Full spoilers for the season premiere of It: Welcome to Derry below.
If you thought IT: Welcome to Derry was going to rehash The Losers' Club by following a group of child protagonists as they relive a childhood encounter with Pennywise, traumatized but alive, but the season premiere's ending quickly and definitively put an end to that idea.
Their investigation into the disappearance of local child Matty Clements (Miles Eckhardt) leads Lilly (Clara Stack), Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fiedler), Phil (Jack Molloy Legault) and Phil's little sister Susie (Matilda Legault) to a Derry cinema, where Ronnie (Amanda Christina) shows them The Music Man, a film that Matty snuck in to look the night he disappeared.
Lilly and Teddy both struggle with guilt for not doing more to help Matty when they had the chance, but Phil tells them that what's important is that they try to do something now.
It: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 Ending Explained
Lilly admits song “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man like the one that was playing when she thought she heard Mattie. That's when Matty appears on screen, trapped inside the film. They call out to him, telling him to follow their voices so they can get him out.
But Matty, who is holding the baby wrapped in a blanket, criticizes them for lying to him and not being there for him. According to him, it was for this reason that he was trapped in the film from the very beginning.
The movie slows down, the image darkens, the song distorts, and Matty looks at them with an evil grin as the child he's holding jumps out of the movie screen and into the real world. It's the flying demon child Pennywise who killed Matty at the beginning of the episode, and now he's wandering around the movie theater.
The film's negativity burns and distorts on screen as a flying demon—or, as Phil calls it, a “giant mutant baby”—attacks Teddy, Phil and Susie while Lilly hides under the seats. The monster attacks Teddy first, beating him up and smashing his head against the ceiling. His blood splashes onto Lilly and his lifeless body crashes into the window of the projection booth as a terrified Ronnie looks on, trapped inside the booth and unable to help them.
The monster then grabs Phil while Susie crawls along the ground towards Lilly. “Give me your hand,” Lilly commands her as the demon lands above her. Meanwhile, Ronnie escapes from the projection booth with a hammer and rushes into the theater to find Lilly covered in blood. “They're all gone,” she mutters as the demon reappears and they flee into the lobby and Ronnie uses a hammer to lock the doors behind them.
“What do you mean they’re all gone?!” What's happened?!” Ronnie asks as Lilly looks down and realizes she is holding Susie's severed hand. Lilly lets out a scream that then segues into Nelson Riddle's “Lolita Ya Ya” during the end credits.
(The theme is from the 1962 film Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick; Riddle later wrote the iconic theme song for the 1960s Batman TV series.)
Andy Muschietti on destroying the show's potential losers' club
I recently spoke with Welcome to Derry executive producer Andy Muschietti about the season premiere and the decision to kill off most of the main characters at the end of the first episode, and whether this was done to make it clear to viewers that Welcome to Derry won't be a remake of the IT films.
Muschietti, who directed the IT films and the season premiere of Welcome to Derry as well as The Flash, said that killing off Teddy, Phil and Susie was “a narrative device that essentially brought people into this mindset where no one is safe in this world, even obviously the ones you're going to follow for the rest of the show. So yes. It also felt like a punch to the chin, that unexpected thing that will probably make viewers want to keep watching.”
Muschietti also talked about the idea of birth horror present in the series, especially in the form that Pennywise takes in this episode.
“I think it ties in very closely with one of the themes of Stephen King's book. People who read the book, 'The Losers,' when they come back 30 years later, they all realize that they don't have children, at 40 years old, none of them have children and probably never will. And that's a way of saying that these guys are subconsciously afraid of bringing children into this terrifying world,” Muschietti explained.
“And it's one of those lingering questions. It's never really resolved. There are all these questions in the book, most of which are never answered, but it makes you think. And I think that's one of the themes, and that's why the baby story is a recurring thing and the birth is a horrific event. [that] brought [up] again and again”.
Muschietti continued, “The other side of the equation for this particular scene is the fears of the era. It's 1962, America is in the middle of the Cold War, and there's a threat of nuclear attack. And all the kids know it.”
“They're scared because there might be a big explosion soon, and they're told to hide under tables in case of attack, which is just ridiculous. But that's one of the fears of the era. And birth defects, radiation, were some of the things. I took that and combined it with the idea of the horror of birth, and that's how fear was created.”
DC Comics Easter Eggs?
Finally, eagle-eyed DC fans shouldn't put too much stock in reading Teddy. Detective Comics #298first appearance of the second Clayface, Matt Hagen, although one could be forgiven for thinking this was intentional since Clayface, like Pennywise, is a werewolf.
“No, no. It was just an inclusion of the DC world, which is very close to my heart, and I wanted to include it. Because we put Flash in the previous scene, there's a Flash issue, then we included one from Detective Comics, but it wasn't planned. It wasn't because of Clayface. It was just a 1962 issue, and I thought it was very appropriate,” Muschietti said. “I don’t remember now, but I’m one hundred percent sure that our prop master brought it with that intention.”
For more information read our IT: Welcome to our review of the Derry season premiere.which Tom Jorgensen rated 8 out of 10, writing:
“The first episode accomplishes its most important task of restoring Derry and Pennywise with style and some skillfully drawn tension, although some of the more heavy-handed CGI horror falls short. In an oblique nod to popular criticism of the novel, the kid side of the story is (so far) much more compelling than the adult side, but Pennywise has barely begun to poke his red-tufted head out of the sewer when that there is still enough time. for this plot, start swimming.”
