It: Welcome to Derry risks ruining Pennywise for good with one fatal mistake

Eddie who? Richie whatshisname? As strong as the cast were in Andy Muschietti's IT, Pennywise is always the first name that comes to mind when you think of his twofold adaptation. As such, it didn't take long for Bill Skarsgård's deranged clown to dance its way into our hearts and nightmares alike (while showing up occasionally in my therapy sessions too).

It's safe to say then that if there's one thing we'd want to see more of in the prequel series Welcome To Derry, it's Pennywise, even if it was reduced to a weird gross baby puddle by the end of IT: Chapter Two. The show is set 27 years before the events of the first film, making it easy to bring Pennywise back in its full splendour. Yet for the first few episodes, Skarsgård doesn't show up at all.

IT is there, of course. It's in every nook and cranny of Derry, its evil seeping into every brick and the mind of every resident. Stephen King's most recognisable antagonist even shows up to terrify a new batch of kids each week, but not in his most recognisable form. Instead, IT appears as various nightmares made flesh, from Lilly's pickled father to a baby-faced demon in the premiere.

It would have been easy to simply rely on the iconography of Pennywise, maximising the show's scares by giving viewers what they came for. But what you want isn't always best for you. Muschietti and his team smartly recognised that in writing this show, choosing to hold back on revealing Pennywise in full until five episodes in.

Risky? Yes, but this was actually the best way to reintroduce a once-terrifying character who audiences have grown somewhat desensitised to. How could you not after Pennywise was meme'd into oblivion back when the films first came out? Building on the tension that comes with waiting to see it, this idea that Pennywise could leap out at any moment, helped remind us how scary IT really is while erasing those dancing memes from our minds completely.

It's unfortunate then that Welcome To Derry risks undoing all this, not through how much Pennywise is shown but rather because of how much its backstory is.

In King's original novel, we learned that Pennywise is a monstrous shape-shifting entity that crash-landed millions of years ago in Derry. This cosmic force of horror can shapeshift into your nightmares to feed off your fear, although its true form is that of golden lights, or "deadlights," that can drive anyone mad upon seeing them. Every 27 years, IT emerges to feast, mostly on children, before hiding away again below the town that's poisoned by IT's presence.

This raises a number of questions. Why does IT favour the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown? Why doesn't this inter-dimensional entity venture out beyond Derry? And why does IT love to float so goddamn much?

In an early interview with SFX (via GamesRadar), Muschietti teased that answers will be coming in season one of Welcome To Derry and beyond:

"We're opening a window. Everything that we are setting up in season one, that will really manifest in two and three, is a look into all the bigger questions about IT. 'What does IT want? Why is IT here?' All the cryptic elements of IT that we're going to ruin and explain."

It's safe to assume that Muschietti was joking about his plans to "ruin" the wider mythology, but he accidentally did it anyway. The whole point of IT and Pennywise specifically is that this unknowable entity of unspeakable evil can't be explained away or ever fully understood. There's no logic to nightmares, and IT is a nightmare personified, the very essence of what you fear most sculpted out of the darkest recesses of your mind.

Every horror fan knows that what you imagine will always be so much scarier than what's shown on-screen. That's why the '90s IT miniseries starring Tim Curry faltered when Pennywise's true form was revealed to be that of a janky-looking spider at the end. And it's not just what's shown that can have an impact either. Over-explaining is just as bad in its own way, especially with an evil as abstract and weird as this one.

In episode four, Welcome To Derry dives deep into the origins of Pennywise, adding lore that wasn't even included in the original book.

It's revealed that a dagger made from the same material as the meteor that Pennywise landed with can hurt the monster. In centuries past, thirteen sacred shards crafted from that metal were buried deep in the earth around Derry's western wood where IT lived, trapping it there. Each one was buried in a turtle shell, hinting at the role Maturin the cosmic turtle has long played in the battle against Pennywise.

Sounds silly, right? What works on the page doesn't always translate well to screen, especially when it comes to aquatic reptiles of a cosmic nature. And that's also true of IT's expanded origin story, which Muschietti hints will be delved into further throughout future seasons. That's going to be a disaster if the military storyline we've seen so far is anything to go by.

Lines like "Derry is a prison and we're looking for the bars," aren't just absurd in isolation. They also speak to just how odd and misjudged it is to see military officers try to weaponise something as unknowable as Pennywise. Even the name itself, IT, speaks to an ambiguity that's central to the power this idea has to unsettle us, a power which this narrative undercuts brutally. The result inevitably demystifies IT and robs the entity of its power.

As smart as it was to tease Pennywise's physical appearance in the prequel, it was anything but wise to begin chipping away at its mystique. And therein lies the show's true horror. Because if Stephen King never explained why Pennywise stays in Derry, for example, why should the show? And more importantly, why should we care?

It: Welcome to Derry continues on Sky Atlantic and NOW on Mondays.

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