It: Welcome To Derry's Season 1 Finale Undercut The Show's Most Unforgettable Episode

"It: Welcome to Derry" season 1, episode 7, "The Black Spot," is by far the show's best installment to date. Not only did it beat the "It" movies with a major character death, it also successfully adapted what is easily one of the most disturbing moments from Stephen King's "It" novel with the Black Spot fire. This horrifying event sees the very real threat of racial violence playing out in one of the most striking and upsetting developments in the whole series — and that's saying a lot for a show as gruesome as this. Unfortunately, the season 1 finale veered into full-on fantasy/horror territory, abandoning the extremely effective tone of the episode before it with a bunch of nonsense about magical trees.

The "It" prequels series delivered an absolute gut punch with the burning down of the Black Spot bar — a speakeasy for Derry's Black military members — at the hands of the Maine Legion of White Decency (a group of Derry's white supremacists). What makes the torching of the venue more awful is that the racist group traps the bar patrons inside the building before starting the fire and then shoots any poor souls who do manage to escape.

This upsetting set piece actually originates in King's "It" book, when Mike Hanlon's father, Will Hanlon, recalls the event in a flashback interlude. The original telling of the tragedy was fairly sparse, which gave "Welcome to Derry" creators Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs a lot of creative freedom to expand upon the Black Spot fire and ultimately produce a more immersive, gripping version of the event — one that's made all the more upsetting for its depiction of real-world horrors. Why, then, did all of that go out the window in the episode that followed?

"It: Welcome to Derry" changed Stephen King's version of the Black Spot fire significantly. For one thing, the way Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) picks off victims amid the blaze is completely different to the "It" novel, and Dick Hallorann, who was the cook at the Black Spot in King's book, is actually a member of the military in the show. There's also the fact that the series has the Maine Legion of White Decency come to the Black Spot to find Stephen Rider's Hank Grogan, who's wanted for the murder of three children that takes place in the shocking twist ending of the "Welcome to Derry" pilot. Then, there was that unforgettable death that made a high-level crew member sob.

Beyond that, the Black Spot fire is just a horrifying sequence that is arguably the scariest moment in the entire series. "Welcome to Derry" flirted with real-life horrors from the very beginning, specifically with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Indeed, that demonic baby that decimated those poor kids in the pilot episode was borne out of Miles Eckhardt's Matty Clements hearing a radio announcer discuss the effects of nuclear radiation on infants. But the mass murder of dozens of Derry's Black residents has to be one of the most downright upsetting depictions of a very real aspect of history — especially since the racists wait around to gun down those who do make it out of the blaze. This is the most raw and intense "Welcome to Derry" got throughout its first season, so it's a shame that the following episode, the season finale, felt like such an abrupt about turn.

The "Welcome to Derry" season 1 finale arguably outdid 2019's "It Chapter Two" with its final Pennywise fight. It also set up future seasons in a compelling way and, in one of the most exciting revelations in the whole series, even confirmed that It is traveling back through time to prevent its own destruction.

But the episode was also kind of silly. It saw every remaining hero in Derry attempt to stop Pennywise from reaching a specific tree on the bank of a river. See, once he reaches the tree, nobody will be able to contain him within Derry any more. Why? Because the ancient pillars that the area's Indigenous people used to pen the entity within the bounds of modern-day Derry will no longer work beyond that point. Why? Just because.

The finale also ends with a sun-drenched scene in which Chris Chalk's Dick Hallorann and Jovan Adepo's Leroy Hanlon are all smiles as the former announces his departure and the latter decides to stay in Derry despite the absolute horror he and his family have faced. So, not only does the show just go full fantasy in this episode, but nobody is grieving the Black Spot victims and reckoning with the utter depravity of the racist attack, let alone the other traumas endured throughout the series. Sure, this is a TV show at the end of the day, but if you're going to tackle a topic as serious as racial violence, you should probably stay serious about it throughout. For a moment, with episode 7, the show did get serious and was all the better (and more terrifying) for it.

"It: Welcome to Derry" season 1 is streaming on HBO Max.