Movies & TV It: Welcome to Derry IT: Welcome to Derry Worms ITs Way Into Our Eyes in “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” Worms, turtles, snails, Koi, demonic moose—Derry’s fauna is a rich pageant. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on November 17, 2025 Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO This week’s episode of IT: Welcome to Derry has the fabulous title “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function”, and was written by Helen Shang, and directed by Andrew Bernstein once again. As Brief a Recap as a King Adaptation Will Allow The episode opens with the new New (Old) Losers Club taking their photos to the cops, who of course can’t see any of the ghosts, mock the children, and then stop mocking them to threaten them instead. The interesting thing is that they DO see Pennywise in Will’s photo, but they refuse to consider that there’s anything weird about a person with glowing eyes dressing in like a 17th Century jester’s outfit living in a cemetery and menacing passing children. Ah, Derry. Will suggests they do some research into the town’s history, and asks Lilly to talk to her mom, who grew up in Derry. Lilly instead talks to her friend, the Juniper Hill housekeeper, who assures her that nothing like what she’s describing happened before—except kids did go missing during the Depression, but it was probably just that they ran away because of the Depression, but either way, she believes that Lilly believes what Lilly believes. I find it odd that this fully adult woman who works in a mental hospital is meeting an 11-year-old former patient at a diner. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Rose visits Charlotte, the two talk, and Charlotte tries to figure out if there’s anything weird about Derry, but Rose just says that she should keep anyone she cares about close. Which isn’t that helpful. But she also talks about her people’s history in the area, and how they would move back and forth between Derry and Novia Scotia “before Manifest Destiny” and refers to the Canadian border as “what they call a border, anyway—to us it’s just a line on the map”, both jabs I appreciated. The General made good on his promise to Dick, and has given the Black soldiers an abandoned storage unit to turn into a club. It looks like a Quonset hut, and it’s a MESS, but the guys start cleaning it up and thinking through how they can decorate it. Hallorann seems nervous. Meanwhile, at school, the kids watch Burt the Turtle Duck and Cover, and I once again despair of humanity past and present. It’s astonishing that any of us are still here. But the important bit is that after school, Charlotte confronts Will, because after Rose left she searched his room and found the cemetery photos. He tells her that he and his friends were cutting through the cemetery and someone chased them—so, technically true, but he wisely leaves out the supernatural element. Charlotte believes him immediately, begins to think there’s a child predator in town, and tells him that he has to either be at home or at school from now on. At dinner she tells Leroy about Ronnie (not cool, Mom!) and Will pleads homework and runs back to his room—and Charlotte encourages Leroy to take the kid out to do something fun over the weekend.   The “fun” thing that Leroy thinks of is fishing, and Will is not into it. But then he catches something, it steals his hook, and that means that when Leroy goes to get him a new one from the car Will is vulnerable to IT. First he sees a beautiful koi, which would most likely not be swimming wild in a Maine river—then he sees his father under the water, horrifically burned, and the figure grabs him and tries to drag him under, screaming “YOU’LL BURN TOO!” When Leroy reaches him he sees that his son is hysterical, and his arms are cut up and bruised. Will tells him what he saw, “You were burnt up like in a plane crash!” and then tells his father, finally, that there’s something bad in Derry. Leroy looks like he’s about to reply when both of them notice the red balloon floating along on the other side of the river. They both see it. Charlotte goes to the cops to tell them about Will being chased, then asks to see Hank Grogan. The Sheriff gets snippy, and she reminds him that she’s from the South and has seen terrible things—appealing to his Northern pride to try to get him to be an ally. Of course, the Chief is a Bowers, and it doesn’t work. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Charlotte, who is GREAT, responds by visiting the Grogan home and speaking with Hank’s mother. “The only one, other than my son, who knows where he was, is God. And neither one of ‘em’s talking.” The show cuts back to the men cleaning the Quonset hut. Hallorann still looks haunted, and then he’s actually haunted when his grandmother appears to him, telling him to “keep that lid on tight!”—but is that his grandmother, coming to warn him, or is it a manifestation of IT trying to undercut his abilities? The vision is interrupted by Leroy turning up to ask Dick what the hell’s going on in this town, and what the hell the military is trying to dig up, Dick tries to put him off with a cheery invitation to the new club, and then Leroy tells him what happened to Will. Dick goes from looking haunted to straight-up terrified, but still insists that “I do what I’m told, when I’m told, just like you.” Meanwhile, Will is at the Derry Tower with the kids, and hits upon the idea that IT isn’t trying to kill them—yet. He floats the idea that, like other predators, IT enjoys the taste of their fear, and is essentially trying to season them before eating them. Rich freaks out, but Lilly comes up with a hilarious plan that I’m sure won’t backfire at all—she sneaks some of her mom’s mood suppressants (would it have been Valium in the early ‘60s?) and gives one pill to each of them. The next time IT comes after them, they’ll pop one under their tongue and the fear won’t be as bad. It’s brilliant, really, but