RECAP: ‘IT: Welcome To Derry’ Episode 3 — “Now You See It”

IT: Welcome to Derry is starting to hone in on its primary story, for better and worse. Last episode, Ronnie’s father was taken into police custody, Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) was put into the Jupiter Hills Asylum (despite selling out Ronnie’s father to avoid it), and well, the US military is trying to turn Pennywise into a nuclear deterrent. Now, in IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3, “Now You See It,” we learn more about Hallorann’s “gift,” General Shaw’s (James Remar) connection to Derry, and we see our Loser’s Club take shape, finally. 

We open at a freakshow, a grotesquerie, and a boy named Francis (Diesel La Torraca), who is in a fun house at a carnival, approaches a man, asking him to come closer, only to be scared away and run out. As he runs out, the episode’s camera angle changes, and it’s clear that there is a high chance Pennywise is influencing Francis. As he walks away, the camera pans to a clown, more delicate than scary, yet haunting enough for the audience to recognize it as a bad omen. 

On their way back from the carnival, his father’s car breaks down, and Francis goes to buy water from a group of Native children selling it on the side of the dirt road. When he doesn’t have the money to pay, a young girl (Violet Sutherland) asks him for his slingshot instead. This isn’t the Derry that we know, and it’s not the same time that we know either.

IT: Welcome To Derry Episode 3 starts in the 1935 Cycle, and can’t stop looking back.

In a montage, we see the young boy playing with the Native children, only to be warned by the girl who sold him the water to stop running into the forest. She doesn’t run in after him but calls for him to come back with a scared look on her face. 

What happens next is a second run-in with the scary man from the carnival. That’s what Francis is scared of, and it becomes increasingly apparent that the Skeleton Man is what Pennywise is using to scare him. As Francis runs through the forest, IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 takes its scariest moment, which is the thin skeletal man running through the forest after the child. It’s scary in the same way that the scares from It Follows were scary. A simple play on height and weight that makes the scene uncanny.

But then it changes into another weird spectacle, making you question the CGI budget for the series as the Skeleton Man morphs into a monster with rows of teeth. The girl attempts to save him with a slingshot to the eye. Then, as they run, the episode switches to the opening credits, which have now become more horror-themed, focusing on the fear of nuclear war, and, notably, Jupiter Hills, as well as a mob fight with Pennywise shooting from a window. 

The opening credits for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 work to capture how quickly the Derry we’ve been seeing is falling apart, and they serve as the perfect transition to the screams from Jupiter Hill Asylum’s halls and Lilly’s mother waiting to pick up her daughter. 

While we don’t have any information on Lilly’s stay in Jupiter Hills, which seems to have been relatively short. Lilly may be checking out of the asylum and guilt-stricken because of what happened to Ronnie’s dad, but none of that helps Hank, who is stuck in a jail cell. 

In what serves as a vehicle to make a Shawshank reference—because this is the Stephen King universe, apparently—the audience is given a look at what is happening to Hank. We see Ronnie’s father in jail, the racist police chief interrogating him, having already decided that Hank is guilty—a pack of cigarettes and Lilly’s testimony was apparently the smoking gun. But that’s all we see of Hank in Welcome to Derry Episode 3, with no idea of how much time has passed. 

Lilly is out of Jupiter Hills, and now, she’s trying to make things right with Ronnie.

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 has three main subplots that are all trying to add more context to this current cycle. The first is creating the new Loser’s Club as they attempt to catch the supernatural force on camera, the second is Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) and Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) being put on the task of finding Pennywise for the military, and finally, the third is about the kid running through the forest who turns out to be General Shaw, and how he and Pennywise intersect with the Native tribe outside of Derry. 

It should be said that Welcome to Derry Episode 3 continues the frustrating and jarring transitions between its subjects. Bloated to say the least, the series is still buckling when trying to find a cohesive story to tell. The ensemble cast is large and presents an entire spectrum of convincing acting, as well as too much melodrama, and all the stops in between.

On the one hand, showrunners Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs are establishing the 1935 cycle and the lore it creates for Derry. On the other hand, we’re seeing a story about childhood grief and guilt. And the other still is some amalgamation of Cold War fear and racism, fueled by the government. There is too much going on in Welcome to Derry Episode 3, and it’s clear that there is just too much going on in the series as a whole. 

When it comes to recapping IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3, I think it’s best to group the events instead of recounting every flashback and confusing jump between adults and children. And to start, well, why not start with the Air Force’s push to turn Pennywise, the thing that was buried in Derry 300 years before the invention of the automobile, into a weapon? 

The bulk of the military’s search is focused on Hallorann and the Major, and their first outing trying to find “the entity,” as General Shaw calls it. At the end of Episode 2, a car was being pulled from the dig site with dead bodies falling out of the door. The car is connected to the 1935 cycle and the Bradley Gang Massacre, where apparently the townspeople of Derry gunned down the criminals in the car. 

For one, this comment highlights that IT: Welcome to Derry isn’t concerned with keeping Pennywise’s victims as children. Instead, the larger narrative appears to highlight how the clown from the sewers is affecting the entire town and its inhabitants.

