Let’s float!
Welcome to Decider’s It: Welcome to Derry recaps. There’s plenty to run down, with a show pulling from Stephen King’s 1,138-page book, giving us almost entirely new characters, and fleshing out the town and its shapeshifting underlord oft known as Pennywise. So let’s float.
“The Pilot” opens on the Capitol Theater at the dawn of 1962 as The Music Man plays, specifically the number “Ya Got Trouble.” “Our children’s children gonna have trouble,” goes one key line. Indeed, no matter how this season’s battle with It goes, the next generation—the OG Losers’ Club we met in the 2017 film—will be right back in the sewers in 1989. (Another Derry-tastic lyric: “Friend, either you’re closing your eyes/To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge/Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster.”)
Projectionist Hank Grogan and a fuming usher disagree on how to deal with a pacifier-sucking kid named Matthew “Matty” Clements who keeps sneaking into screenings. This argument will be moot, as it’s the last time anyone will see the boy alive. His final moments on this earth aren’t his most peaceful, as he hitchhikes in the cold, telling a family of four he’s going “anywhere but Derry.” A quirky little spelling bee in the car starts curdling as soon as the daughter pops open a container of revolting liver, prods it around, and sticks her gooey fingers into Matty’s face. As they mystifyingly drive back in to Derry, Matty wants out, but the best he’ll get is a family-wide chant of “O-U-T!” with the inimitable cadence of “you’ll float too.” The young son’s eye lolls to the side the way Pennywise’s does when he’s about to sink his teeth into an innocent meal.
And then shit gets crazy. The pregnant mother goes into a clearly unnatural labor and an unseen creature flops into the darkness at her feet. A hideous bat-baby flies up and starts whipping around the car (literally, umbilical cord still attached) before launching itself at Matty, sending his pacifier flying out the window and into the sewer. The same It logo from the movies rises above the water, followed by Welcome to Derry.
Cut to April ’62. A boy named Phil Malkin is at the famous standpipe with a spyglass, cataloging planes flying into the local Air Force base, specifically a Cold War operation known as a Strategic Air Command base. At the high school, Lilly Bainbridge arrives and finds her locker full to bursting with pickle jars, a cruel reference to her father’s tragic death. Phil will relay the rumor that “they found her dad’s body parts in pickle jars all over Maine”; Lilly’s now derided as “looney,” having just been discharged from Juniper Hill Asylum. Her friend Margie consoles her, seeks Lilly’s take on some thick new glasses (“I’m not going through the rest of the year looking like some bug-eyed freak”), and drops the word “ginchiest.” We meet Phil’s friend Teddy “Teds” Uris, who shares a surname with Stanley of the Losers’ Club and endures his buddy’s conspiracies about alien boys and the Air Force base.