there are a lot of ways this plan can go wrong. During the next class the teacher tells them about the 20,000 species of worms on the Earth, who are part of “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function”—including a type of worm that infects snail’s eyes and makes their stalks swell. Margie asks Lilly to meet her for lunch, just the two of them, but it’s clearly a set up by the Patty Cakes. The set up is interrupted with a brief check-in with Charlotte, who has a note from Mrs. Grogan that she’s allowed to visit Hank. The Chief is out, and when an underling cop tries to stop her, she points out that all it’ll take is a couple phone calls to “MLK, JFK, RFK, all the other FKs” and they’ll have a bus full of civil rights protestors swarming all over Derry. He wisely relents. It turns out that Hank’s rights were violated, and he could be on house arrest waiting for a bail hearing instead of being stuck in jail, with his most-likely-one-way-ticket to Shawshank waiting to be punched. She presses him about where he actually was on the night of the Capitol Massacre, and he finally admits that he was with a woman, and not just a married woman, but, say it with me now: “A married white woman”—because what other secret could possibly be so dire? And Hank, being Hank, isn’t only thinking of a mob attacking him, he’s also thinking of “what her husband will do to her” if he finds out about an affair with a Black man. So Charlotte has at least made some progress… but Paulie saw her going into the police station, and of course tells Leroy, who is angry that Charlotte’s “stirring up trouble” again. But back to Margie and Lilly, and our first full horror setpiece after Will’s vision. Margie and the Patty Cakes have planned some sort of humiliation ritual. Margie acts like she wants Lilly back as a friend, but also plants the seed that a cute football player “likes” Lilly. She supposed to nudge her into talking to him, at which point he’ll do something terrible to get the whole cafeteria to laugh at her. What happens instead is that Margie goes to the bathroom to help her “freshen up” before she talks to the boy, and once she’s away from the Patty Cakes she breaks down and starts to confess the whole awful plan. But then, IT takes over, and her eyes turn into horrifying gelatinous stalks and grow out of her head, and THEN she runs into the woodshop classroom and bandsaws her own eyestalks off. Goddamn when this show commits it commits. And of course poor Lilly tries to help her, accidentally drops her Valium down the toilet Trainspotting-style, chases Marge into the shop classroom, and wrestles a screwdriver (I think? I don’t know tools) out of her hands—just as all their classmates burst into the room and see Lilly, covered in blood, wielding a sharp thing right over Margie, who has had an eye gouged out. It sure looks like Lilly attacked her in retaliation for the prank that the Patty Cakes will probably now admit to, and Margie’s too traumatized to do anything but scream. I think we’re going back to Juniper Hill, everyone. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Back at the Hanlon’s that night, Will can’t sleep—not because clowns will eat him, yet—but because every time he closes his eyes he sees his father’s charred screaming body. Fair enough. He gets up and looks through his telescope, because apparently he finds comfort in the black uncaring nothingness of space, but then he points the telescope down a bit, and THERE’S FUCKING PENNYWISE, lurking in the yard. Leroy, naturally, thinks that the man Will saw is someone retaliating for Charlotte’s activism, but when he runs out into the street (with a katana, I think???) there’s no one there. But. He does see a single red balloon, caught in their tree. The next morning he storms into the General’s office, demanding to know: “What the hell do you have us chasing?” Which is why I love Leroy Hanlon. Rather than doubting his son, or continuing to blame his amazing wife, he puts the clues together and realizes that something uncanny is afoot. And the General, to his credit, seems to genuinely respect him. He leads him to an interrogation room, where they’ve handcuffed Rose’s nephew Taniel to a chair. Dick Hallorann sits across from him and asks him to just tell them what he knows, since what Dick has to do will be unpleasant for both of them. The kid answers succinctly by spitting in his face. “I’m so sorry about this,” Dick says, and seems to mean it. Dick goes inside Taniel’s mind. He’s standing in a circle of doors, a memory hidden behind each one. He hears what we recognize as Rose’s voice, and when he walks through the door, he’s in Taniel’s childhood bedroom. Rose sits in front of the boy and asks him to tell her the story of the “Galloo”, a story every child in the tribe has been made to memorize. “Some of our stories are real,” she tells him. The Monster of the Western Wood fell to Earth from the darkest part of the night sky, an evil spirit bound in a falling star. The people knew to avoided the Western Wood, and worked out a sort of truce where the monster used that as ITs hunting ground, and they had a shard of the asteroid carved into a knife that could keep IT at bay if it threatened them. But then the settlers came, and ignored the warnings, and soon the Galloo fed on them and grew stronger. The people’s mightiest warrior was a woman named Seski. She knew that the people would need to move farther away from IT, but her daughter, Nakani, gathered some of her friends and went after IT herself. This plan ended in disaster when IT attacked the search party sent after them, including Seski herself. But Nakani and her friends were able to find ITs cave, and ITs asteroid. The tribe caved twelve more blades, marked them with sigils, and buried them in a circle around the Western Wood, marked with pillars of smoke. As Taniel finishes the story, Dick stands up from behind Rose and applauds. Then he smiles wide and asks Taniel to take him to the pillars. “Follow the tunnels and you’ll find the pillars,” Taniel says, and he leads Dick through an open door into the light, and there we see ITs dilapidated well house on Neibolt Street. Oh no. Do We All Float? Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Taniel’s vision is a trap, right? I feel like this whole episode is full of traps, but this is just Taniel fighting back, and luring Dick to the Neibolt house, right? That would make for a great mirror to Margie’s attempted prank abuse of Lilly—we thought we were about to see social horror, but instead we were given SNAIL EYESTALK BANDSAW HORROR. Here, Dick thinks he’s used his powers for evil because he doesn’t have much of a choice, taken advantage of a vulnerable person, and will now take the military one step closer to something they should absolutely NOT do. But instead, I wonder if he’s set himself up for the horror of being face-to-face with IT. We’ll see—maybe I’m wrong and he actually did get information out of Taniel, but obviously they’ve all bitten off more than they can chew. But my two big thoughts, coming away from this episode, are thus: First, the Hanlons are great parents—none of the usual Derry gaslighting with them. I love that Charlotte protects Will’s graveyard secret to keep him out of unneeded trouble with Leroy, but also that she listens to him, takes his fear seriously, and marches straight into the police station to float the idea that someone is menacing children. (You would think that, since Hank Grogan’s locked up, this would raise some questions about the Capitol Massacre, no?) Meanwhile Leroy is able to see the balloons, and recognizes them immediately as Weird Shit, and figures that they must be related to his mission with Hallorann. Second: I think we’re about to watch Dick Hallorann Learn To Use His Powers For Good. He’s doing what he’s told, he’s not asking questions, he’s enjoying his special privileges—and he’s weaponizing a gift that should never be weaponized. For the U.S. MILITARY, no less. I’m guessing that the show has folded him into the story of IT to show us how he gets the wisdom he imparts to Danny Torrance a few decades hence. But in the meantime it’s fascinating to see someone who I’ve had warm feelings for since the first time I watched The Shining (when I was probably about Danny’s age, actually) be cruel and merciless with his supernatural abilities. I think the apology to Taniel makes it even worse? And of course in both cases—the Hanlons are good parents to Will because they’ve learned, as Black people in America, that they have to be alert to the first prick of fear, the first uneasiness, the first clue that shit’s about to go down. And Hallorann is selling the Shine out to terrible people, because it’s the only way he can get a shittier version of the privileges that all the white soldiers get. There may not be many turtles in this episode, but it’s racism all the way down. #JustKingThings I didn’t catch as much stuff in this episode, but I do have to ask: did people say “boss” in the 1960s? I didn’t think that was a big slang term then. But the bigger improvement on a King Thing: I love how the show continues to weave real horror into ITs cosmic horror. We see Charlotte trying so hard to fight the town’s baked-in racism, in a variety of ways, only to run into a boys’ club that wants to suppress her efforts. We see how the Black soldiers are given their own space… a rundown, filthy shack, way away from the spaces that have been made for the white soldiers, that they’ll have to clean and refurbish themselves, with their own money, in their own free time, before they can even use it. We see how the Native Americans are treated respectfully… right up until the moment they’re handcuffed in a front of a two-way-mirror. We see how the popular kids torment the outcasts, and how the teachers ignore all of it, even as the town institutes a curfew and talks about keeping its kids safe. Turtles all the Way Down We see Burt the Turt in all his horrifying glory.   One of the shardblades is concealed inside a turtle shell! Mike Hanlon’s Photo Album I assume that Quonset hut the soldiers are fixing up becomes The Ink Spot? Which is, well, brutal to watch, given what’s going to happen. It’s interesting to me that we’re getting this in the same year as Sinners—watching a Black community creating a space for themselves, a pocket universe away from white bullshit, but knowing from the start that it’s going to end in tragedy. Ridiculous Alien Spider, or Generationally Terrifying Clown? Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO OK. OK OK OK. Will’s vision of his dad is incredibly upsetting, as is Pennywise’s blurry appearance. Margie growing snail eyestalks, and then attempting to Lucio Fulci her own eyeballs is extraordinary work. But we have to talk about Taniel’s tale of “The Monster of The Western Woods”, and Seski’s vision. Here, tucked inside a nested story unfolding in Taniel’s mind as Dick Hallorann uses the Shine against him, we see how IT appears to Seski, a warrior of a fictional Native American tribe. While IT often appears as a demonic moose (a perfect fit for the forests of Maine) for other members of the tribe, when Seski faces off with IT, IT takes a human form. Specifically a Catholic missionary, Deadlights revolving above his head like a perverted halo, whose torso splits to reveal a vicious infant Jesus, crowned with thorns, who stabs her with the Spear of Longinus as the priest unhinges its mighty jaws and reveals row upon row of teeth. Goddammit, television show. You’re just gonna shove that in, in the last ten minutes, in a nested story that’s most likely a trap to lure Dick Hallorann into ITs haunted house??? You’re going to do this to me, at 10pm on a Sunday night, when I have work in the morning????? I love you, television show.[end-mark] The post <em>IT: Welcome to Derry</em> Worms ITs Way Into Our Eyes in “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” appeared first on Reactor.