IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1, Episode 3 Review

Warning! This review contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry episode 3.

It: Welcome to Derry‘s third episode gets off to an exciting start. The cold open flashes back to 1908, two Pennywise cycles ago, where we follow a frightened little kid past the horrors of a freak show. Shortly thereafter, he’s stalked by one of the freaks — a spindly, emaciated old man — who chases him through the woods. It’s a perfect standalone horror short, just like the opening of the Welcome to Derry pilot, and arguably the scariest sequence in the show so far. The CG effects aren’t too distracting, because the VFX team just used CGI to augment a real actor; they didn’t create a CG monster from scratch.

This opening isn’t just a glimpse at Pennywise attacks of the past; it significantly deepens the ongoing narrative in 1962. As we catch up with the kids from that cold open 54 years later, it goes a long way toward explaining why General Shaw is so hellbent on finding and weaponizing Derry’s resident monster. It also humanizes James Remar’s gruff military bureaucrat by showing us pieces of his childhood and one of the most important relationships in his life.

At the end of last week’s episode, following her pickle vision in the grocery store, Lilly was sent back to Juniper Hill. This seemed like a game-changing twist that would raise the stakes of Lilly’s search for the truth and might even give us a look at Stephen King’s Cuckoo’s Nest. But ultimately, her return to the psychiatric hospital does not make much of a difference. She still spends her days at school and her evenings investigating spooky goings-on with her friends.

Welcome To Derry Unsubverts Our Expectations In Episode 3

The Massacred Losers’ Club Promptly Gets Replaced

The most impressive thing about Welcome to Derry‘s first episode was its ability to subvert the audience’s expectations. It assembled a new Losers’ Club, sent them after a missing kid who was abducted by Pennywise, and then, in its final scene, it massacred all but two of those young protagonists. butt the following two episodes have undermined the shock factor of that massacre by simply replacing them with yet another Losers’ Club. Lilly and Ronnie have found another couple of kids to help them investigate Derry’s monstrous underbelly, so those subverted expectations have been unsubverted.

This episode starts to round out Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann as a key part of the story, and not just a walking, talking Shining Easter egg. His superpower gives him the ability to see what’s really going on in Derry: the missing kids, the floating monsters, the overwhelming darkness. Hallorann’s dinner with the Hanlons is a great little scene that exemplifies what this show can do that the movies couldn’t: slow down for more character-driven, less horror-centric moments.

This Is Welcome To Derry’s Scariest Episode Yet

It Culminates In A Thrilling Climactic Sequence In A Ghost-Infested Graveyard

The episode builds to a thrilling climactic sequence in a cemetery, where the kids are trying to get photographic evidence of paranormal activity. This set-piece perfectly captures the spirit of It — it’s genuinely unnerving, but it’s also a ton of fun — and it sets up the episode’s chilling cliffhanger ending. After a close encounter at the cemetery, the kids sneak into the darkroom at the school to develop their photos. Just before the end credits, they spot a blurry Pennywise lurking in the background of one of the pictures, glowing eyes piercing through the celluloid:It’s… a clown.“

Between the terrifying opening chase, Hallorann’s creepy vision, the ghosts swooping around the graveyard, and that final Pennywise tease, this is the scariest episode of Welcome to Derry so far The series is in full swing now. The plot is starting to take off, the characters are all starting to meet each other, and our dreaded Pennywise is just over the horizon.

Release Date

October 26, 2025

NETWORKS

HBO

Directors

Andy Muschietti

Franchise(s)

IT

Pros & Cons

• This is the scariest episode of Welcome to Derry yet
• The plot is starting to take off

• The Losers’ Club massacre of episode 1 has been undermined by replacing them