Look, we all know the story. We know the yellow raincoat. We know the storm drain. We know the Losers' Club of 1989 fighting back-to-back in the Barrens against a shape-shifting evil. But before any of that—long before little Georgie Denbrough ever made that paper boat and chased it down a rain-slicked gutter—there was the winter of 1962. And let me tell you, the darkness in Derry runs deeper, older, and crueler than we ever imagined.
If you thought the modern timeline was terrifying, Welcome to Derry serves as a brutal reminder that fear is timeless. This isn't just a prequel; it's a full-blown tragedy. It’s the official, canonical backstory to the 2017/2019 cinematic universe, and Bill Skarsgård is back, arguably at the absolute peak of his terrifying powers. He isn't just playing a monster here; he's playing a force of nature that is waking up hungry.
But the vibe? It’s different. It’s colder. We aren’t in the humid, sweaty summer of the 80s anymore. We are in the dead of winter, on the precipice of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The whole world is holding its breath, waiting for nuclear annihilation, staring at the sky waiting for the bombs to fall. And Pennywise? He is absolutely feasting on that collective anxiety. He doesn't even have to work hard; the fear is already in the air, thick enough to taste.
This season wrecked me. It’s not just a monster movie; it’s a complex story about human cruelty, military arrogance, and how the "sins of the father" literally pave the way for the nightmares our favorite Losers face decades later. It forces us to ask: is the clown the corruption, or is the clown just drawn to the corruption that was already there? Let’s break it down, beat by heartbreaking beat.
Part I: The First Domino (January 1962)
The show doesn’t ease you in. It drops you right into the freezing dead of winter, January 4, 1962. The cinematography is stark—bleak whites and greys—which makes the inevitable splash of red blood pop even more. Immediately, your heart breaks for a kid named Maddie.
Maddie isn't running from a clown; he’s running from a home life that’s scarier than any monster in a sewer. He’s bruised, terrified, and sucking on a pacifier just to self-soothe, a regression tactic that screams of severe trauma. Watching him sneak into the Capitol Theater to watch The Musician felt like such a fleeting, desperate moment of safety.
That movie choice isn't accidental. The song "Ya Got Trouble" becomes this haunting anthem that sticks with you the whole series. It’s a song about a con man convincing a town they have a problem just so he can "solve" it—a perfect parallel to It, who creates fear just to feed on it.
But this is Derry. Safety is an illusion.
Maddie tries to hitchhike out of town—God, you just want him to get away, to cross the county line and never look back—and he gets picked up by a seemingly nice family. But then the reality-warping starts. This is where the show flexes its budget and creativity. The radio blaring news about Soviet tests, the tension spiking... and then the laughing. That scene where the family just dissolves into manic, ritualistic laughter while speaking gibberish? It’s disorienting. It’s pure nightmare fuel because it feels like a fever dream you can't wake up from.
When Maddie looks out the window and sees the "Welcome to Derry" sign, realizing he never actually left? Chills. It confirms the town is a spiderweb; once you touch the silk, you don't leave until the spider is done with you.
And then... the birth. I don't want to get too graphic, but the body horror here is Cronenberg-level. The creature that tears its way into the world isn't a human baby; it’s a winged monstrosity, a rough draft of the nightmares to come. Maddie fighting for his life in that cramped car, losing his pacifier out the window as it drifts into the storm drain... it’s a symbol of lost innocence that hits you right in the gut. He’s the first domino to fall, the first course in a banquet of terror.
Part II: The "Original" Losers
By April, the snow melts, but the dread doesn't. We meet the outcasts of '62, and honestly? I love them just as much as the '89 crew. They feel rawer, perhaps because the world of the early 60s was so much harder for anyone who didn't fit the mold.
Crazy Lily and The Turtle
Lily is the heart of this season, and her story is devastating. Her father died in a gruesome accident at a pickle factory—pulled into the machinery while trying to retrieve a toy for her. The town—being the cruel place it is—tortures her with it. They call her "Crazy Lily," leaving jars of pickles in her locker, whispering that her dad is "in the brine." It is quintessential Stephen King cruelty: real-world bullying that hurts just as much as the supernatural.
But here is the detail that made me scream at my screen: She wears a bracelet with a tiny toy turtle.
For us Constant Readers, that is everything. It’s a direct nod to Maturin, the cosmic turtle and ancient enemy of IT in the King macroverse. It implies Lily has a guardian, or at least a spiritual connection to the "Other"—the force of Good that opposes Pennywise. Lily is the only one who can hear Maddie’s ghost singing from the drains. She’s the spiritual antenna of the group, the "Shining" light in the dark.
The Soldier’s Son
Then there’s Major Leroy Hanlon and his son, Will. This storyline hurts because it’s grounded in historical reality. Major Hanlon is an elite pilot, a man of discipline and skill, but he’s fighting a war on two fronts: the Cold War against the Soviets, and the vicious, systemic racism of 1960s Maine. He’s hard on Will, not because he’s mean, but because he’s terrified. He thinks he has to tough his son up to survive a world that hates him for his skin color.
Will just wants to look at the stars. He's a dreamer, a scientist. But when he looks through his telescope, he doesn't see constellations; he sees It. The tension between a father trying to protect his son through hardness and a son who just wants to be understood is palpable. It adds a layer of family drama that makes the stakes feel incredibly personal.
The Skeptics and The Trauma
We round out the crew with Phil and Teddy. Phil is our conspiracy theorist, convinced aliens are at the Air Force base. The irony is tragic—he’s watching the skies for "Little Green Men" while the real monster is living in the sewers beneath his feet. He represents the paranoia of the atomic age, trying to rationalize the irrational.
