This article contains SPOILERS for IT: Welcome to Derry through Episode 3, "Now You See It."
After an extremely solid second episode that felt like it was solidifying the TV series’ sense of pace, tone, and overarching aesthetic, the third episode of IT: Welcome to Derry feels like a notable and befuddling back-step on just about every front. “Now You See It” works in spurts, mostly thanks to the stellar ensemble cast and interesting story threads carrying over from previous episodes, but so much of it feels as if it is actively undoing some of the prior episodes’ boldest strokes up until now, which makes for a bizarre and dissonant viewing experience.
IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 review: "Now You See It"
An easy place to start this conversation is with the character of Lilly Bainbridge, played with sincerity, palpable anxiousness, and empathy by Clara Stack. At the end of last week’s episode, Lilly made the heartbreaking choice to acquiesce to the pressures of the local police force and essentially aid in the arrest of Ronnie Grogan’s dad, Hank.
Out of fear of being sent back to the mental institute she just recently completed a stay at which tainted her public-facing reputation at school, Lilly refuses to corroborate Ronnie’s account of the monster that killed the other children at the Capital Theater in the first episode. As a direct result of this, Hank is not only arrested, but Lilly is subsequently targeted by the titular It in the grocery store, has a massive breakdown, and is re-committed to the mental institute anyway. This all made for compelling drama and interpersonal conflict among the main characters, which makes it obscenely bizarre that Lilly’s stay at the institute is simply resolved in a matter of minutes in this episode
After a 1908-set prologue (which we’ll get to in a minute), the present-tense story starts with Lilly’s mother picking her up from the institute, with everyone speaking very passively about her having completed her stay. For starters, none of this seems to really jive with the institute that was pitched to audiences earlier in the show; Lilly’s experience there seems to have been pleasant, with her even having gotten the chance to reconnect with a caretaker who we’re told she actually grew close with during her first stay in a perplexing bit of backfill information.
This makes the whole thing feel like a far-cry from the high-stakes narrative development it was played as at the end of the previous episode. But even worse, for the purposes of the story, it feels as if Lilly was only in the institute for a matter of hours, if that. She gets out, goes back to school, and its as if no time has passed at all. Everything else in the story is still presently unfolding, and no one even seems to have really noticed that she was missing.
I understand that this is a critical point in the story where you want to have your main young characters spending time together and solidifying their bond, especially after the fake-out of the first episode’s ending essentially further compressed the amount of time available in order to do that. However, to build up this entire threat of how Lilly going back to the institute is her worst fear and then essentially just hand-wave it away and allot it no actual narrative or thematic weight within the story as it actively happens is exceedingly strange, and ultimately serves to undermine both this episode and the previous ones.
Another example of a similar misstep is in the prologue sequence, which is set primarily at a roadside carnival. Where the previous episode’s horror sequences felt like they really pushed the boundaries, with Ronnie’s scare setpiece centered around memories of her mother being a particular highlight not just for this TV series but for the IT franchise as a whole, “Now You See It” deflates all of that momentum in its opening moments.
This carnival sequence features a hall of mirrors bit that feels like a light-weight iteration of a very similar moment from IT: Chapter Two, relies predominantly on very shallow parlor tricks to attempt to elicit scares, and culminates in the most visually garish and ugly moment of the show so far. For a series that had been playing things so relatively restrained regarding the role of Pennywise thus far, it feels so odd for this episode’s opening to take a hard left-turn and suddenly show audiences a very underdeveloped CGI take on It in a more monstrous form, running through the woods in broad daylight.
It isn’t scary, and it also lets all the air out of this thing like someone just popped one of Pennywise’s balloons; up until this point, everything had felt genuinely cinematic and at least on-par with the films, if not even more impressively and fully realized. But here, all of those defining narrative and visual principles get chucked out the window in favor of some cheap scare tactics. This ties into the finale of the episode, which goes to a similarly strange place.
In an effort to attempt to get some photographic proof of It to support their testimony about the murder of the kids at the Capital Theater, the central group of kids decide to attempt to hold a séance of sorts in the Derry cemetery. Things go awry when It shows up and manifests as a bunch of ghoulish, undead flying kids and the ground begins to crack open all around the kids as they ride their bicycles and attempt to escape It, all while getting a picture of the mayhem.
This all makes for an exceedingly cluttered and ultimately unexciting finale to the episode. It isn’t scary and the stakes never feel particularly high, and visually, it feels much closer to Disney’s 2023 Haunted Mansion movie than a Stephen King project. What makes it all even odder is that the whole point of the first episode’s surprise ending, where several of the children who audiences had been led to believe would be this show’s equivalent of the Losers Club were mercilessly killed off by It, was to subvert those expectations and raise the stakes, making it feel like no one was safe. But here, in this episode, the show opts to lean all the way in to establishing this quartet of kids as Losers Club-esque and having them all ride their bikes around to evade zombies, ghosts, and cracks of molten lava, without any of them getting injured in any way. As such, this whole finale feels bloated, visually and narratively, and seems to deliberately undo so much of the groundwork the series had been working so diligently to lay.
The best parts of the episode are when it is leaning into some of the more interesting story threads established in the previous episode, such as Kimberly Guerrero’s Rose and her larger role within the story or Hallorann’s continued pursuit of It for the US government alongside Hanlon. All of these performers do an exemplary job with their scenes, and continue to bring a real sense of gravitas to these more dramatically-inclined moments in the series.
This also correlates to what is far and away the most effective horror sequence in the episode, when Hallorann follows a telepathic avenue opened up by an old artifact and finds himself unknowingly stepping into Pennywise’s layer. While the clown himself doesn’t physically show up onscreen, the framing of the infamous circus wagon and his glowing yellow eyes work wonders to really sell the heft and dread of the moment. We also do get our first tease of Bill Skarsgård’s returning vocal performance as the clown here in the dark, and establishes a real foreboding sense of unease moving forward.
Verdict
Overall, while the episode has some bright spots thanks to the continued positive attributes established in prior episodes, I can’t help but feel like “Now You See It” is destined to go down as a massive misstep for the show. It quickly and inefficiently rushes through some of its most interesting story threads, making them feel weightless and muddled in the process. On top of this, where the first two episodes felt constrained and meticulous in the way they visually unraveled the role of It in the story, this episode feels as if it steps all over that careful groundwork in some very garish, unexciting, and strange ways. Here’s hoping the show can find its footing again next week.