IT: Welcome To Derry Episode 3 (2025)

🎈 IT: Welcome To Derry Episode 3 (2025)

“You can connect the dots, but sometimes you really shouldn’t.”

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🎥 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

⚠️ Content Warning
This episode of IT: Welcome to Derry isn’t pulling any punches. Expect disturbing imagery, child endangerment, racial violence, and psychological trauma front and center. There are also heavy scenes involving police brutality, institutional corruption, and supernatural horror that leans into body distortion and possession.

If you’re sensitive to themes of racism, mental illness, or graphic violence — or just not ready to watch kids get tormented by both monsters and adults — take a breather before pressing play. This one’s less about jump scares and more about what’s rotting underneath.

Oh, boy look I was giving the show the benefit of the doubt. For the first two episodes. We were off to a good start. If you ask me but the cgi creatures I was already skeptical about. I was like, okay. I’ll give you a pass for now. Maybe you’ll utilize it better or not. Use them a lot. But now we’re three episodes in, and it’s nothing but cgi creatures. And now all the seams have broken, and I am noticing the flaws in this show, and it’s like, oh, this isn’t just a one time thing. This is a recurring thing. Let’s break it down shall we?

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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Episode 3, titled “Now You See It,” picks up with both timelines in motion. In the past, a young boy at a carnival crosses paths with a one-eyed old man who might be more than he seems. The encounter turns horrific as the man morphs into a monstrous, elongated form straight out of a nightmare. In the present, Lilly is released from Juniper Hill Psychiatric Hospital, trying to mend her friendship with the girl whose father she accidentally got arrested. Meanwhile, the accused father, Hank Grogan, sits in jail facing the threat of Shawshank Prison while a detective tries to bully a confession out of him.

Elsewhere, Dick Hallorann (yes, that Hallorann from The Shining) is pulled deeper into a secret military project. They’re using his “shine” to locate something buried beneath Derry—a mission that sends him into a psychic trance where he glimpses the deadlights, floating corpses, and the unmistakable cosmic horror beneath the town. By the end, Lilly and her friends perform a séance to photograph the entity, and when the photo develops, the final image reveals a blurry clown face watching them from the shadows.

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🧠 Character Rundown

Lilly (Jovan Adepo) – Still the most sympathetic and grounded character. Her trauma and determination give the show its emotional spine.

Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) – Likable performance, but his inclusion is messy. We’ll get into that.

Hank Grogan – The wrongly accused father whose story is the show’s strongest reflection of real-world horror: racism and systemic injustice.

The rest of the kids? …I couldn’t tell you. Three episodes in, and I still find myself asking “wait, who’s that again?” That’s a big problem when we’re supposed to fear for them.

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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow

Episode 3 runs smoother than the first two in terms of scene transitions, but it’s bogged down by unnecessary CGI scares that kill any tension. The best moments are the quiet, character-driven ones—Lilly struggling to reconnect, Hallorann’s eerie calm before his visions, the dinner scene at the military couple’s home. The supernatural side, though, keeps yanking the story out of focus.

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👍 Pros

The Native American flashbacks and lore segments were visually strong and actually deepened the mythology.

Hallorann’s psychic vision sequence had potential—it’s eerie and connects the wider Stephen King universe.

Lilly remains a great lead; her performance carries the emotional weight the rest of the cast can’t.

The ending photo reveal is legitimately creepy, probably the best cliffhanger so far.

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👎 Cons

Dick Hallorann’s inclusion is forced. The writers clearly want every King property connected, but it doesn’t make sense. In The Shining, Hallorann was just an ordinary man with extraordinary empathy—a cook who happened to have the shine. Here, he’s a government operative on psychic recon missions. That turns him from a human into a Marvel-tier character, and it clashes with the grounded tone of King’s earlier work.

The CGI continues to kill the mood. The elongated old man, the floating corpses, the ghostly swirls—it all looks rubbery and cheap. I can practically hear my immersion deflating. Horror only works when you feel it, and nothing about fake plastic monsters feels real.

