As any clown in the circus business will tell you, it’s all about the big finish. Build up is vital of course, but all the tricks and fancy stuff isn’t worth the grease paint its coated if you can’t pull off something truly dazzling before the final curtain comes down.
As you’d probably guessed from my clumsy metaphors, it’s time for It: Welcome To Derry to pull out some razzle dazzle as the finale is now finally upon us and if I’m being honest, the stakes are just as high outside the show as it is inside. Not only has the show been an absolute banger that’s remained endearingly crazy throughout, but despite the odd spot of clunky character work and Andy Muschietti’s frequent blindness to some obvious CGI, I genuinely believe it’s been Pennywise’s finest hour (or 8), I’ve been utterly gripped to see what fucked up stuff the show is going to fling at us next. Can Welcome To Derry avoid the curse of the prequel and actually connect solidly with the events of It: the feature film, or will it sink into the bloody charnel pit of foreshadowing and bungle that final act? Prepare to strike up the band and drop the curtain, because It’s going out in style.
It was basically over. With the fire at The Black Spot marking the end of the feeding cycle of the comic being known as It, the space-shifting creature had returned to its lair below Neibolt Street to sleep on a full belly. However, with General Shaw destroying one of the pillars that keeps the clown-wearing monster imprisoned within the town limits of Derry, It realises that to sleep now would mean missing it’s big chance to take it’s grisly show on the road. Already having abducted Will using its hypnotic deadlights, the creature, wearing its favored Pennywise form is now thinking big and he bewitches the entire student body from Derry’s high school and leads them off to a horrible fate.
Realising that they have to save Will and everybody else (yes, even Patricia Stanton) from becoming an all you can eat buffet, Lilly, Ronnie and Marge grab the dagger made from the fragment of It’s meteor and give chase with the hope of using it to kill the cackling Pennywise. However, while the adults gather, they realise that the dagger would probably be best used to replace the missing pillar in order to retrap the blood drenched Pennywise and put him back to sleep foe another 27 years.
Using Dick Halloran’s Shining abilities to get inside Pennywise’s head and slow him down, the kids discover that the further the dagger gets from the meteorite, the like a belligerent One Ring it becomes as starts messing with Lilly’s mind. Worse yet, Shaw isn’t about to see his plan to bring order back to a divided United States by unleashing a fear-monster on it get ruined by a bunch of kids; so with both Pennywise and the US military acting against them, can these kids possibly hope to end the clown’s current reign of terror and put the jabbering jester to sleep?
You have to hand it to Andy Muschietti – the guy really knows how to put on a show. In fact, while his two It feature film ended with similar showdowns with a form-flipping Pennywise, somehow neither seemed to be as big as the climax we see here. That’s right, in its final episode, It: Welcome To Derry decides to go big and go home by having its grease-painted antagonist shoot for the moon in his final episode. Of course, when it comes to delivering a belter of a final episode that’s also a prequel, we all know that just being awesome isn’t quite enough to state knowledgeable fans. You could put out the best episode in the world, but if it doesn’t match up with what’s already laid out to come next, chances are you’re still going to piss people off. Well, it pleases me to report that not only does Welcome To Derry continue to overachieve when it come to going balls out, but the majority of its foreshadowing manages to pass the sniff test, even if some of it manages to be a little bit intrusive.
Firstly, anyone hoping for some apocalyptic finale that manages to purge half the cast in nihilistic fire might be a little thrown at how low the body count truly is as we eventually discover that the show is unwilling (or in some cases, unable) to be a vicious as that impressively callous first episode. Possibly trying to avoid overshadowing the death of little Rich last episode, we find the survival rate strangely high considering that Pennywise seems to be at the height of his powers. However, during the final struggle, Muschietti may seem to sacrifice scares for a genuinely epic finish, but you can’t argue how incredibly exciting it all ends up being. Again, some of the plotting and dialogue seem far more dedicated to streamlining the story and getting everyone where they need to be and in the aftermath we find that a bunch of “main” characters are all but dead weight (Hank Grogan and Charlotte Hanlon don’t really have anything to do but be scared for their kids), but when things get this epic and heartfelt, it’s tough not to get swept along in how big everything it.
In fact, among the hefty production values, Muschietti manages to sneak in some genuinely thought provoking things concerning Pennywise himself, with Halloran managing to get into It’s mind and stall him by making him think that he’s actually Bob Grey and during an altercation with Marge, not only do we get confirmation that’s she eventually becomes Richie Tozier’s mother, but It knows that her son will eventually help kill him as the cosmic being awareness allows him to see all of time as happening at the same time. Of course, to match all these funky concepts, we also get Bill Skarsgård operating at full throttle as Pennywise himself and his new, brazen attitude works well with that partially blood soaked look that leave everything above his nose bone white. In fact, this might just be the best Skarsgård has ever been as the eponymous creature thanks to all of the weird, new situations he’s allowed to have been placed in – and watching him turn into a clown-headed bat monster doesn’t exactly hurt either…
It’s not perfect. The notion that Pennywise could travel back in time to stop the Losers Club from forming even before they were born feels wrong somehow – I mean, if he experiences time as all happening at the same time, wouldn’t his past self just know it rather than him having to act like a frilly, bewigged Terminator? Also, while some of the foreshadowing works nicely (welcome back Sophia Lillis’ Beverly Marsh), others are a bit heavy handed (did we really need Pennywise to produce a missing poster of Finn Wolfhard just to make his point to us?) which tends to pull you out of the story a little.
However, regardless of these little issues, there’s no doubt that It: Welcome To Derry has made up for the relative disappointment that people have for It: Chapter 2 and has made that prospect for two more seasons a white hot prospect I’d like to see sooner rather than later. However, I would like to see the show start over in 1935 nice and clean with a whole new cast and story rather than push any further into that time travel territory that was mentioned.
Whatever the future (or past) should hold for Pennywise and the poor, poisoned people of Derry, the present has seen yet another long running franchise zapped into life thanks to a shift to television (Alien: Earth also had me locked in for the duration of its run) and the desire for more may even rival that of the clown’s hunger for fear. Take a bow, Derry; you’ve earned it.
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