It: Welcome to Derry (2025) — Episode 4 Review

“Halfway to Derry, all the way to disappointment.”

💀 Halfway Through, and I’m Losing Interest


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

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📉 Halfway Point Thoughts — and the “Stephen King Seal of Approval” Problem

We’ve officially hit the halfway mark of Welcome to Derry, and honestly? I’m not impressed. The scares aren’t landing, the atmosphere feels artificial, and everything looks drenched in overdone CGI. The irony is that Stephen King himself called this show “great” and “scary.” At this point, his seal of approval means absolutely nothing to me. Every time he praises an adaptation, it ends up being something bloated, over-rendered, and toothless.

And that’s what this series has become — a glossy, over-produced prequel that breaks its own lore, bends The Shining canon out of shape, and somehow still manages to be boring.


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🧩 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Episode 4 tries to blend cosmic horror with folklore, following multiple storylines that are starting to clash more than connect.
A Native American legend resurfaces, describing the arrival of a demonic entity long before Pennywise’s reign. Meanwhile, Lily Bainbridge (Clara Stack) and her friends are still reeling from recent tragedies, while the adults are unraveling their own mysteries.

Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) begins to suspect that the military isn’t just hunting a threat — they might be studying something supernatural. And Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), inexplicably tied into this mess, uses his “shine” in ways that feel completely out of sync with King’s established rules.

The result is an episode that talks a lot about fear but never actually delivers it.


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🧠 Character Rundown

Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) – Once again, Hallorann’s powers are misused. Instead of empathy and telepathic sensitivity, the “shine” is now a convenient mind-reading plot device. It breaks The Shining lore entirely.

Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) – The show’s moral compass. His slow awakening to the supernatural threat is intriguing, even if it’s buried under exposition.

Lily Bainbridge (Clara Stack) – Still the emotional anchor, though this episode gives her very little to do.

Marge Truman (Matilda Lawler) – The eye-horror scene is disturbing, but it feels like shock value rather than meaningful storytelling.



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⏳ Pacing / Episode Flow

For a show about fear, this one sure moves sluggishly. The pacing drags as the episode juggles military conspiracies, kids’ horror, and mythological flashbacks. The tone jumps between grounded drama and outlandish digital horror, and the result is confusion, not tension.


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👍 Pros

A few moody visuals and strong performances (especially Adepo’s).

The Native American myth could’ve been fascinating if handled with restraint.



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👎 Cons

CGI overload. That forest flashback — where an old man morphs into a distorted creature — looks like a PlayStation 3 demo. It kills the tension.

Lore-breaking nonsense. Hallorann invading minds? That’s not how the “shine” works.

Empty scares. Every “boo!” moment feels calculated and weightless.

Halfway burnout. The story’s setup keeps expanding, but the dread keeps shrinking.



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💬 Final Thoughts

By Episode 4, Welcome to Derry has lost sight of what made Pennywise terrifying. The series feels more like a paranormal government drama than a horror story. Every scare is telegraphed, every reveal is over-explained, and the CGI does all the heavy lifting — badly.

Stephen King’s blessing can’t save this show. The heart of It was never the creature — it was the people and the trauma it fed on. This prequel seems to have forgotten that.


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⭐ Rating: 5 / 10

Beautifully shot but emotionally hollow. Halfway through, the scariest thing about Welcome to Derry is how far it’s drifted from what made It work in the first place.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Alright, let’s peel back the latex off this CGI monster…


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💀 Spoilers

The episode opens with a lengthy flashback: a Native tribe hunts an old hermit through the woods. When cornered, the man begins to distort — limbs stretching, jaw splitting, face melting — until he transforms into a grotesque, digital creature. It’s supposed to reveal the “Galloo,” an ancient evil that crashed to Earth, but the scene looks so cartoonish it undercuts the entire idea.

Meanwhile, in the present, Marge gouges out her own eye in a panic-inducing moment of body horror. Lily tries to help her, only for the others to think she caused it. Dick Hallorann uses his “shine” to pry into a Native boy’s mind, violating canon and logic alike, to see visions of the Galloo’s fall.

Major Hanlon’s storyline escalates when he takes his son fishing, only to see a burned version of himself rise from the water and a red balloon float overhead. Shaken, he confronts his commander, who offers only cryptic warnings.

Halfway through, Welcome to Derry feels less like a horror story and more like a cautionary tale about the dangers of too much CGI and too little soul.

The episode ends with Hallorann being pointed to where the shards are hidden and inside the mind of that native guy, he points to the Nebolt street house, ohhhhhhh.

Since wers officially halfway through this series, here’s the mid season trailer.