What an appropriate episode to have a line that reminds me of "We all float down here."
This episode is very, very dumb in some very, very frustrating ways. I enjoyed it significantly more when I managed to turn my brain off, but then something else would happen to turn it back on again, and it was just a neverending cycle.
This is best encapsulated by Leroy finding his son in the sewers. He’s already had his wife show up (more on that later) and rightfully deduced that anything that doesn’t belong in the sewer is almost certainly a monster and should be shot on sight.
He finds Will in the sewers because the kids have followed Matty down there (more on that later too), reasonably assumes that this is another trick, and prepares to shoot him. This is excellent. Even if we know that Will can’t die, it’s still a great moment of tension that should carry emotional weight going forward.
Pauly, Leroy’s friend who has been a consistent albeit incredibly minor presence, realizes that he can see Will, which means that he’s real and not a hallucination. He tries to tell Leroy this (although rather quietly instead of with any actual urgency), and shoves the barrel of Leroy’s gun directly into his own chest instead of just down or up or to the side or literally in any other direction other than his chest.
So Leroy shoots Pauly, and he dies immediately after what should be an emotional moment that I didn’t really care about because I had no investment in Pauly at all.
It’s really, really stupid. There is literally no reason why Pauly had to die there. It was completely self-inflicted, and it ruined what was a very promising start to that scene. The episode is full of moments like this.
Let’s stick with the military for a little bit. I’m not quite sure why Shaw thought that a group of seven people would be enough, but the assault on the sewers wasn’t nearly as cool or as epic as I had hoped. Their gear gave me strong Aliens vibes, so maybe they were doomed to disappoint me from the start, but the construction of those scenes felt messy.
At some point. Taniel and the Colonel just vanish from the episode. Did I miss them leaving the sewer somehow? Where did they go? The editing was also weird when Leroy told Charlotte what was really happening in Derry. He told her the whole truth, right? I wish we could have seen her reaction to that, especially since she had no issues letting Will go off on his own later on.
That being said, I do love and appreciate that the Hanlons are actually taking steps to protect their family from Pennywise. No burying their heads in the sand here. It’s very refreshing compared to how horror usually has families (specifically adults) completely disregard stuff like this.
The Hanlons talk to each other. They communicate. So why didn’t Will mention to Charlotte that “Hey, Matty is actually alive”?
There have been hints and suggestions that Matty might actually be alive throughout the series, but I’ve never really believed them. When he first poked his head out of the tent, I immediately clocked him as evil. The opening credits have a scene of Pennywise luring children from a tent! Tents are evil!
Plus almost none of what he was saying added up. I wish that the kids had picked up on some of it too, like the idea that Pennywise sleeps during the day. Lilly, Marge, and Will were all attacked during the day! That doesn’t sound inactive to me.
The drugged scene was also annoying. I didn’t find it funny. It shoved the Marge/Rich relationship along so… cool? I guess? It lasted for a couple of minutes and then the kids were instantly sober again. What was the point of getting high if they weren’t going to actually encounter Pennywise while high? At least there was the detail of Matty acting normally, which was another fun hint that he wasn’t actually Matty.
This review has been rather negative so far, but there were two things that I enjoyed a lot without reservation.
The first is the reappearance of Pennywise the Dancing Clown himself in the flesh. Bill Skarsgård has not missed a beat. He’s so delightfully malevolent that it’s impossible to look away whenever he’s on screen. I couldn’t even be scared or tense because I was so happy to see him.
The second, naturally, involves Dick. His scenes, at times, feel like they belong in a completely different show. Once he hit the water (gorgeous shot, by the way), he had his own plot. I definitely had the sense that I was missing something when it came to the box, though, like it was a reference to something, so I turned to the internet.
In Doctor Sleep, Dick teaches Danny (the boy from The Shining) how to lock away ghosts and things that torment him in a mental box where they can no longer harm him. It seems like Dick’s has now been wrenched open and superglued into place.
Welcome to Derry turning into a Shining prequel is one of the more unexpected and fun aspects of the series. I’m fascinated to see where it goes from here, considering that he saw Pauly’s ghost wandering the woods outside of the sewer.
Random Thoughts
At least we got a little bit of clarity involving when Shaw remembered Derry, since government experiments knocked some things loose before he ever arrived here. Rose implied that Shaw didn’t remember everything, though.
Did I miss something, or did Taniel and the soldiers with him just completely disappear from the plot? Did they ever get out?
The place where Taniel dropped the shard did not even remotely resemble the location where it was when Lilly found it.
The tribe coldly and pragmatically discussing Pennywise and how many people have been lost this cycle was cool.
Hank’s bus to Shawshank crashed, and now he’s an escaped fugitive. His lover is Ingrid, Lilly’s friend from Juniper Hill.
More importantly, Ingrid’s last name is Kersh. Beverly visited a Mrs. Kersh in It: Chapter Two.
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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.
If this show does turn out to be an outright Shining prequel, I might have to watch it. Even if an episode (like this one) turns out to be less than shining, pun intended.
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