RECAP: ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 8 — “Winter Fire”

The penultimate episode of IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1 was a shocker. Pennywise was put to sleep and then awoken when the military destroyed one of the pillars, The Black Spot and all of its patrons were murdered, and Richie Santos died saving Marge. In IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8, the fallout from those events and Pennywise’s growing power comes into focus. 

Titled “Winter Fire,” IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 opens with fog taking over everything. The mist, as it settles in, kills the plants it touches and brings woe to all. If it sounds familiar, well, the military causing a break in the plane where it came from is the plot of Stephen King’s The Mist. Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs are not showrunners who put subtext first. 

As the mist takes over Derry, the children are excused from school, well, the seniors are. With the younger students held in the gymnasium, the school’s Principal begins to thank them for attending his special show. Moving oddly, the audience knows what is about to happen. 

The parallel between the opening of the last episode and the gruesome show in “Winter Fire” works extremely well. 

As the Principal continues to appear even more, well, dead, he announces Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and the curtains pull back, revealing that he is puppeteering the Principal. It’s the first shock of the episode, and as a season finale, there are many more to come. 

Pennywise rips apart the principal, and the crowd is shocked. But much like Episode 7, Welcome to Derry opens this episode with a performance. Pennywise dances, he sings, and everyone in the gym is scared out of their mind. Which means his meal is perfect. Bill Skarsgård has made Pennywise his role, even with Tim Curry’s pivotal performance in the late 90s. He is terrifying. 

But the clown doesn’t eat his meal; instead, he opens his jaw and captures the students in his beam before pulling the stage’s background to the side and revealing a vision of the past carnival. It’s a lot, but there is still more to come. 

After the opening credits roll, Welcome to Derry Episode 8 cuts to the remaining kids, Ronnie, Lilly, and Marge, as they overlook Derry being consumed by the mist. As it moves away, the kids see posters for every student at school. As they take off on their bikes, it’s clear that things are entirely different in this episode. 

For the majority of the season, Pennywise has just been a spectre. The killer clown has chased them and scared them, but ultimately has been confined by the pillars; the limitations on his power gave them a shot. But as we see a close-up of his foot, a severed hand, and suspended children, we realize Pennywise is free and moving through foggy Derry in his cart, playing a tuba, and in full control. 

The core three girls find the decapitated principal and his severed head before freaking out. When they see Will’s poster, they’re terrified. But when they see a trail of blood, they all hop on the bike and move together. As they go through the town, they see more bodies. This is a killing unlike what Pennywise has previously wrought, but thankfully, a dead milkman means that they have a truck to take. 

The trio of girls put the storytelling perspective through a different lens. In the films, the boys outnumber Beverly, and her hardships often feel wasted, especially when they deal with issues that only affect her because she is a girl. Here, though, Ronnie, Marge, and Lilly coming together showcases a friendship between girls, and it’s the first time they have all really confronted how they have impacted each other. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 is the best-looking episode of the series. 

As the girls try to find Pennywise, Will, and all of the other children, Major Will Hanlon is at the airbase and worried. When he calls Will and gets no response, Pennywise calls him back. He asks on the phone, “What scares the man without fear?” The answer is “us,” not “you,” and the Major is aware that his son has been taken. 

Pennywise’s propensity to play with his food and his ability to get under adults’ skin have made this prequel series so much different from the films we have seen. Here, Pennywise is everywhere, and the whole of Derry is his victims.

Dick Hallorann is the only person that the Major can turn to for help, but he’s seconds away from killing himself as the dead keep stalking him, responding to his acknowledgment. Hallorann has broken. The Black Spot broke him, Pennywise gutted his mind, and now Hallorann can’t see another way out. That is, until the Major tells him that it has Will. 

What happens next brings the rest of Welcome to Derry’s ensemble cast together. With Hallorann in the back of a van, Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), Charlotte (Taylour Paige), Rose (Kimberly Guerrero), Taniel (Joshua Odjick), and the Major are all trying to find the kids, using the dagger as a homing beacon of sorts that Dick Hallorann has latched onto. Rose encourages and helps Hallorann to use his gift for good and ultimately cage the monster one more time. 

