It: Welcome to Derry has spent its entire first season attempting to soup up the supplemental material in Stephen King’s novel to a degree where it’s able to stand on its own while retaining the essential King-ness at its heart. With “Winter Fire” bringing the season to a close, Welcome to Derry sees the show achieving that goal, with a finale that keeps big emotions at the center of big spectacle… although that spectacle does become increasingly ridiculous as it spirals. Then again, endings do tend to get a little complicated in the world of Stephen King.
“Winter Fire” opens with the stakes skyrocketing immediately. A dense layer of fog (but not “Mist;” they pointedly do not say “mist” at any point) plunges Derry into chaos, giving much of the episode the feel of a disaster movie. At first blush, this seems to be part of the military “cleanup” hinted at by General Shaw a couple episodes ago. The confused reactions on the part of the soldiers who first detect the phenomenon, however, muddy the waters on that score and suggest it may be the backfiring results of destroying one of the pillars in last week’s episode. Though the rationale for blanketing Derry in moody, atmospheric fog isn’t well justified, the environment does serve as a creepy, engaging setting for the ensuing race against Pennywise. I remain shaken by the god-awful CG in the cemetery scene from Episode 3, so it was a relief that at least the visual effects in the finale seemed a lot more thoughtfully designed and deployed, even if the presence of the fog is not well explained. Guess that’s just the price of admission for cool shots like a procession of catatonic kids floating over the ice, or Pennywise’s monster-bird form making a terrifying beeline for our heroes through that fog.
“A smile is something special…”
In any case, the lack of clarity or purpose here serves as a real “masks off” moment for the season’s military conspiracy: It’s a dud. Dick Hallorann aside, it feels as if the outsized military thread’s main purpose was just to squeeze one more episode’s worth of Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) out of Welcome to Derry by the end, as if the predestined burning of the Black Spot couldn’t work as the season’s true climax because fans would see it coming – the dilemma of a prequel laid bare. General Shaw’s (James Remar) abject ignorance, thinking he could “aim” Pennywise at dissident Americans, comes back to bite him… hard, in the face, until he’s dead. Remar’s measured tones and kindness made Shaw a sympathetic presence for much of the season, which leaves Shaw’s snowballing idiocy over the last two episodes a real disappointment.
In a broader sense, the scope of the storytelling expanding around Pennywise through this plot thread feels like a rare instance of Welcome to Derry fumbling its perspective on King’s fiction. So much of the horror of It comes from being alone with it and, even though the secret’s always going to be banding together to face that horror together, all the increased visibility of the monster does occasionally chip away at its mystique through the finale. Welcome to Derry had a glamored clown waiting in the wings that may have helped all this, but Periwinkle/Ingrid Kersh (Madeleine Stowe) is mostly absent from the finale.
In fairness, this is exactly what I used to look like 30 seconds into any school assembly.
Pennywise, reawakened by the pillar’s destruction, uses all this confusion as an opportunity to sneak out and gather an entire school’s worth of children for the most effed-up assembly of all time. Decapitation, musical theater, the entire student body being glamored by It’s deadlights at the same time – that all sounds better than math class to me! “Winter Fire” pushes Pennywise and his surrounding mythology to extremes we’ve never quite seen before, but Skarsgård’s unwavering commitment to the role does wonders for keeping the action on the rails as the clown does things like ice skate across a frozen lake to kill soldiers or, I don’t know, up-end the entire concept of spacetime as it relates to It’s physiology and cycles of feeding. More on that in a minute.
“Makin’ my way downtown, floating fast, faces pass and I’m clown-bound.”
With the fog spreading a deep chill over Derry and Pennywise blowing into a tuba as the Pied Piper for a stream of floating kids, the mission quickly comes into focus: replace the destroyed pillar with the ceremonial dagger in the custody of Lilly (Clara Stack), Ronnie (Amanda Christine), and Marge (Matilda Lawler), which will send Pennywise back to sleep and save Will (Blake Cameron James) and the other glamored kids in the process. Ronnie and Marge finally get through to the increasingly isolated Lilly after the three steal a milk truck to go after Pennywise and Will themselves. The girls get the dagger and its corrupting influence away from Lilly long enough to remind her that she is and always has been a “lifeboat,” not the “anchor” on her loved ones that she’s feared; it’s a moment of support and reconciliation that Stack, Christine, and Lawler navigate well together.
