It Welcome to Derry Episode 3

Clowning Around

Warning: this review contains spoilers for the first three episodes of It Welcome to Derry.

It Welcome to Derry episode 3 still doesn’t feature Bill Skarsgaard as Pennywise, but it does bring us closer to his hopefully imminent arrival. “Now You See it” opens in the early 20th century, with a young boy at an amusement park with his father.

The child has a terrifying encounter with a strange elderly man. He’s rescued by a plucky Native girl, who he quickly develops a crush for. No prize for guessing if these kids are going to be revealed as adults in the series’ main 1962 timeline.

This episode continues to expand the storylines introduced in the first two episodes while using flashbacks to add some background to key characters. It also continues the crossovers with other King works.

Dick Halloran (Chris Chalk) of The Shining is featured more this time. The military wants him to locate a secret “fear weapon'” that they believe is buried underground at a Native reservation near Derry. Apparently the U.S. government is planning to win the Cold War by frightening the Soviets to death. Halloran is on a collision course with Pennywise, which puts us in uncharted territory. These characters haven’t encountered each other before.

Meanwhile, Lilly (Clara Stack) is back at Juniper Hill (a mental institution that is featured or mentioned in several King works) after her mental breakdown at the grocery store in episode 2. She is riddled with guilt, blaming herself for the arrest and imprisonment of her classmate Ronnie’s dad.

A Mix of Old and New

The first episode suckered us into thinking we were watching the formation of a new version of the Loser’s Club, only to pull out the rug from under us at the end. But it appears that It Welcome to Derry will use a version of this storyline after all. In episode 3, Lily and Ronnie team up with two boys, Will (Blake Cameron James) and Rich (Arian S. Cartaya), to find proof that the monster is real.

They naively hope that photographs of the creature, who finally starts to take on a clown-like appearance after the silly demon baby from the first two episodes, will convince the police to let Ronnie’s dad go. This quarter of kid actors has good chemistry together, but some of their scenes are a little too cheesy.

Their scenes in this episode often feel like a ’60s version of Stranger Things, which would be fine except that type of tone doesn’t fit well with a story as dark as It. Something’s off when we’re getting ’90s Disney vibes from a 2020s HBO horror series.

Meanwhile, a Native woman named Rose (Kimberly Norris Guerrero) is investigating the U.S. military’s actions. The tribe is disturbed by their intrusion, especially because the soldiers are disrupting ancient burial grounds. Rose’s fight against the mission leads her to an intriguing encounter with an old friend, General Shaw (James Remar).

The star of this episode is Dick Halloran. He was relegated to a supporting role in the earlier episodes, but now he gets time to shine, pun intended. Halloran may end up being this series’ most interesting character. I’m more invested in the military storyline than I was before. My guess is that Halloran will team up with the kids at some point. Chris Chalk delivers a strong performance.

It Welcome to Derry is an eight episode series. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Now You See It” is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. The series is off to an interesting start. I’m looking forward to seeing how the storylines progress in the next five episodes. I hope that they don’t test our patience too much longer, though. Pennywise needs to pop up soon.