10 Memorable Moments From This Week’s Terrifying Episode of It: Welcome to Derry
About time, It: Welcome to Derry. Pennywise has been teasing his grand entrance all season, and this week, the show finally delivered. But while the fan-favourite monster (as played by Bill Skarsgård in full clown regalia) may have been the most anticipated debut on HBO’s Stephen King series, episode five was stuffed to the brim with things that made us scream, both in terror and with incredulous laughter.
Here are 10 memorable things that happened this week on It: Welcome to Derry ranked from mildest to wildest.
10. Matty’s return
The pint-sized movie fan who seemingly met a grim demise in Welcome to Derry’s first episode unexpectedly reappeared, haunted and weak but very much alive. His friends were too shocked and grateful to really question his story of being held captive in the sewer for months-a mistake they’d soon regret.
9. The kids gobble pills, thinking that will prevent them from feeling fear
Intent on rescuing any other survivors from Derry’s sewer, Lilly, Ronnie, Mike, Margie, and Rick follow Matty back underground, but not before they each pop three pills of “Mother’s Little Helper” (presumably valium) stolen from Lilly’s mother. We get a brief and mild slow-mo “tripping” sequence… but the effects seemingly wear off before the group’s next scene and certainly do nothing to diminish thier fear.
8. Rose tells Francis his plan isn’t going to work
“You think you can put a leash on this thing? it can’t be controlled, Francis!” The Air Force should listen to Rose and call off Operation Precept, like, yesterday.
7. Francis reveals the drug experience that jogged his Derry memories
The reason Francis remembered what happened to him in Derry back in 1908-namely, that close encounter with It, which would have ended an entirely different way if not for rose’s spot-on slingshot aim-is because he took experimental drugs as part of a Department of Defense security operation.LSD, probably. Too bad, as Rose points out, it didn’t also revive the fear he felt as a kid and prevent him from returning.
5. Dick hallorann’s trauma box opens
Dick’s extended vision quest deep beneath 29 Neibolt Street brings him face-to-face with his sinister grandfather. He torments Dick and his grandmother before taking sadistic delight in breaking open Dick’s trauma box. It’s where he’s long been mentally locking away all the psychic horrors he’s encountered.We know Dick will get through this-he has a date with the Overlook Hotel, after all-but it feels like he’s got some stuff to work through before he can wake up from whatever brain fog he’s trapped in at the end of the episode.
4. Pauly’s sacrifice
As soon as we heard the military guys being told, “If you see something that by any rational measure should not be down there, shoot it,” and then watched Lilly, Will, and company heading into the very same sewer, we knew a collision course was unavoidable and tragedy would result.
the feeling intensifies when Major Leroy Hanlon has to light up a nightmarish vision of his wife and warns his best buddy, Captain Pauly Russo, that they can’t hesitate: they must kill “whatever you see down here that’s not supposed to be here.” An old girlfriend, a high-school gym teacher, a…