The CGI creatures feel like a palate cleanser.
That’s a huge problem, because they’re supposed to be the scary parts — but they aren’t. Every time one shows up, I actually feel relieved. My brain instantly goes, “Oh good, that’s not real. I’m safe.” Meanwhile, the real horror — the racism, the systemic abuse, the way Derry treats people — that’s what actually terrifies me. The monsters are supposed to bring fear, but instead they bring comfort. That’s not how horror should work.

Three episodes in, and I remember exactly two characters: Lilly and Hallorann. Everyone else might as well be mannequins. You can’t care about people you barely know, and that’s a huge flaw for a horror story built on empathy and tragedy.

The show keeps forcing connections—to Shawshank, to The Shining, to Derry’s history—instead of letting the story breathe. It’s like the writers are terrified you’ll forget this is a Stephen King prequel if they don’t remind you every five minutes.

Also, the showrunners just start figuring out what pennywise’s powers are because an episode two, when lily is in the store and she’s smashing pickles, and see that pickle monster of her dad, she ends up snapping out of it and realizes none of that’s happened.And there’s no pickles on the floor yet. In this episode spoilers, they snapped some pictures of ghost kids that pennywise takes the form of and it shows up on the camera. What?

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💭 Final Thoughts

IT: Welcome To Derry Episode 3 finally dives into real supernatural horror, but it also exposes the cracks in the foundation. For every strong idea (like the haunting image of the developed photo or the exploration of racism in Derry), there’s a clunky CGI effect or forced King-verse connection that drags it down. The Hallorann subplot feels particularly unnecessary—it retroactively turns a humble cook into a psychic action hero.

Visually, the episode still delivers atmosphere—foggy cemeteries, flickering lamplight, and that eerie small-town stillness that hides something ancient. But narratively, it’s starting to buckle under the weight of its own shared-universe ambitions.

I’ll admit it — I got ahead of myself. After the first two episodes, I thought Welcome to Derry was shaping up to be one of my favorite horror shows. But by episode three, reality set in faster than a bad jump-scare.

Now, I am not even so sure, and if they don’t fix the problem. Soon this show might become a mess.

Words of advice to any future directors, please stop using cgi as their crux in a horror film.You realize a good horror movie is supposed to rely on practical effects.That’s why people like Del Toro toro and Robert Iger’s exist. They know how to actually put their craftsmanship in their movies and not rely on practical effects.

The c g I is just gonna make this show dated because it already looks terrible on the arrival, everything just looks too rubbery, like a belong during the ps3 era and even that’s insulting to a ps3. So in no good intentions, I cannot give this episode any higher than a.

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⭐ Rating

7 / 10 — Creepy, intriguing, and stylish, but the weakest episode so far. The heart is there, but the shine is fading fast.

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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

From here on out, full spoilers. You’ve been warned.

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💀 Spoilers

The episode opens in the past with young William visiting a carnival’s “freak room,” where he encounters a one-eyed man who later reveals monstrous features—teeth stretching like Pennywise’s and limbs bending like a spider. The CGI transformation kills the scare factor; it looks like something from a 2010 Syfy movie. The boy’s friend fires a slingshot into the monster’s eye, drawing blood that floats upward, mirroring the blood-defying-gravity effect from It: Chapter One.

Cut to the present: Lilly leaves Juniper Hill, trying to fix her friendship with the girl whose father, Hank, is now in jail. Hank’s interrogation scenes are grim—racist cops pressuring him, threatening Shawshank. These scenes actually work because they’re real horror.

Meanwhile, Hallorann is recruited by General Shaw (the grown-up version of that carnival boy) to use his shine as a “human compass.” He locates the dig site but has a psychic breakdown mid-flight, transported mentally to Derry’s sewers where he sees Pennywise’s lair and countless floating bodies. The creature senses him, taunting, “Who are you?”—a direct nod to Pennywise’s ancient awareness of the shine.

Back on Earth, Hallorann warns them to stop digging. They won’t. And that’s when we cut back to Lilly’s group of friends, who hold a séance in the cemetery. They think it fails—until the ground splits open and ghostly children crawl out in a storm of dirt and screams. Also I cannot address this enough. This looks terrible. This just looks like something out of a goosebumps episode. Were only three episodes in people and already I’m questioning if the show is good or not. This is not a good sign.