This review contains SPOILERS for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 4, "The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet's Function."
After an exceedingly lackluster third episode that felt as if it was spinning its wheels and unintentionally undermining much of the solid foundation laid by the previous two episodes, IT: Welcome to Derry gets things back-on-track in its fourth episode, “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function.” Thankfully, director Andrew Bernstein redeems himself after the mishandled, mangled mess of an episode that was last week’s installment, delivering an episode that highlights some really strong performances, has some inventive visual ideas, and surprisingly, leans all the way into the gonzo Stephen King lore at the heart of this whole endeavor. The result is something probably not quite as strong as the second episode, which still has the best scares of the series by a country mile, but one that goes the distance and feels like it actively pushes things forward in interesting ways.
Ironically, what I’m finding about IT: Welcome to Derry is that it’s kind of an inverse situation to Andy Muschietti’s two-part movies themselves. In the films, the kid-centric material in Chapter One was far and away the most compelling element of the duology. Experiencing this unknown terror alongside the likable bunch of miscreants that comprised the Losers’ Club made for high stakes and ruthless tension. In stark contrast to this, IT: Chapter Two centered on the characters as adults, and often felt exceedingly monotonous and repetitive. The structure of the sequel divvied each individual adult character up and sent them on their own little side-quest, which were edited together back-to-back-to-back. This resulted in a mind-numbing three-hour runtime full of sequences where it felt blatantly obvious that nothing was going to be allowed to actually happen to push the story forward: everything just felt painfully stagnant.
In IT: Welcome to Derry, the opposite is proving to be true. Any time the series focuses more on the adult characters, the story feels like it is actually allowed to move forward in interesting ways. Part of this is due to the fact that from the outset, the narrative scope of the series has been much larger. Incorporating elements like the U.S. government’s presence in Derry and Dick Hallorann’s ‘shining’ abilities make for a much larger canvas. When the show homes in on the adult characters, it feels like this larger scope is put to good use, expanding into unexpected and delightfully odd places. However, when the series focuses more on the child characters, no matter how good the performances from the incredibly talented young cast are, everything feels like it pulls to a standstill to deliver limp retreads of things we’ve already seen.
For example, there’s a whole scene in this episode where the quartet of child leads all get together and talk through the fact that they keep encountering this mysterious malevolent creature (the titular It) that seems to be attempting to scare them rather than kill them. But the scene can’t help but feel kind of dull because we as an audience have seen this already, in IT: Chapter One, when the Losers’ Club pieced together this same line of thought. There, it felt interesting and compelling because it was new information. But here, it just plays as stale, and also kind of oddly dissonant, given that the series literally opened with It outright murdering several children without going through the trouble of spending an appropriate amount of narrative time jump-scaring them first.
Whereas the children-centered stuff feels stuck perpetually in the same gear, the adult storylines are allowed to chart new territory and are, obviously, all the more enthralling because of it. This is certainly true for the threads involving Leroy Hanlon (as so incredibly performed by Jovan Adepo) and Dick Hallorann (as brought roaring to palpable life by Chris Chalk), where they are gradually unraveling the larger cosmic mystery of what It is and why it resides within Derry, all of which is material rooted in King’s book that the films never got the time to tackle.
But its equally as true for storylines like Charlotte Hanson’s (as so exquisitely played by Taylour Paige). Her righteous quest to find justice for Hank Grogan (as played by Stephen Rider, who gets his best showcase yet in this episode) is tied into the larger It-centric story of the series, but is predominantly related to real-world events and the causality of various characters’ actions. In giving these kinds of diverse character a much more potent part of the spotlight in this series than they did in the movies, IT: Welcome to Derry is able to deliver far richer thematic material and subtext.
All of that to say, the prior episode was much more kids-centric while this episode leans far more heavily on the adults’ portion of the story, and is all the better for it. I will, however, affirm that one of the criticisms I had of the previous episode does absolutely carry over here, and that is the distinct downgrade in terms of the visual handling of the scares and It itself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bug-eyed bathroom bit for me, which plays as unintentionally comical much more so than harrowing. The fact that that scene also culminates in poor Lilly (as played with such powerful pathos by Clara Stack) again being left to look as if she’s gone completely insane in the aftermath of some It-realted shenanigans can’t help but make it feel like her arc is just stuck perpetually in a loop. There’s even a point in this episode where someone half-threatens her with the idea of returning to Juniper Hill Asylum, a threat which holds no weight since that’s already happened and was resolved in approximately a minute-and-a-half of screen-time in the previous episode.
Of course, I would imagine that the part of this episode that pretty much everyone is going to be talking about in the week to come is the final fifteen minute stretch, where the show goes full-blown bananas and gives audiences the origin story of It and the indigenous peoples who fought against it hundreds of years ago. The whole sequence is fittingly bonkers, even if I couldn’t help but find myself wishing the It-centric moments were staged in a bit more effective manner. (A priest growing long limbs and then giving birth to a baby demon that stabs someone with a spear while a blue CGI vortex swirls around them just isn’t very scary or visually interesting to me, personally.)
But I do love the way in which writer Helen Shang was able to anchor this entire expedition dump in the present-tense momentum of the story, having Hallorann experiencing this alongside the audience via his ‘shining.’ It would have been so easy to simply plop this in somewhere along the way, even as a prologue in the next episode, but the choice to work it into the narrative itself and have the characters learn this information with us is genuinely great. I also love that it all ends in a way that both pushes the story forward and ties directly into one of the most iconic locations from the films; an ideal encapsulation for the series’ ambitions to move forward even though its narrative is rooted in the past.
Verdict
Overall, I enjoyed “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function” much more than its predecessor. By focusing more on the adult characters and allowing the story to push forward rather than feel hopelessly caught in a monotonous rut, It: Welcome to Derry has found its footing in a way that makes me hopeful for the weeks to come. Here’s hoping they can keep the momentum going.