Picture this: You’ve been waiting all year long for a famed restaurant chain to open a store close to your home.
Your taste buds are tingling, anticipating all the new flavors that’ll melt your brain. The opening is grand, and the ambience is just right for your Instagram reel.
But alas, when the entrée arrives, you realize it is as bland as a plain old shell from a Taco Bell. That’s exactly how stumped I felt after watching IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1 Episode 5.
While it is true that realism needs to take a backseat when exploring a fiction-based on cosmic horror, it does not have to throw it completely out the window.
Some of these habits have become so jarring to look at… My eyes do a literal 360 within my skull each time I see a horror project repeat them.
I really hoped the new IT series would step above them, considering the amazing brains that have worked hard behind its conception. But the show seems to be falling prey to the same 50-year-old tropes.
Same Old, Same Old, But Not Necessarily Gold
It: Welcome To Derry keeps repeating old horror tropes that viewers are tired of seeing.
They might’ve worked 50 years ago, but now the audience is more intelligent. The show needs to adapt and come up with something genuinely new.
Take Taniel’s loss of the meteorite shards. He had the only weapon capable of working against IT. Yet at the most crucial moment, he loses them.
Lily then conveniently trips and falls, separating from the group. She somehow ends up finding the artefact anyway, despite the location looking completely different from where Taniel dropped it.
This isn’t suspense. It’s lazy writing.
The trope of “separated from the group, finds crucial item” is Horror 101. We’ve seen it a thousand times. In Poltergeist, in The Ring, in countless slasher films.
Derry doesn’t reinvent the wheel here. It just spins the same old one around.
The show had a chance to make us believe Lily earned that artefact through wit or courage. Instead, she stumbled into luck. Literally.
The pacing issues make these moments feel even more forced.
Characters conveniently arrive or disappear when the plot demands it. Suspense gets sacrificed for narrative convenience. It’s the difference between great horror and forgettable television.
IT: Welcome To Derry Needs to Do a Better Job at Narrating
The logic gaps are staggering. IT escapes the moment the meteorite crashes open. Shards are literally lying around him.
Yet supposedly 13 remote shards hold him captive in Derry, despite miles of space between them. How does that make sense?
IT can literally fly over them. Does the Indigenous ritual create some invisible barrier? The show never explains this. We’re left guessing.
Then there’s Pauly’s death. It felt nonsensical and forced. He could’ve simply shouted to Leroy to snap him out of his trance.
He could’ve pointed the gun at a wall instead of at his own chest. The wall was at a larger angle than his position.
He had options. The narrative took those away to manufacture tragedy instead of earning it.
This is where Welcome to Derry stumbles hardest. Good horror respects its audience’s intelligence. It gives us rules and follows them.
Stephen King’s original novel did that beautifully. This show seems to think viewers won’t notice the logical inconsistencies.
They will.
Cosmic horror doesn’t require narrative shortcuts. It requires precision, internal logic, and payoff.
Derry has the atmosphere. It has the cast. It has the source material.
What it’s missing is the willingness to challenge itself beyond these tired tropes and plot conveniences.
What are your thoughts on It: Welcome To Derry so far?
Are you feeling the tropey nature of the show, or do you think it’s earning its scares? Sound off in the comments below — we want to hear if the series is hitting for you or falling flat.
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