Spoilers below for the latest episode of IT: Welcome to Derry for anyone who hasn’t yet watched it on HBO or via HBO Max subscription, so be warned!
IT: Welcome to Derry’s premiere came flying out of the gate like a bat out of hell — or rather like a baby-headed flying demon — and HBO Max gave fans the second episode early to coincide with Halloween night. Regardless of when one actually watches it, “The Thing In the Dark” is a stellar follow-up that drives the story forward in interesting ways regarding the military’s interest in both Derry and Leroy Hanlon.
Beyond that, though, this episode thankfully introduces IT: Welcome to Derry’s opening titles, whose clue-filled excellence is impressive even by HBO’s already lofty standards. And it also offers an immediate payoff for Lilly’s disturbing AF story about her father’s pickle factory death. Since those are the sequences that’ll be rattling around in my head for the foreseeable future, join me in some light and completely normal obsessing.
IT: Welcome To Derry’s Opening Is An Artful And Reflective Town History Lesson
Of course the trippy opening to an IT series is set to the two-steps-from-cloyingly sweet sounds of child singers, in this case ’60s sister duo Patience and Prudence. The tune “A Smile and a Ribbon” plays atop Rockwell-esque imagery that, unlike the consistently cheery song, gets increasingly more nefarious and infested and deadly and WHY DO PEOPLE STILL LIVE HERE? Ahem.
As pointed out in the second installment of our expertly culled easter egg collections (see below), this sequence isn’t just a joy to behold for its sights and sounds. It’s also a historical road map that directly references several of the ways that Pennywise and other manifestations of evil amassed IT’s body count every 27 years, according to Stephen King‘s massive tome.
Surely, co-showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane talked with co-creators Andy and Barbara Muschietti about expanding on all of those ideas, given their prequelized three-season plan that mystified Stephen King himself. The book only offers up like half an episode’s worth of actual story to dig into by way of the Bradley Gang and the horrifying incident at Kitchener Ironworks, in the way that the novel and dual-movies’ references to the Black Spot fire is a creative source point for this first season.
The point is, I think, I’m not getting this kind of extended narrative-based conversation from the majority of other TV shows’ opening titles. That’s not even a knock on most other shows, since a lot of them probably shouldn’t go for this kind of thing. Like the titles themselves, it’s a celebration of how the series showcases its attention to detal. While I readjust this ribbon in my hair, let’s move on to a more sour note.
Lilly’s Supermarket Trip Is The Most Ghoulishly Traumatic Thing I’ve Ever Seen
Clara Stack looks like the epitome of a Stephen King character, with her beyond-innocent perfectly anti-complementing the abject horror that Lilly is already facing within this show’s narrative. IT does not fuck around when it finds out what makes fear emerge from Derry’s most vulnerable children.
More On IT: Welcome To Derry
To be clear, I’d count myself as one of those vulnerable children in this particular instance. (Also: everything that has an umbilical cord in this show would also send me crashing out of reality’s back door.) From the creepy smiling bastards who keep looking at her and following her around way too closely….
…to the impossibility of those cereal boxes with Matty and others’ faces on them to all the hateful comments being whispered at her, it’s nightmare city for Lilly. And it somehow gets even worse, with her father’s disembodied parts coming together in absolutely non-matrimony to traumatize whatever flecks of Lilly’s brain may have gone without permanent damage to this point.
If you think I would ever set foot in that grocery store again, with none of that to do with any amount of public judgment that might have come from making such a scene. Hell no.
Again, many kudos to Clara Stack for making Lilly’s fear look so genuinely convincing. I hope she’s doing well, and that she has a healthy relationship with pickles and pickle factories. I may never see pickle jars in the same way again. And the voice I hear coming out of them is going to be way different now.
It: Welcome to Derry will no doubt find more ways to crawl into my brain’s murkiest areas when new episodes hit HBO and HBO Max on Sunday nights at 9:00 p.m.