After receiving a phone call from Pennywise, Jovan Adepo puts in his best work of the season as Leroy, Derry’s “man without fear,” finally breaks, tearfully begging Hallorann (Chris Chalk) to help save his baby. Taylour Paige’s Charlotte takes the news of Will’s capture just as hard, exploding in anguish and doing a good job of focusing the other assembled adults – Hank Grogan, Rose and Taniel, and Dick – on the task ahead. The supporting characters are largely left by the wayside throughout the finale, joining in on the action mostly when the plot needs help to move along. Taniel (Joshua Odjick) in particular goes down with a surprising amount of indifference, unceremoniously killed off by gunfire as the adults, kids, and military all converge on the banks of the Penobscot River, on which rests a gnarled tree where the dagger must be placed to reseal It in his prison. With a Shining assist from Dick (a fun diversion that sees Dick trick Pennywise into thinking he’s awoken as Bob Gray), the kids free Will and find the dagger fighting against being put in place. Then a knight in shining armor comes to save the day, as the spirit of Rich Santos (Arian S. Cartaya) arrives just in time to flip off Pennywise and help his friends plunge the dagger into the tree. It’s a moving moment that calls to mind Stan Uris’ spiritual presence while his surviving Losers’ Club friends defeat It in their own time.
Not everything about Welcome to Derry’s first season worked, but Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann was a resounding success.
The funeral for Rich, Will, and Ronnie confessing their mutual crushes on each other, and the breaking of the “Lifeboats” circle when the Grogans flee town for Canada help to ease Welcome to Derry back into more recognizable emotional territory after the chaotic events on the Penobscot. It’s at Rich’s funeral that Dick gets the chance to use his Shine to give comfort to Rich’s grieving parents, letting them know that Rich is right behind them and he always will be, and I’m not crying, you are! Not everything about Welcome to Derry’s first season worked, but Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann was a resounding success, and the cutesy hints at the next steps of Dick’s journey make the idea of potentially getting to spend more time with the character (whether in future seasons of Welcome to Derry or a spinoff) a welcome proposition.
And yes, the finale does put a surprising amount of emphasis on laying groundwork for future stories, which seems ass-backwards considering we know future seasons of the show are supposed to be moving back in time. The narrative grenade Welcome to Derry lobs over its shoulder on the way out the door? Pennywise doesn’t experience time the same way as humans, and killing him may actually just be enabling his birth, suggesting that no defeat of It can be totally counted on as final… not even, it seems, the victory of the Losers Club over It in 2019. Much of this sentiment is conveyed to Marge directly, as Pennywise reveals to her that she becomes Margaret Tozier, going so far as to whip out a missing poster for Finn Wolfhard’s yet-to-be-born Richie Tozier. These are compelling turns to consider, but Welcome to Derry seems happy to punt any further explanation of these timey-wimey intricacies to next season.
That all brings us to why this episode is called “Winter Fire” in the first place; after all, “winter fire” is a poetic phrase we most closely associate with Losers’ Club member Beverly Marsh, right? Well, Welcome to Derry’s got one crank of the jack-in-the-box left to surprise us with after the “It: Welcome to Derry Chapter One” title card comes up: a jump forward in time to 1986, where Ingrid Kersh (Joan Gregson, returning from It: Chapter Two) hears screams from the next room over from hers in Juniper Hill, where she’s been in custody since the burning of the Black Spot. Ingrid investigates and discovers her neighbor Elfrida Marsh has hung herself, to the horror of the distraught husband and daughter grieving at her feet: Alfred and Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis). Ingrid hits Bev with the town motto, “No one who dies in Derry ever really dies,” before giving her a bucktoothed Pennywise grin. The coda certainly reinforces the continuity between Welcome to Derry and the movies, but it’s not all that clear whether Lillis’ presence is just to help put an exclamation point on the season, or to suggest that as Pennywise hinted, there may be unfinished business for the Losers Club to account for sometime in their future.
