Welcome to Derry’ Episode 3 Is Great, Until It Isn’t

Allow me to begin this week with an apology. Last week, It: Welcome to Derry ended with the U.S. military digging up an old car full of skeletons. I mistakenly thought it was the station wagon of the family that picked up Matty and drove him to a hellish end. It’s not! But in my defense, the scene was dimly lit, and as much as I love cars, I just couldn’t tell the difference between a 1960s station wagon and a 1930s mob car. Sorry!

But the point stands: Pennywise’s evil can imbue itself into objects, as it apparently did during a mob massacre that killed gangster Al Bradley, which took place in Derry during Prohibition and that Pennywise, or rather “The Entity,” was involved. It’s why General Shaw (James Remar) holds on to his slingshot from his childhood. He, too, encountered it in a forest many moons ago. With the psychic powers of Dick (Chris Chalk), Francis Shaw is back in town with the might of Uncle Sam to finally track it down. But as we can already guess, his efforts may bear no fruit whatsoever.

Episode 3 of IT: Welcome to Derry, “Now You See It,” is a mostly strong episode hindered by one of the worst climaxes I’ve seen on television in years. Although the episode impressively spans decades and places focus on some tertiary characters while still advancing the A-plot to formalize its core group of kids, I just can’t get past the atrocity of the climax. I’m a Vietnam veteran reliving awful memories, only my war traumas are made up of The Book of Boba Fett and its sluggish speeder chases. Maybe Pennywise really does know my greatest fears.

Here’s everything that happened in It: Welcome to Derry episode 3.

Young Loves, Old Memories

We begin in 1908, following a young Francis Shaw (Diesel La Torraca) long before he’s a general in the U.S. Army. On one fateful trip to the fair, Francis feels real fear for the first time, only to be instructed by his father to not be a coward. This might explain why he’s still chasing Pennywise after all this time. He’s still trying to prove something to his father.

After his dad gifts him a slingshot from the fair, he trades it for water with a pretty girl from a local Native tribe, Rose (Violet Sutherland appears as twelve-year-old Rose, while adult Rose is played by Kimberly Norris Guerrero). This slingshot gains its auras when the two young lovebirds encounter “it” in a forbidden forest (and appears as one of the freak show attractions Francis saw at the carnival), and Rose uses the slingshot to defend Francis. While “it” is contained to the forests (for now, at least), its evil is simply too powerful to be kept in there forever. How Pennywise breaks out of his confines to unleash itself on all of Derry is sure to be revealed in due time.

As an adult, Francis, now General Shaw, returns to Derry to seek out “The Entity” and weaponize it on behalf of the U.S. military. (Because what else could the Army use it for?) Derry’s strange power of existing in its own psychological island is reinforced when Francis, reuniting with Rose, tells her he nearly forgot all about her and Derry. Though they’re happy to see each other again, they stand at odds. The local Natives are not happy about the military excavating the land and disturbing unmarked burial grounds. General Shaw offers an olive branch and invites Rose to help the government point to which lands they can dig up. Rose is hesitant, but she agrees to try. (“No promises.”)

Rose may not be the front-leaning face leader of the tribe, but she seems to have serious pull behind the scenes. Her nephew Taniel (Joshua Odjick, who was also in the excellent The Long Walk) comes to her like a loyal soldier, taking orders to stand down until further notice. After informing her the military dug up Al Bradley’s car, he says they “have to do something now before they get any closer.” Closer to what? Rose interrupts him before he finishes his sentence. Yet another mystery It: Welcome to Derry will drag out for at least another episode.

“Like Seeing Things Without Seeing Things”

And so we see the start of an uneasy friendship between Leroy (Jovan Adepo) and Dick. General Shaw, who continues to support Dick and his powers, assigns him to Leroy and Captain Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso), who take Dick up in the air to potentially find Pennywise from the air. Indeed, Dick gets closer to the clown as he experiences a psychic episode that puts him front and center before Pennywise.

After they survive the mission, Leroy invites Dick for dinner at home with his wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige). The evening turns tense when, right before dessert, Dick and Leroy come to an uneasy agreement. While Leroy isn’t ignorant of the supernatural, he doesn’t like Dick being in his head. Leroy tells Dick that he knows he was one of the masked assailants from General Shaw’s “test,” based on a vague psychic connection the two shared. Meanwhile, Dick tells Leroy he’s disturbed by what he felt in Leroy’s head. Where most men’s thoughts are full of pleading and regret when they face death, Leroy was “analyzing.”

“It’s like the part of your brain that’s supposed to be afraid, it’s not even there,” Dick says. “So you are not the kind of fella I’m likely to fuck with, Major. But you saved my life up in that bird. So I sure wouldn’t mind having you with me in them trenches.”

Is this the start of a beautiful friendship, as Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca? Maybe not. We might not see these two become best buddies, but whatever Leroy goes through, it’s enough to scare him silly. Remember that Leroy does appear (in a minor capacity) in the 2017 film IT, played by Steven Williams.Leroy is going to survive Welcome to Derry, but how it changes him from a good soldier and a devoted family man to an ice-cold SOB who can shoot sheep in the head without blinking is what we should really be scared to witness.

Wait, This Isn’t Stranger Things…

Blame it on the fact that the final season of Stranger Things is taking up a large percentage of my brainpower, but at this time, I can’t see kids on bikes and not think they’re plotting against Vecna. I’ve partially theorized the It movies did as well as they did because of the Stranger Things phenomenon; that Finn Wolfhard was involved with both felt like the universe was being cute about their parallels.

This recent episode takes the cake as a Stranger Things alternative in how the show finally crystallizes who its core “kids” are (after killing off a disturbing amount of preteens it has introduced thus far). This week, Lilly (Clara Stack) returns from her second stay at the mental hospital and proposes to Ronnie (Amanda Christine) a way to prove her father’s innocence. Because they don’t know up from down with camera film development, they recruit Will (Blake Cameron James) and his new pal Rich (Arian S. Cartaya). Will’s crush on Ronnie grows, while Rich admits he’s really liking Marge (Matilda Lawler) at the moment. Also, I dare you not to laugh at Cartaya’s delivery of the word “ta-tas.”

After Rich informs them about some of his family’s cultural traditions around the supernatural, they hit up the graveyard in an attempt to summon “it.” But it’s pretty clear that Rich was kind of talking out of his ass. He doesn’t really know anything about the paranormal, and seems to just want to hang with girls. (Maybe he’s trying to cozy up to Lilly to get close to Marge?) But Rich was right anyway, as Pennywise homes in on the children and unleashes the ghosts that haunt them all.

Unfortunately, the only thing scary about this sequence is how wretched it looks. While the graveyard scenes are gorgeous, which is owed to elegant candle lighting rarely seen on TV these days, the episode quickly devolves into a VFX cartoon. A repetition of scares and a sauceless cat-and-mouse gimmick as the children race to outmaneuver Pennywise’s ghosts and retrieve the camera, it all comes to a screeching halt when Will encounters another ghost in a crypt. (The encounter is obscured, taking place pretty much off-camera.)

It: Welcome to Derry suffers from its first major L of the season. It’s a sequence that just feels overproduced and undercooked, as though the producers had one big reckless splurge of the show’s budget and opted to spend it all here. It isn’t thrilling, nor is it any fun. The kids look like they’re riding Peloton bikes in mud. Mercifully, the show spends its final few minutes redeeming itself with a tease for Pennywise in his proper glory. I actually shook as the camera lingered on the photograph of Pennywise in the dark. Welcome to Derry might stumble here and there, but it still knows how to get you where it counts.

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