Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched IT; Welcome to Derry’s latest episode on HBO or via HBO Max subscription.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to one of the most haunted fictional towns in American horror…wait, why would anyone think it’s safe to return to Derry? For TV audiences, it was all for the experience of watching IT: Welcome to Derry’s humdinger of a fourth episode, which boasts the wacky title “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function.”
Not quite as jam-packed with easter eggs as past episodes, which is normal once a series finds its own legs a few episodes in, this installment does dig into arguably the most important and most mysterious element of this interconnected narrative universe: the full story behind IT’s arrival on Earth and how its reign of death and evil began. (Granted, it’s all anecdotal, but I’d still like to believe it’s mostly aligned with reality.) So first duck, then cover, then join me in pointing out all the fun references and nods in Episode 4.
IT Compared To Dracula
Following the still magical title sequence, the kids are in the gym talking about their harrowing experience in the cemetery, with Clara Stack’s Lilly questioning how similiar IT is to Dracula, at least in the art of forming mirrored reflections.
In Stephen King’s novel, Bram Stoker’s seminal bloodsucker (by way of Bela Lugosi’s portrayal) is indeed one of the forms that the evil entity takes on as a way of scaring Derry’s youths. Way more fangs in IT’s mouth, though.
Hanlons As Historians
During the same scene, Will notes that the first thing he would do would be to look back and see if other incidents of a similar nature had previously taken place in Derry. Will already knows that history is bound to repeat itself if nothing is changed, but he doesn’t yet know just how impossible it will be to change anything about this cursed location. Importantly, though, nothing that happened to him in this context swayed his son from following in those same historian footsteps. Or else the Losers Club might never have been brought back together.
Charlotte’s Derry Herald Has A Standout Edition Number
Shining fans with keen eyesight (or pausing-and-zooming capabilities) may have noticed that the newspaper Charlotte reads through boasts