The adults are rushing toward the girls, but the girls are struggling to keep the dagger’s impact at bay. As Rose explained to the van (offering exposition to the audience), the dagger wants to return home. Because of that, the dagger is harming the girls and Lilly specifically as she fights the others to keep hold of it. But the harder she fights to hold onto the dagger, the more it hurts her. 

Lilly is cracking, and it’s driving a wedge between the three girls. Lilly’s insecurities are harming her. She’s worried about getting everyone killed, and the dagger is making it worse. But Ronnie and Marge hold onto her. They fight with her, but more importantly, they reassure her that they are her friends, that they can work together, and that none of this was her fault. 

This is one of the first times that the three girls have gotten to bond and support each other. Deciding to trade off with each other, the dagger begins to glow, and Pennywise’s wagon is close. They see the desolate land and the ash surrounding it as they cross the now-frozen river. 

From Dick Hallorann to Lilly Bainbridge, every character is pushed to their limit in this finale.

Dubbing them the fool, the freak, and the failure, Ronnie holds him back with the dagger, but Pennywise isn’t showing any signs of slowing as he captures Marge, pulling her into the ash. What happens next is Pennywise taunts Marge, calling her Marge Tozier and showing her future son.

For the clown, the past, present, and future are one, and now we know how the kids of this cycle also connect to the Losers Club of the film. As she is about to get eaten, Pennywise freezes, the kids drop from their suspension, and there is hope. We see this in their reunion and the triumphant music that plays. 

But Dick Hallorann is the only one who can help. He has gotten into the clown’s head before, and now he has to try again. After he leads the van to the girls, we see one of the funniest scenes in IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 when Hallorann stuns the clown.

Frozen, Hallorann has trapped him in the wagon with the carnies looking over him. He’s not the galloo or it, he’s just Bob Crane, Ingrid’s father, and the sad, drunk grieving his wife. It’s a small respite from a harrowing episode that refused to slow down. 

Welcome to Derry Episode 8 is all gas, no breaks, but for the first time, it works. The series has often put spectacle over substance, to its own narrative detriment. However, as each subsequent scene gets larger than the last, it all works. And then, the end is in sight, or at least they think it is.  

Taniel and the Major go together to place the dagger. The darkness and the mist that looks like both snow and ash at the same time is terrifying. But Taniel and the Major are shot on the way to the location. General Shaw is here, and he wants Pennywise out. With the military blocking their path and about to disrupt Hallorann’s control of Pennywise, it’s all left to the children. 

Taniel’s death is hard to see. A kid just like the others, he died trying to protect everyone, and we now know virtually nothing about him. While the series tries to have a conversation about race, Rose and Taniel are Native characters who exist solely to impart wisdom and serve as plot points, but have no agency beyond dying or warning the main characters. They’re nothing more than the “harbinger,” and it’s frustrating to see, made worse than Taniel’s pointless death. 

But this series doesn’t care about Taniel, at least not as much as it cares about General Shaw. For his part, he approaches the frozen clown, teeth bared, and says he’s been wanting to figure out whether he’s real or a boy’s nightmare. The selfishness that Shaw has displayed throughout the series comes to a head in Welcome to Derry Episode 8. And this moment crystallizes it, but at least he gets eaten.

The spectacle that we see in the final act of “Winter Fire” is large and impactful. 

As Pennywise chases the kids, the fear grows. As much as the children want to drive the dagger into the tree, they want to go back home, to Pennywise. With Leroy and Taniel down, it’s up to Nick to take the dagger back, but as he tries to run back with it, he keeps getting pulled backward. Thankfully, the girls grab hold and help him move it back to where it needs to be. As we saw many times throughout the season, the group is stronger together. 

Still, while the Major, Hallorann, and Rose attempt to shoot Pennywise down after freeing themselves from the soldiers, the kids need help. Pennywise begins to transform, and in the final moments, we see the Warleader show up one last time, but this time, she is with Richie. 

An overly sentimental moment, Richie is back, and he is the missing element of driving the dagger into the base of the tree and sending Pennywise back to his cage. The character may have died, but to really drive everything home, we need to visibly see him to understand how he helps in spirit, a heavy-handed delivery to say the least.

Even with this moment that I don’t quite like, but can’t put my finger on why, “Winter Fire” is the best that special effects have been this season, and ultimately uses its spectacle effectively. Welcome to Derry Episode 8’s final battle, which aims to hit epic status, and it does in scale. However, it also captures emotion, something the series routinely left behind in previous episodes. 

