Movies & TV It: Welcome to Derry It: Welcome To Derry’s Premiere Episode Ends Strong After a Bumpy Start If IT keeps this up, IT might be one of my favorITe things this year. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on October 27, 2025 Credit: HBO Max Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: HBO Max Welcome to It: Welcome to Derry! I’m going to be reviewing the latest Stephen King adaptation each week (I mean, latest as of this writing—I’m sure there will be at least five more adaptations before the show’s finale on December 14th) and I’ll give you a brief plot summary, point out any Easter eggs I catch, and sum up my thoughts. First things first: It: Welcome to Derry is a prequel to the two-part IT adaptation that came out in 2017 and 2019 respectively. The show is set in 1962 to reflect the updated timelines of the film, but it is drawing on events from the original novel, mostly stuff that took place in the mid-to-late 1950s by the novel’s timeline. The series has been developed by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs; Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise in the films, is on as an executive producer in addition to reprising his role as the best clown ever. I am attempting to watch this show week-by-week without knowing anything beyond my memories of the book and films—but there is one character whose identity I already figured out—I’ll be coy about it below in case you’re also going in cold, and don’t want to be spoiled. As Brief a Recap as a King Adaptation Will Allow We open with the sad tale of Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt). We meet the kid at the Capitol Theater, where he’s watching The Music Man and sucking on a pacifier. A strange thing for an older kid to do. The other thing to notice is the shiner fading around his right eye. A bully? Or a standard-issue Stephen King Terrible Father? A few minutes it’s suggested that his family situation is not great, so I’m guessing it’s the latter, and that they don’t care a bit that people might see evidence of their abuse. A weirdly vigilant usher catches Matty, who hasn’t paid for a movie ticket, and chases him over the objections of kindly projectionist Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) and his daughter Veronica (Amanda Christine). Matty escapes into the snow of a January in Maine, and, to really drive home how sad and isolated this kid is, attempts to hitch a ride. The people who pick him up seem normal at first—a dad, a very pregnant mom, an older sister, a younger brother. But alarm bells ring pretty quickly when they ask Matty where home is, and he asks to be dropped “anywhere but there”—and they offer to bring him with them all the way to PORTLAND. Which is a whole-ass other town than Derry. But Matty’s fine with that. This turns out to be a mistake. Elder daughter takes out a Tupperware full of… organ meat? I think? dips her fingers into the blood the meat is swimming in, and then sticks her fingers in Matty’s face in a gruesome take on “I’m not touching you!” Mom encourages younger brother to practice his spelling with increasingly weird vocabulary. And soon enough Dad has driven the car back past the Welcome to Derry sign, rather than heading out toward Portland as promised. Matty begs to be let out, finally resorting to sucking his pacifier again out of panic, and then Mom gives birth to a mutant demon baby right there in the front seat. After a few minutes of the baby ricocheting around the car while Mom holds onto it by the umbilical cord, it crashes though the car window, taking Matty’s pacifier with it. We follow the pacifier down down down into the river, and into a sewer tunnel, where the title card rises from the water. Nice cold open, show. We cut to four months later, where we meet our season’s main characters. Phil Malkin (Jack Molloy Legault) is obsessed with UFOs and World War III. His BFF Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) is mourning their friend Matty, and trying to balance his interest with comics with the demands of bar mitzvah studies. Classmate Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) is an outcast because of her mental breakdown after her dad’s death a year earlier, and her BFF Margie (Matilda Lawler) is desperately trying to get her to act normal so they can get in with the “Patty Cakes”: the high school’s group of popular girls who orbit around a blonde named Patty. Given that someone in the school has decided to fill Lilly’s lockers with jars of pickles for some reason, this seems like a longshot. Meanwhile, Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) and his friend Captain Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso) report for duty at Derry’s Strategic Air Command base—an important site for potential Cold War conflicts. The Major is scarred from seeing action in Korea, and he’s eager to start a new life in Maine once his wife arrives. General Shaw (James Remar) tells him and Pauly: “If normal’s what you’re after, you two are going to love Derry.” Nice, show, nice. But Major Hanlon notices a sign that I think said Whites Only, and he and the driver, also a Black man (whom I recognize from somewhere… but where?) share a glance. Naturally, one of the Major’s new reports pulls some racist shit almost immediately, but the General reprimands the man and invites Major Hanlon to his office for a drink. Over the course of a couple afterschool hangouts with Phil and Teddy, we learn that they were the closest thing Matty had to friends. His mom tried to bribe them with candy to come to his birthday party, but they still didn’t go. Lilly’s getting ready to take a bath when she notices the turtle charm on her charm bracelet, which throws us into a flashback. She remembers New Years Eve, when Matty Clements took her up to going up to an abandoned tower over Derry. They each