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Warning: Spoilers float, too. The following article contains major spoilers<\/strong> for episode 4 of “It:\u00a0Welcome to Derry.”<\/em><\/p>\n “It:\u00a0Welcome to Derry” is several things in one:\u00a0a prequel to the pair of successful blockbuster movies, a companion piece expanding on Stephen King’s “It” novel<\/a>, and a fresh, original narrative pushing back against the confines of modern franchise IP-building trends. Such an ambitious project likely wasn’t in the cards for even the biggest horror fans out there. After all, an “It” prequel series implicitly promising to tell the origin story of the killer clown from outer space (okay, yes, it’s a little more complicated than that) certainly sounds like as uninspired a choice as it gets these days. Yet, the results so far, as \/Film’s Chris Evangelista wrote in his review of the show<\/a>, are “smarter and scarier than expected.”<\/p>\n Much of that has to do with how main creative developers Jason Fuchs, Andy Muschietti, and Barbara Muschietti have decided to unfold the series of events centered on the (fictional) cursed town of\u00a0Derry, Maine. The early twist at the end of the premiere, which cruelly did away with what we thought<\/em> would be the new batch of kids making up the series’ version of the Loser’s Club, helped inject a sense of shock and unpredictability into the main plot. But, as much as the gruesome and effective scares tend to hog the spotlight, we’d be remiss to call this the greatest strength of “Welcome to Derry.” Episode 4, titled “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function,” is perhaps the best display yet of what the HBO show does so well … and, no, it has nothing to do with all those monsters lurking around every corner.<\/p>\n