One of the gnarliest body horror sequences in TV history makes up for another dud ending. When I recapped Alien: Earth earlier this year, I thought I knew gross. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I've bore witness to profane videos of Internet legend. I truly thought I knew horror and depravity, and that I had a stomach of steel. But IT: Welcome to Derry has taken a step beyond what I thought was possible on mainstream television.
Gore aside, IT: Welcome to Derry's fourth episode, "The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet's Function" is less about literal eyesight than it is the horrors some see and others refuse to acknowledge. We begin with children holding evidence of the supernatural; what they get are shrugs from cynical, condescending cops. We continue with a Black woman, Charlotte (Taylour Paige) demanding justice for an innocent man; what she gets are shrugs from cynical, condescending cops. (I'm sensing a pattern here.)
We end with an elaborate flashback to Derry's beginnings: How Pennywise came to this earth, how the Natives knew his evil and took it upon themselves to keep it contained, and how settlers doomed themselves and generations to come. All throughout Derry, no one believes the innocent.
Here's what happened in IT: Welcome to Derry episode 4. In the morning light after their ordeal in the graveyard, the kids present their photographs of ghosts—and Pennywise—to Chief Bowers (Peter Outerbridge).
One of the gnarliest body horror sequences in TV history makes up for another dud ending.
Author's summary: A stark, uncompromising chapter that amplifies social indifference and the cost of hidden evil while delivering a shocking horror beat.