had a box of Cracker Jacks, and he traded her his turtle charm for the rocket ship she got. She opened up to him about the accident that killed her father. He was crushed in the gears of the canning factory where he worked, and Lilly blames herself because she’d asked him to go back into the factory to retrieve the mood ring she’d forgotten when she and her mom picked him up from work. Matty reassures her, and tells her that she’s not like the Patty Cakes and other girls at school. He tries to kiss her but she rebuffs him (not out of any meanness but because she thinks of them as friends) and he runs off in shame—and straight to the Capitol Theater, that horrifying car ride, and either death or something worse. But this is a Stephen King adaptation, and things can always get more awful, never fear. First, Lilly’s mom stands in the doorway to remind her daughter that she needs to have clothes ready to visit her dad’s grave, and when Lilly asks not to go because she’s still too upset, her mother replies: “You’re not the only person who’s had something bad happen to them. The sooner you realize that, the better.” Nice, mom. THEN Lilly hears Matty’s voice in the pipes (singing “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man, no less) and a bloody finger pokes up from the drain. She turns to the boys for help, but only Teddy is even slightly open to it. Phil, despite thinking aliens are infiltrating human society, draws the line at ghosts in sewers. Teddy tentatively tries to ask his father whether someone might kidnap a child and hold them in the sewers, but the man goes ballistic and yells at him about the real-life horrors of the Holocaust, rather than realizing that his son is worrying about the fate of his missing friend. Teddy’s older brother also scoffs at him. Later, Teddy has a waking nightmare that his lampshade is made of screaming human faces, and when he finally ends up cowering and crying on the floor it’s his brother who check on him, not either parent, and his brother looks at him in disgust and says “I can’t believe we’re related.” So, as expected, regular human family is the scariest part of the show so far. The kids meet up again. Phil’s now willing to believe that there’s something Wrong, but he also needs some kind of definitive proof. Lilly’s grief got her packed off to the Juniper Hill mental health facility, after all, and talking about hearing ghost children in the sewers of Derry isn’t going to go over well with the adults of the town. As Phil says: “I can’t go to the loony bin, Teddy! I couldn’t make it through goddamn sleepaway camp!” The kids go to the library to study microfiche together. Could we be witnessing the birth of a new (old) Losers Club? Phil has to bring kid sister Susie (Matilda Legault) along, and she clearly has an adorable crush on Teddy. The kids work well together, and almost immediately find an article about Matty’s disappearance, with Phil quipping the entire time like a proto-Richie Tozier. They notice the detail that the Capitol Theater’s projectionist’s daughter, Ronnie, was the last person who reported seeing Matty alive. They dutifully troop off to find her—only for Ronnie to tell them off and order them away from her house. Apparently the cops came around constantly at first, and tried to pin Matty’s disappearance on her father—who might have been the only adult who was ever nice to Matty. They start to leave, but then Ronnie overhears them mention voices coming from the sewers. She calls them back, and admits that she, too, has heard kids’ voices. Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they scream. When Lilly mentions the song she heard, Ronnie makes a decision. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO But first, let’s check in with Major Hanlon. He’s sleeping in the barracks when multiple men in gas masks show up. They beat him, pull a gun on him, and demand the specs for the experimental B-52 he’s meant to test. Just as he tells them to pull the trigger, Pauly bangs on the door. Hanlon manages to fight back, Pauly breaks the door down, and the two men fight the intruders until they flee. “How’s my hair?” Pauly asks. “Still greasy,” Hanlon replies. Meanwhile, across town, Ronnie sneaks the other kids into the Capitol. Maybe they really are our new Losers Club! She threads The Music Man into the projector, while the other four take seats in the theater. The three older kids start to cry as they think about how they’ve let Matty down. Phil insists that none of it was their fault, and that they’re going to fix it now. And then there’s Robert Preston singing “Ya Got Trouble”, and there’s Matty, in the movie, holding a bundle in his arms. He looks up at them, and the kids call him to come through the screen and back to life. They’re going to save him. But, well, no. No, Matty tells them that they’re the REASON he’s trapped now. His death, and his undeath, was their fault—they ignored and rejected him, and that’s what sent him off to the Capitol alone, and then to that demonic car. He drops his head and his face warps into an expression that looks awfully similar to a certain clown I could mention. “Matty” unwraps the bundle, and the Mutant Demon Baby from the cold open flies through the movie screen into the Capitol Theater. And here’s where the show, after some decent scares and bumpy character building, won my heart: the Mutant Demon Baby destroys them. As Ronnie watches in horror from the (now supernaturally locked) projectionist’s booth, it kills both Phil and Teddy. Ronnie breaks out, and gets to Lilly just as Lilly grabs little Susie’s hand—but by the time the girls run out to the lobby, little Susie’s hand is the ONLY part of Susie that Lilly’s still holding. The episode ends on Lilly, screaming and covered in blood. Do We All Float? Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO …huh. Three of our five potential new protagonists are dead, and I’m guessing the fourth is headed back to Juniper Hill. Ronnie Grogan is now set up to be our young lead in the overtly supernatural plot, as I assume Major Leroy Hanlon is set to be our adult lead in whatever the military sci-fi plot turns out to be. I’ll admit that this was a rollercoaster for me. I loved the opening, but I found a lot of the middle of the episode a bit clunky. The actors playing the kids have great chemistry, but the characters themselves felt a bit underbaked, or even just annoying—Richie Tozier is one of my favorite characters in all of literature, because his awkwardness is balanced with the occasional legitimately funny line. Here, Phil was kind of just… irritating. Which is obviously more realistic than giving us an 11-year-old with sparkling wit, but it’s also a bit much to take. On the other hand, I thought the show did a good job of handling Lilly’s relentless depression, and the way none of the people in her life give a shit about it, and want her to move on already. Teddy’s family’s explosion at his questioning seemed a little over-the-top even by Stephen King standards, but the lampshade scene was excellent. Leroy Hanlon’s plot is a bit underbaked so far, but obviously we’re just starting out. And, obviously, I’m very interested to see what they do with the Major’s driver, who seems… familiar. (I also love Chris Chalk from the cancelled-too-soon Perry Mason reboot, so I’m glad to see him here on general principle.) As ever, the interesting stuff about King is the moments when supernatural horror intersects with real life horror. I was pleased to see that the show is realistic about the racism of 1962 Maine, about how much parents want their kids to be seen and not heard, about how society as a whole has no sense of trauma needing to be processed, of the way horrific details of the Holocaust are thrown in a kid’s face, and the way nuclear threat hangs over everything. Also, after the way Mike Hanlon got short shrift in the two IT movies, I’m pleased to see the seemingly bigger roles given to Leroy Hanlon, and, so far, Ronnie Grogan. Let’s hope she lasts at least a few more episodes. And, of course, that ending. That ending made the show for me, and if it can keep up that level of unadulterated, no-one-is-safe-no-really-we-MEAN-it horror, it will become one of the highlights of my year. I mean, it ends with eleven-year-old HOLDING THE DISEMBODIED HAND OF A LITTLE GIRL. A thousand heart-shaped red balloons, for you, show. #JustKingThings Credit: HBO Max There is precisely one (1) good parent in this whole first hour. Ronnie Grogan’s dad tries to protect Mattie from the power mad usher, and I have to assume he know Ronnie’s also lying to protect the kid. Once they think Matty’s escaped, the two make their way back up to the projection booth, Hank Grogan quizzing Ronnie on movie trivia on the way. It’s really sweet, and basically the only warm moment this hour gives us. Other than that: Lilly’s mom wants her to hurry up and get over her dad’s death; Teddy’s whole family blows up at the kid for asking about whether there might be a kidnapper in Derry, four months after his friend Matty vanished off the face of the Earth, and the show opens with Matty walking around with a fading black eye and implies it was doled out by his father. The other big King Thing in this opening hour weaves into the one I just mentioned: the extraordinary cruelty of bullies is shown when Lilly opens her locker only to find it full of jars of pickles. We later learn that her dad was crushed to death a jarring factory. Someone was enough of a shithead to spend actual US dollars on a locker’s worth of pickles just for an incredibly hateful prank? That’s King all over. And of course no adult sees this or corrects the behavior. One anti-King Thing I noticed: I didn’t hear a SINGLE over-the-top Maine accent—and this show’s set in the 1960s, when regional accents still roamed the land like megafauna. I’m deducting like 8,000 Maine points, television show. And one last thing: did young teens in 1962 really say “fuck” this often, and so casually? I did (I still do), but I was not around in 1962. Turtles all the Way Down The school’s sign features a message from Bertie the Turtle telling the kids to Duck and Cover, and once we’re inside we see a kid dressed in a Bertie costume handing out leaflets. These are almost immediately knocked out of his hands by a bully. Matty gives Lilly his turtle charm, and she says that “Turtles are lucky” as she adds it to her bracelet. Is that why she survived the massacre at the Capitol? Mike Hanlon’s Photo Album Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Someone wrote “Teddy Urine” on Teddy Uris’ locker—this was a common insult hurled at Stanley Uris in the novel. Clearly Teddy Uris in NOT Stan’s dad or grandad—maybe Teddy’s shitty older brother is? Which would explain why the elder Uris is so dead set against Stan’s own dalliances in fantasy a few decades later. We see Leroy Hanlon reading a newspaper with the headline: “City council presses forward with Paul Bunyan statue”—so Richie Tozier’s future nemesis is still on track. Ridiculous Alien Spider, or Generationally Terrifying Clown? A little of both this time. The mutant demon baby was not, in itself, terrifying, but the way the atmosphere in the demonic family’s car gradually curdled into horror was absolutely perfect. The birth scene itself was gross in the best way, and Mutant Demon Baby’s closing scene in the movie theater was amazing. But Mutant Demon Baby looks like a Garbage Pail Kid come to life—I don’t think it would be scary until it was actually eating you. On the other hand, the screaming lampshade was really, really upsetting.[end-mark] The post <em>It: Welcome To Derry</em>’s Premiere Episode Ends Strong After a Bumpy Start appeared first on Reactor.