Dick Hallorann has one of the most significant roles in “Now You See It.”

In an attempt to get closer to the Entity’s burial site, Hallorann and the Major, his new handler, fly a helicopter over the dig site. With a slingshot in hand, which was from Shaw’s childhood in Derry, the one that the young girl used to shoot Pennywise, Hallorann uses the Shining to guide them to the site. 

Hallorann does tap into the Entity, making it to the sewers under Derry, where the tower of collected souvenirs from his victims stands tall, with bodies flowing around it. While Hallorann is in the vision, he’s unresponsive in the real world, making the Major worry and pay attention. However, the larger problem here isn’t Hallorann’s episode; it’s the fact that while he was looking into the darkness of a 1935 clown display cart, Pennywise looked back. 

“Who are you?” Pennywise says, prompting a manic montage of all the deaths that Hallorann holds in his memories and how it makes him terrified. The yellow eyes capture what we know about the clown, but we still don’t see him. 

The fear Hallorann feels is intensified when his grandmother tells him to run. Only, while Hallorann believes he is opening a hatch to leave the sewer, he is really opening the helicopter. Seconds away from death, the Major saves him.

The two have bonded from their time in the sky, and even more so when the Major invites Dick to his house for dinner.  Charlotte Hanlon (Taylour Paige) makes food that reminds Hallorann of a past time, and the trio talks about the new life in Derry. It’s here where we find out that Charlotte can’t be a teacher in Derry, despite having been a History Teacher in Louisiana before the move. But her teaching isn’t the only thing that she misses from back home.

She misses the marches and the activism, but the Major, as Charlotte says, is happy that it’s gone. With the activism gone, it won’t impact his career ladder upward in the military. It’s a somber note that defines the couple’s relationship, as well as how the Major views the world. Where he is okay with keeping his head down, Charlotte isn’t. 

The Major and Hallorann have a friendship growing, but an undercurrent of uncertainty remains. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 isn’t about bonding, though; it’s really about the Shining? Yeah, this episode spends a lot of time with Hallorann, his gift, and how he describes it, “like seeing things, without seeing things.” Still, you’d think that the Major would be at least a little skeptical. But he isn’t, he believes Hallorann, explaining that where he grew up, every friend had a friend who had the same thing. 

While the Major explains that he has never seen the Shining (though it hasn’t been called that just yet in this series), he knows it exists. And that’s when he points out that he can feel it. The Major never told Hallorann that he had a son named Will, but his new friend knew, and more importantly, he felt a tug in his mind. The same tug that he felt when he was being assaulted in Episode 1 by the men in gas masks. 

Welcome to Derry Episode 3 adds more connections between the cast members and the Entity, but in this case, it also connects characters in general. The Major tells Dick Hallorann to stay out of his mind, and is obliged.

But Hallorann doesn’t agree to stay out of his mind because he was asked to, but because the Major has a mind that he hasn’t seen before. Where other men think of their families and their regrets before death, the Major was simply analyzing the situation, collecting information; he was a man without fear. 

Where Hallorann and Major Hanlon are one element of the military attempt to find Pennywise, General Shaw is the other. Francis Shaw was the 12-year-old from the beginning of the episode, and his childhood gives more context to Derry and to Pennywise in the past. We see flashbacks of him and the young girl playing together and promising to remember each other. 

The reality is, though, that Shaw didn’t remember anything but his time on the military base and his father. But his friendship with the girl and her assertion that the thing didn’t leave the forest was enough to call him back to Derry. As we move from a flashback to the present day in the 60s, we’re shown that the girl is Rose (Kimberly Guerrero), the shopkeeper from Episode 2, who was kind to Charlotte. 

Rose is also at the center of the attempt to stop the government from continuing to dig up her tribe’s sacred ground. In a town hall moment, we see the young man who was sitting on the ridge in the last episode. He is Rose’s nephew, and he’s deeply against the military’s abuse of the land.

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 adds another factor to the military’s dig site.

The rest of the town hall is pushing to stop the digging, but Rose wants more answers as to why they’re digging and for what. So, she files petitions with the federal government to get it to stop, understanding that it will be ignored. 

That paperwork is what brings Shaw back into her life, and into her shop. The General comes to Rose to ask for her help. The reason that he comes up with is that he and the Air Force are testing the soil to see if they can add infrastructure ot the area. It’s a lie, and we know it, and with the look on Rose’s face, I think she does too. 

It’s here that we encounter the common horror and even more common Stephen King trope about disturbing sacred burial grounds and the curse that can be brought.  The use of this element and another we see later feels like something shoehorned into the episode because it had to be. The sincerity we see from the actors isn’t carried through the dialogue or the narrative itself; instead, it comes off as melodrama steeped in stereotype, and that’s about it. 

With the military and its men in the rearview, we now get to come back to our new Loser’s Club, actually, this time. Having been released from Jupiter Hills, Lilly returns to school and immediately attempts to mend things with Ronnie, who is being bullied. Ronnie is angry, and it’s understandable, but Lilly apologizes and devises a plan for them to prove Ronnie’s father’s innocence. Take its picture. 

