TL;DR: Episode 4 of IT: Welcome to Derry is the series’ strongest hour yet, delivering a haunting cocktail of character drama, ancient horror lore, and Pennywise’s long-awaited origin story. Between Lilly’s heartbreaking storyline, Will’s river nightmare, and the jaw-dropping cosmic flashback about the entity’s arrival on Earth, this is the episode where the show fully becomes the epic horror prequel fans have been waiting for.
It: Welcome to Derry
Every week I sit down to watch IT: Welcome to Derry, I tell myself the same lie: “This episode can’t possibly get darker than the last one.” And then Andy Muschietti kicks down the door like he’s the world’s angriest UPS driver and drops off another package full of trauma, lore, and existential clown-based nightmares. Episode 4 — poetically titled “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” — is the hour where the show finally rips open its cosmic raincoat and says, “Hey kids, wanna know where Pennywise really comes from?”
And oh boy, was I not ready.
This is the episode where IT: Welcome to Derry shifts from being a creepy prequel with personality to a full-on cosmic horror series with ancestral trauma, ancient weapons, multi-generational secrets, and a mythology about as subtle as a red balloon floating in your living room at 3 a.m.
The opening stretch of Episode 4 immediately taps into that classic Stephen King energy I grew up on — that aching, uncomfortable truth that in Derry, the adults are somehow both the problem and completely useless.
We pick up with the kids taking their developed photos to Chief Bowers, hoping for help. And look, I grew up in a small Midwestern town where the police department once lost their only pair of handcuffs, so I’m used to small-town incompetence, but Bowers makes Barney Fife look like a hardened detective. He looks at the photos, shrugs them off, and basically says, “Ghost kids? A clown? Sounds like a you problem.”
It’s wonderfully infuriating.
Meanwhile, Lilly goes to the one adult she can trust — Ingrid, the quiet Juniper Hill nurse who has major “I’ve seen some stuff” energy. It’s a small scene, but it hits. Ingrid’s gentle encouragement reminded me of that one teacher I had in the 7th grade who swore I was destined for greatness because I wrote an essay comparing The X-Files to Beowulf. (She was wrong, but that’s not the point.)
This is what Derry does best: everyday people navigating supernatural horror with the emotional toolkit of a middle-school guidance counselor.
One thing I adore about this show is how it builds the Hanlon family into the emotional center of everything. In the films, Mike Hanlon’s story was trimmed to make room for Bill Skarsgård’s clown olympics. But here? Mike’s lineage gets the spotlight it deserves.
Charlotte grows increasingly freaked out by Will’s claims that something is stalking him, even though Leroy insists everything is fine. (The number of horror dads who say this is approximately equal to the number of horror dads who are dead by Episode 6.)
So, naturally, Leroy takes Will fishing — because nothing bad ever happens in Derry’s rivers, right?
Wrong.
In one of the episode’s most chilling scenes, the entity appears as a charred version of Leroy and drags Will underwater. You know that moment in Jaws where the head pops out of the boat hull? I jumped harder here. I’m talking popcorn-everywhere, cat-screaming, heart-in-my-teeth levels of terror.
Leroy saves him, but the damage is done. Pennywise has officially slid into this family’s DMs.
And then comes the red balloon.
Look, I know it’s just a balloon, but when you’ve read as much Stephen King as I have, seeing a red balloon in Derry is like watching someone pull a pin from a grenade using their teeth.
This isn’t going to end well.
If you thought the river scene was messed up, buckle up — because Episode 4 decides to break our hearts next.
Lilly’s been trying to hold it together, juggling teen angst, cosmic horror, and bullies who weaponize lip gloss and emotional trauma like they’re going pro. When Marge — queen bee and part-time sociopath — suddenly apologizes and invites her into the cool circle, you know something evil this way comes.
But Pennywise isn’t content with just terrorizing kids physically. This episode gives us a full-on psychological horror set piece involving Marge, a bathroom, and a rapidly escalating eye trauma moment that I genuinely had to watch through my fingers.
Marge’s eyes bulge, rupture, and she spirals into madness, carving at her face with whatever sharp object she can find. It’s body horror that feels straight out of Evil Dead with the emotional weight of Hereditary.
And then the show hits us with the cruelest twist: to the adults, it looks like Lilly attacked Marge.
You could hear my groan two houses away. Derry always finds a way to punish the innocent.
THIS is where the episode levels up.
For the first time in this prequel, the show goes full cosmic horror, like King’s mythology had a baby with Annihilationand the director raised it on a steady diet of lore-heavy Reddit threads.
General Shaw forces Taniel to relive a memory — a ritualistic retelling of the Mi’kmaq people’s ancient encounter with the entity. This scene might be one of the strongest bits of IT mythology ever put on screen.
Through Taniel’s story, we learn:
• Pennywise arrived millions of years ago as an evil spirit inside a fallen star.
• The star was shattered to create a weapon — yes, literally star-metal.
• A brave girl tried to defeat the monster, but realized it could only be trapped, not killed.
• She buried 13 shards in a ritual circle to cage the entity.
As someone who grew up devouring lore-heavy sci-fi like Mass Effect and Stargate SG-1, this entire sequence felt engineered specifically for my brain chemistry.
And then we get the final shot: the decaying Neibolt House, looming like a rot-infused omen. Even though I knew it was coming, I still whispered “oh hell yes” at my TV.
By the end of Episode 4, IT: Welcome to Derry transforms from a spooky nostalgia trip into something mythic, tragic, and genuinely epic. This is the hour where Pennywise’s mythology deepens, the kids’ innocence shatters, and the series firmly plants its flag as one of the boldest King adaptations ever attempted.
Solar eclipses. Cosmic meteors. Ancient tribes fighting an unknowable evil. Kids trying to survive middle school andextradimensional horror.
It’s messy, ambitious, grisly, and utterly compelling — exactly what a prequel to IT should be.