And Teddy... poor Teddy. There’s a scene where he looks into a mirror and sees not his own face, but the emaciated face of a concentration camp prisoner. It confirms that IT doesn’t just jump out and say "boo"—It weaponizes your generational trauma. It pulls your ancestors' pain right out of your DNA. It suggests that It knows everything about you, everything your family has suffered, and it uses that suffering as seasoning for the meat.
Part III: Weaponizing The Nightmare
This is where the show does something new and expands the mythology in a fascinating direction. It brings in the Cold War industrial complex.
Enter General Francis. This guy... he represents the banality of evil. He knows about the monster. He knows it kills children. But he doesn't want to kill it. He wants to harness it. He thinks if he can bottle the "Deadlights"—that insanity-inducing cosmic light—he can win the Cold War without firing a single nuke. It’s arrogant, it’s insane, and it’s terrifyingly plausible for the era. He views the children of Derry not as victims, but as acceptable collateral damage for national security.
To do this, he uses Dick Halloran. Yes! The Shining’s Dick Halloran!
Seeing him young, tortured by his own psychic abilities, trying to drown out the voices with alcohol? It adds so much tragedy to his character. We know him as the wise mentor to Danny Torrance, but here, he's a man on the edge of sanity. He describes the "Shining" in Derry as being in a room where everyone is screaming at once. He’s used by the military as a human compass to find the creature, forced to open his mind to a darkness that wants to consume him.
Part IV: The Deep Lore (Galoo & Bob Gray)
We finally get the origin story we've been craving. We go back thousands of years to the Shokopiwa tribe, who called the entity "Galoo." They knew they couldn't kill it, so they caged it with a meteorite dagger. This establishes that the entity is not from Derry; it crashed here. It's an alien parasite that has been infecting the land for eons.
But the part that really stuck with me—and the part that humanizes the horror—was the story of Bob Gray in 1908.
We always see Pennywise as a monster, but seeing the human face he stole? Bob Gray was a grieving father, a failing carnival worker trying to provide for his daughter. He wasn't evil; he was pathetic. He wanted an audience. He wanted to be loved. The entity seduced him in the woods, consumed him, and twisted his desperation into a hunger for flesh.
It wears his painted smile to mock us. It takes a man who wanted to make children laugh and turns him into a thing that eats them. That adds a layer of cosmic sadness I wasn't expecting. The clown isn't just a disguise; it's a trophy.
Part V: The Black Spot
If you’ve read the book, you know about The Black Spot. It is one of the most harrowing chapters King ever wrote. Seeing it on screen was... heavy. It was hard to watch, but necessary.
This nightclub was supposed to be a sanctuary for Black soldiers and locals—a place of jazz, joy, and community in a segregated world. But the town’s racism, stoked by Pennywise’s influence, burns it down. The show makes it clear: Pennywise didn't light the match. The hate in men's hearts did that. Pennywise just fanned the flames.
The chaos is overwhelming. But amidst the fire and the screaming, there is a moment of heroism that links directly to the movies. A man named Rich sacrifices himself to save a woman named Marge, shoving her into a refrigerator to protect her from the collapse.
Marge is Margaret Tozier. Richie Tozier’s mom.
Let that sink in. The trauma she endured in that fire—the claustrophobia, the loss, the clown watching it all burn, the heat of the flames—she passed that fear down to Richie. It recontextualizes everything about Finn Wolfhard's character in the 2017 movie. Richie's hyperactive mouth, his anxiety, his fear of clowns... it’s all inherited trauma. He carries the scars of a fire he was never in.
Part VI: The Slumber
The finale is absolute chaos. The military, in their hubris, tries to melt the meteorite shard (bad idea), thinking they can extract the power. Instead, they wake Pennywise up completely.
It all ends at the Deadwood Tree, a location that feels ancient and wrong. It’s a desperate last stand. Lily, Ronnie, Marge, Hanlon, and Halloran manage to force the creature back into hibernation using the ancient dagger. General Francis gets what he deserves—eaten by the very weapon he tried to control. The creature recognizes him from 1908, closing a loop of terror that spanned a lifetime.
They win. But it feels like a hollow victory. They didn't kill it; they just hit the snooze button. They bought the town 27 years of "peace," but at the cost of their own innocence.
Part VII: The Echoes of 1988
The ending montage is where the tears started flowing for me. It masterfully bridges the gap to the films.
We see Major Hanlon deciding to stay in Derry to keep watch. He becomes the grandfather of Mike Hanlon. Suddenly, Mike’s obsession with history makes total sense—it’s not just a hobby; it’s the family legacy. He is the Watcher on the Wall, carrying his grandfather's burden.
We see Bob Gray’s daughter, Ingrid, who survives but spends her life in an asylum, driven mad by staring into the Deadlights. In 1988, we see her as an old woman, painting clowns obsessively on the walls of her cell. And in the background? We see a young girl named Beverly Marsh visiting her parents. It implies Bev’s mother was a victim of this madness too, perhaps explaining why she was so passive in the face of her husband's abuse. The rot in Derry touches everyone.
Welcome to Derry isn't just a scare-fest. It’s a story about how trauma echoes through generations like a shockwave. It shows us that while the Losers' Club of 1989 are the ones who finally ended it, they stood on the shoulders of these forgotten heroes from 1962.
The series ends knowing that the clock is ticking. The rain is going to fall again. The storm drains are going to flood. And a little boy named Georgie is going to lose his boat.
It’s tragic because we know what happens next. We know the horror isn't over. But watching Lily, Hanlon, and Halloran fight back? It proves that even when the darkness is ancient and overwhelming, people will still try to turn on the light. And that, my friends, is why we keep coming back to Derry.
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