Still, the two girls don’t know how to develop photos, and they can’t exactly take supernatural photos into a store. And that’s where the Major’s son, Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James), and his new friend Rich (Arian S. Cartaya) come in. Having met in detention, Ronnie recalls how Will explained the chemical reaction of a stink bomb and assumes he can figure out how to develop film, too. She’s right. 

Unfortunately, IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 doesn’t have all of its characters on the same page, leaving Ronnie and Lilly to convince Rich and Will that their experiences are real. The boys agree to help take the photos, but they don’t necessarily believe the girls either, at least not entirely.

“Now You See It” attempts to highlight Cuban Santeria, but falls short.

In the clock tower, Rich listens to the girls’ story and walks away, comparing it to Santeria in Cuba and the Orixás, spirits who take the form of dead loved ones to scare people, a practice his babalao tio used to conjure. It’s a moment meant to highlight Rich’s culture, but it stands out just as sorely as the close-up matza balls from Episode 1. Like the racism we saw in the last episodes, this aspect of the supernatural comes across as something shoehorned in, rather than a sincere illustration of Pennywise’s lore. 

Where Rich is open and directly comes up with a plan to try to summon the force haunting the girls, Will is just along for the ride. When he talks to Ronnie, he makes it clear that he doesn’t believe that she is a liar. Will believes that Ronnie believes what she is saying, but the science in his skeptical heart doesn’t let him buy into it. So, he has to experience it.

IT: Welcome To Derry Episode 3 is where the scares get bigger, or at least, the showrunners attempt to make the scares bigger, even if it doesn’t really work out that way. The new Loser’s Club heads to the cemetery to perform Rich’s uncle’s ceremony to summon the evil force. However, it may have been his uncle’s ceremony that his cousin told him about, and it might not work at all. After some laughs and moments of confusion, the group decides to leave.

As the quartet peddles toward the exit, Welcome to Derry Episode 3 takes a different attempt at horror, leaning on ghosts (or I guess the series is calling Orixás, no matter how odd that is) and earthquakes rather than the big beasties that we’ve seen so far. Ronnie, Lilly, Will, and Rich keep trying to get out, only for the gate to move further away; the ghosts of the dead kids from the movie theater pop up and scare them. 

Separated, all of the kids have their own experiences as they attempt to keep the camera in their hands and also take pictures of it all. As they find their way out, Will is left alone, having fallen into a crypt. When he gets the camera, he takes one last photo before struggling to leave, his bike at his side. Will didn’t believe Ronnie before, but he does now. 

This part of Welcome to Derry Episode 3 is an attempt to highlight that Pennywise isn’t just one thing. He is the fear that the person feels at the moment. Here, the kids are afraid of ghosts, and so, the ghosts show up. The problem, much like the rest of the episodes, is that the CGI is just not great.

Despite its subpar CGI monsters, the final simple scare in Welcome to Derry Episode 3 is effective. 

The jarring difference between the CGI ghosts and the human actors makes everything funny instead of scary. Our heroes, the kids, are terrified and screaming each time one of the ghosts appears, but for me, it just looked funny. The color palette and even the injuries and body manipulation are all too much spectacle for the horror fans trying to pull out, and it’s frustrating. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 ends at the school, with the kids walking through the darkened halls, and then developing the photos from the cemetery. This is the best sequence in the entire series so far, with the ticking of the timer as they develop the film one frame at a time. 

First, we see Rich’s photos and nothing out of the ordinary. Then we start to see the faces of the dead, the ghosts of the kids killed in the theater, their ghosts captured in the film. Ronnie, Lilly, Will, and Rich are happy. The subject in the photos may be horrible, but it proves that they are not delusional or crazy. 

The moment is a thoughtful one, bringing the kids together and allowing them to celebrate. The simplicity of the photos is much needed for the overstuffed series. And as the final photo develops, IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 finally shows us Pennywise. The last photo that Will took has Pennywise standing in the ruined crypt, blurry but there, his distinctive, menacing silhouette. 

I expected Pennywise to move in the photo because in Welcome to Derry, it doesn’t hold back in any of its scares. However, in this final scene, they do. The showrunners let the image speak for itself, and it works, ending the episode on a high note after being stuck in a low valley. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 is frustrating, once again. With a promising ending, the series clearly knows what can work, but it gets buried in all of the large swings for big CGI scares. There are too many characters, too many motives, and the series doesn’t easily establish tethers between each of the subplots, resulting in a messy narrative, uneven pacing, and characters who aren’t given enough time for the audience to develop any emotional connection to them. 

The cinematic universification of Stephen King is awkward to say the least, but it’s difficult to see them as anything more than frustrating Easter eggs. Welcome to Derry Episode 3 doesn’t keep me engaged, and it’s more fun to laugh at it than feel any fear. Maybe I’ve outgrown Pennywise, even if this series is doing everything it can to tell its audience that adults are scared, too. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 is streaming now on HBO MAX with new episodes every Sunday. 

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