’re all grieving for Matty, their guilt tying them together. But Lilly’s offhand comments about being sent back to Juniper Hill, an insane asylum, pull her into a unique focus. 

Lilly carries her own grief for her father, but the guilt that they all feel for not being by Matty’s side when he was alive is an even heavier weight. They’re kids, and kids feel deeply. Still, they also don’t have the understanding to see that it is not all their fault. The kids see the world through their actions; their choices feel like mountains; and the failings of adults don’t come into focus. 

Once the film starts playing and the song comes on-screen, the character tells the “mothers of River City” to stop the trouble from coming to the town. And then, the kids see Matty—the family took him in the cold open—and as Matty walks closer to the audience on the screen, the background color fades out, leaving him blaming the kids for being stuck on the screen to begin with. It preys on the kids’ guilt, and then, the demon baby from the beginning comes plowing through the screen, and the film reel burns. 

Phil blames the airbase, and as the bad CGI mutant baby crawls over the seats, the room flashes with red lights throughout. The baby rips apart Teddy, then Phil, and Susie, too, as Lilly tries to save her, and Ronnie runs down the stairs from the projection room. It’s mayhem for sure, and the first time that IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 shows the same level of blood and violence as we see in its opening. With Lilly and Ronnie, the last ones left, the two girls are terrified, and Lilly’s shriek plays out the episode. 

Notably, Pennywise the Clown doesn’t show up in “The Pilot.” The horror is the weird mutant baby, racism, and masked goons asking about the specs for a new bomber that Major was brought in to test. To say IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 is messy is an understatement. While the pastel dream Andy Muschietti has for Derry carries over from his films, the chaotic nature of this premiere episode makes the tension he’s crafted before fall flat. 

Welcome to Derry Episode 1 is a lot to take in, messy, weird, and unfocused.

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 feels like too much is crammed into less than an hour-long episode to achieve a cohesive vision of what this series means for the existing lore. I don’t know what this series is going to be, and as a first episode, I’m not quite sure the Muschiettis do either. Ultimately, despite a cliffhanger ending, there is nothing about “The Pilot” that functions well as a pilot. 

While I don’t think that they need to retread territory nonstop, IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 doesn’t have much in the way of connection outside the town, including in its tone. And as a premiere episode of a well-known franchise, the series fails to make a strong connection to the films it’s tied to.

In fact, the scattered approach to setting up our characters and then immediately eliminating them makes it hard to grip the story. And by getting rid of nearly the entire cast in the very first episode, there had to be more consistency and investment elsewhere, something more gripping to be a success for those tuning in as a new Sunday show, not just because of the IT branding.

Visually distinct, IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 is chaotic in its storytelling and tone. While the characters are decently interesting to understand, and the guilt running through what looked to be our core group was the series’s most tangible element to become invested in, this isn’t a pilot that sets a series sailing. Instead, it’s just too much spectacle, too little substance, with barely any focus to keep you invested.  

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 is streaming now on HBO Max with new episodes releasing every Sunday.