Last night’s ‘IT: Welcome To Derry’ was better than ‘Stranger Things’

When I was asked what was on my mind IT: Welcome to Derry on HBO Max every Sunday, I’d probably tilt my head back and forth in an “ehhh” gesture. It has high highs and low lows, but this week? Last night’s episode was an all-timer, mostly thanks to Bill Skarsgaard’s Pennywise, who is now completely unleashed on the show in a way that he really wasn’t even in the films themselves. Spoilers follow.

In this episode alone, we got the full origin story of Pennywise, in that “IT” actually stalked and harvested him to take on the clearly favored form, which lasts over a hundred years. He was a real clown who performed at carnivals (and previously in the circus) and seemed like a decent guy and at least a good father. And then… he is led into the forest by IT in the form of a boy. Nice gesture.

Then we got chaos Pennywise who:

• Appears at the Black Spot inferno massacre to revel in the violence and eat people while they are burned.
• Kills the husband of Pennywise’s original daughter and chews his head. Does something strange with his teeth pointed at her.
• He manages to escape from his ‘cage’ in Derry and awakens from the sleep phase of his blood and body bath and goes to Will’s house to perform the mind control trick on him. It’s still not entirely clear what this will do to them, but his daughter survived and is…changed. Presumably the same thing will happen to Will, and I imagine the idea is for them to become some sort of IT vessel.