Welcome to Derry Just Stole A Clever Trick From HBO’s Watchmen
The It prequel goes off the beaten path.
Pennywise the Clown (Ben Skarsgård) might have sated his bloodlust in the latest episode of It: Welcome to Derry — but a new villain just stepped out of the shadows to bring “It” out of hibernation.
Episode 7 of Welcome to Derry might just be its best, and most harrowing, yet. The season has slowly but surely been building up to the “Augury,” the bloody climax of It’s feeding cycle, and the series’ penultimate episode delivers that promise and more. Its first half takes place at the Black Spot, the makeshift nightclub built for the Black airmen at the nearby Army base. The strife and mistrust building up between Derry’s Black community, who are secretly harboring the wrongly convicted Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), and the town’s all-white Old Guard reaches a fever pitch. The latter set fire to the Black Spot while its patrons are still trapped inside — the act of insensible violence that It has waited 27 years for.
Pennywise uses this massacre as cover for his final feeding: half of those present perish in the fire, but the carnivorous clown devours the rest. Once It retreats to his lair, Derry is set for peace for the next 27 years. Thanks to a last-minute twist, however, it seems like that peace will be hard-won. Welcome to Derry isn’t content to give us a straightforward prequel to the events of It; Episode 7 takes a brilliant page from another HBO adaptation, setting the stage for even more bloodshed.
Spoilers ahead for Welcome to Derry Episode 7.
Pennywise might be the least of Derry’s worries.
The massacre at the Black Spot is a tragedy, but the work to defeat Pennywise is far from over. The clairvoyant Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), Major Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), and their supervisor General Shaw (James Remar) are still looking for a way to corral the creature. They plan to use the “pillars” — the shards of the meteor that It fell to Earth within, buried along Derry’s city limits — to capture It, maybe even destroy It once and for all. Once Shaw’s men find one pillar, however, they bring it back to the Army base, a decision that Hanlon says is akin to “leaving the cage door open.”
Hanlon tries to stop Shaw’s soldiers from destroying the pillar, but it turns out that’s exactly what Shaw wants. He previously recruited Hanlon to his cause with claims that It could be an effective weapon in the ongoing Cold War. In truth, Shaw doesn’t want to sic the creature on Russia, but turn it on America itself. Pennywise feeds on people’s fear, and after the events at the Black Spot, it’s clearly an effective teacher.
“The streets are calm today,” Shaw says. “No rioting, no looting, no unrest. The fear — it settles on every living person it touches like a fog, like a goddamned anesthetic.”
Shaw just took a page from Watchmen’s Ozymandias.
Shaw plans to unleash Pennywise to quell any unrest threatening to fracture the country, whether it be “antinuke crazies,” members of the feminist movement, or perpetrators of race riots. He’s fine putting a few thousand lives on the line every 27 years in exchange for law and order. It’s a properly chilling plan, but he’s not the first one to come up with something so cold. Superhero stories are full of such villains, who prioritize their idea of the “greater good” at the cost of civilian lives. It’s a plan most famously carried out in Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen: the superhero Ozymandias attempted to create a utopia by unleashing an alien squid monster on the city of New York, murdering millions but giving the world a common enemy to rally against.
Ozymandias’ plot, horrible as it is, does work. Nations that were previously at odds with the U.S. reach out to help, tabling previous threats of nuclear conflict. Moore’s graphic novel doesn’t dive much further into the aftermath, at least in how it affects civilians — leaving HBO’s Watchmen series, set years after the massacre, to explore the fallout. It was just one of the show’s brilliantly executed choices, and one that Welcome to Derry could be gesturing to.
Welcome to Derry already owes a lot to Watchmen: few shows had entwined America’s racist past with a genre story quite like it before. HBO’s It prequel is walking in its footsteps in more ways than one, giving horror fans a compelling alternate history to chew on and complicating the backstory most thought they knew. With Pennywise reawakened and his cage compromised, Welcome to Derry is headed for a finale that no one can predict.