With the fight over, IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 closes with Marge delivering a speech about friendship, sharing her love for Richie, and the young boy’s spirit clinging to his parents’ shoulders. Closing out with Richie’s funeral is impactful, if only because it’s the one moment we see that lets us all know that every death in the series was real. 

Still, the funeral also serves as a way to showcase a new Dick Hallorann. He isn’t surly or disinterested; instead, he is kind. He reassures Richie’s parents that he is with them, and as Richie looks back at him, it’s clear that we have now met the Hallorann that we will see in The Shining. 

As much as this is a prequel series to IT, it is also a story that adds to Dick Halloran’s canon as a character. It fills the space of who he was before. And in case there was any question about it, we get an explicit moment where Dick Hallorann tells the Major that he will be heading to work at a hotel. While The Overlook isn’t mentioned entirely, the joke about how simple running a hotel will be sets it all up. 

The Easter Eggs stop being hamfisted and start having narrative impact. 

“Winter Fire” not only closes Hallorann’s loop, but it also establishes the links between Will and Marge and their future children. Will, the Major, and Charlotte accept a chance to join Rose and her tribe in keeping Pennywise locked up. They buy her farmhouse, and now, Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) is a sheep farmer, a fact we know when we see him with his grandson Mike Hanlon in IT: Chapter One. 

As for Marge, we saw on the ice that she is Richie Tozier’s future mother, and now she knows that. But Marge is putting two and two together as she talks with Lilly at their hideout, high above Derry. She wonders, what if it experiences time differently? 

Marge takes this to a logical conclusion, which is that if Pennywise wanted to kill her because her son would kill him, then what is stopping him from going after her parents? It’s a natural progression, but it opens up a can of worms for the series’ future, which has already been booked for three seasons. 

Welcome to Derry Episode 8 closes out Season 1 strong. It’s better than it was when it started, and as Chapter One shows on screen, we know that there is more to come. Outside the bloodlines established in this episode, the ending scene serves as the final piece of connective tissue linking the films. 

Ingrid Kersh closes out the episode, scared in her room at Jupiter Pools. They put on a record, and she calms down. Then, Welcome to Derry Episode 8’s epilogue jumps to 1988. The same vinyl plays as a woman paints, and we know that it is Ingrid.

Then we hear screaming in the hall, crying. The old woman walks towards the screams, and they see a woman has hanged herself. Her name is Elfrida Marsh, an easter egg to the films, Beverly Marsh’s mother. Beverly, holding her father, turns around. The tense music ends the series with a bang, a wink, and a “what the hell.”

If you’ve been keeping up with my recaps, then you know that the series falls short more than it excels. However, in the last three episodes, IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1 has found its voice. More importantly, with Welcome to Derry Episode 8, the series has ended on a high note. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2 is wide open, but we can’t help but ask what’s next.

It: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 is surprising, and much of that comes from the increased fidelity of the special effects work and how seamlessly the showrunners have woven bloodlines into the series. While many of the Easter eggs were blunt objects forced into the story, the way everything comes together in Welcome to Derry Episode 8 feels at home. 

While some parts of the series are thinly written, particularly in its relationships, the key performances throughout still work exceptionally well. The young actors, while they struggle at first, once they begin to build on each other, their performances are strong. IT: Welcome to Derry feels like a series that has a “but” following every development I find good. Still, the series finds itself worthy of more, even if it’s not quite clear where it will go. 

Still, by closing the loop, the Muscietti’s first IT film, Welcome to Derry, ends up feeling like legwork. A foundation created for an existing film to sit on. However, with Marge’s question and theory that Pennywise can find his way to the past, the lore that we will get to see is varied. However, how much more can you see? In this first season, we have seen multiple cycles, and what’s next will be building on those building blocks. 

It: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 closes the loop, but it also opens a whole new one with Welcome to Derry Season 2 already greenlit. Bloodlines, choices, and a rousing final standoff close out this first season. Now, having seen it all, I’m interested in more, if only the showrunners learn that subtext can be their friend. 

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8, and the rest of the season are streaming now on HBO Max. 

Last Episode | Season Review