IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1

SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.

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101: The Pilot 2025 October 26
(First watched 2026-01-11) OK, so I went into this _mostly_ blind, beyond a few spoilers that floated in front of my face in recent months. So I'm still catching on to who is who, and what things connect to the main IT story previously known.

The end of the episode, if they aren't doing a big fakeout (which is kind of a hallmark of IT), is pretty shocking. Did they play with our expectations, set up the familiar scenario of a group of kids trying to investigate the situation, and then kill most of them off before the end of the episode?

Also wondering how the Cold War Air Force branch of the story is going to tie into things.

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102: The Thing in the Dark 2025 November 2
(First watched 2026-01-12) Nope, those kids are sure as shit dead!

There are definite comparisons to be made between IT and Stranger Things, but IT definitely pushes the horror aspect much further, as seen in this episode with two of the living children being attacked by visions of their dead parents in awful ways.

90% of the way through the episode I was still wondering how the Air Force stuff was tying in, but then it turned very interesting. A search for hidden unknown technology that causes intense fear (which of course is surely connected to Pennywise), and an Air Force officer with just the right kind of brain damage to prevent him from feeling fear as a tool to help retrieve it.

Dick Halloran from the Shining also shows up in this episode. One of the things I'd been spoiled about. I guess as long as you're expanding one Stephen King tale, though, bringing in parts from other source material isn't too crazy. King's work already sets up a multiverse, so sure, why not some where IT and The Shining have direct overlap? In this case it seems like they were using his powers to help track down the "fear tech" they're hoping to win the Cold War with.

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103: Now You See It 2025 November 9
(First watched 2026-01-13) The military side of things gets more intriguing. They mention things like the "1935 cycle" and "the entity", so they seem to know a lot about the situation in Derry, even though the base commander didn't remember his own childhood experiences until arriving recently. So... how did they learn all of this? Why do they know it now and no longer seem to be involved in the 80s and 2010s? If the future seasons are going to earlier years, how is having flashbacks to 1908 not like, burning what they'll be covering in potential season 3?

So the newly formed still-alive group of kids actually managed to get some photographic evidence of weird goings-on. Though I have to assume that will not convince very many people.

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104: The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet's Function 2025 November 16
(First watched 2026-01-14) So the natives have been dealing with "the Galoo" or whatever for a long time, though I wonder how their story got the detail of it arriving millions of years ago.

Halfway through and enough people are realizing that Something Is Wrong, including Leroy Hanlon seeing enough strange things like the scratches on his son and the anomalous balloons to know it's not all just in his kid's head.

I haven't mentioned it yet, but this show's title sequence is a really good one. Sickly sweet lyrics with retro visuals that are just a bit off and progressively get more twisted... it's the show.

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105: 29 Neibolt Street 2025 November 23
(First watched 2026-01-15) So, to the creepy house and the sewers already. Considering that's such an important entry... why is it abandoned? The protectors don't have a presence there? And nobody does still going decades forward?

Some of the characters have connections to characters seen in later parts of the IT story, but it's becoming harder to imagine the HOW or WHY. Like... after all this shit, why are the Hanlons sticking around Derry? Do they end up with the mistaken belief that it's safe after this cycle ends? Or that decades down the road is too far to be worrying about?

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106: In the Name of the Father 2025 November 30
(First watched 2026-01-16) OK, so... "Pennywise" has a human daughter? But we know this thing has been around much longer. So how do these facts jive? Did the entity "absorb" him or just find aspects of his act useful to continue mimicking in the future?

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107: The Black Spot 2025 December 7
(First watched 2026-01-17) So the military plan was just to... destroy the pillars, allowing the thing to escape and cause mass fear for a calmer society? What the fuck. So the thing's sleep cycle had begun, but destroying a pillar has woken it back up.

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108: Winter Fire 2025 December 14
(First watched 2026-01-18) Well, one thing about prequels is you tend to know what's going to happen so it can lack big surprises. But you don't always know everything! Sure didn't know about a crazy fog overtaking Derry and most of the children in town being temporarily entranced by the deadlights.

So the "time travel" bit is another thing I had spoiled, so not a big shock. Having seen it, though, it seems more like... Billy Pilgrim or a DS9 Prophet. Not so much time travel as not experiencing time linearly. A 1935 season wouldn't be him going back to change things, but just 1935 him aware of 1962, 1988, 2015 events.

"Richie" as one of the child characters here was conspicuous as a shared name with the later Richie Tozier, and in this episode we get the strong implication that future Richie is named after this Richie.

The Hanlons stick around to be part of the Keep The Galoo Caged Club... where the hell were these people the next few cycles? Pretty much all we know is Leroy is still around as a farmer.

One thing they push at the very end is "Noone who dies in Derry ever really dies." which... puts in doubt the finality of Pennywise's defeat? Along with of course him saying that death/birth seemed the same to him.

On the whole I enjoyed this season a lot. Advantage over the films is it was a TV series story built for TV series pacing, rather than a 1000 page novel rearranged into the shape of two features.

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