Warning! This review contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry episode 5.

It: Welcome to Derry floats into the back end of its first season with a game-changing twist, a bunch of compelling character moments, and the long-awaited appearance of a certain dancing clown. Right off the bat, Matty’s return is a great midseason twist. Miles Ekhardt does an incredible job of showing the impact of the trauma of being trapped in the sewer with Pennywise. He’s pale as a ghost, visibly shaken, and seems to have aged years since we last saw him a few weeks ago.

The kids in Welcome to Derry’s new Losers’ Club are all wonderfully endearing, but the deliberation over whether or not to go to the police takes up a lot of airtime. The movies did a better job of establishing that the grownups are useless and sending the kids off on their own to slay the monster themselves. But the TV show feels the need to come up with a new excuse not to tell the cops at every single turn. This time, Matty refuses to go to the police, because they’ll make him go back to his dad.

Although this overexplaining is starting to feel a bit repetitive, Welcome to Derry is doing something fresh with the adults’ relationship to Pennywise. In the movies, it’s pretty much understood that the adults in Derry turn a blind eye to Pennywise’s reign of terror. But in Welcome to Derry, we see characters like Leroy Hanlon and Dick Hallorann learn about the threat posed by It and react to it a lot more rationally than the other adults around them (especially their fellow military personnel, who want to weaponize this supernatural entity).

Welcome To Derry’s Ghost Story Poignantly Reflects The Contemporary Climate

Only The People Who Are Personally Affected By The Horror Understand The Seriousness Of It

I’m loving the relationship between James Remar’s General Shaw and Kimberly Norris Guerrero’s Rose. Before Rose was introduced, Shaw was just another run-of-the-mill military bureaucrat — the same one-note archetype we’ve seen in countless movies and TV shows — but his history with Rose is rounding him out into a more unique and sympathetic character. Remar and Norris share spectacular chemistry, and it’s fascinating to see how their childhood scrapes with Pennywise have shaped them in very different ways.

The fact that the characters of color — Rose, Hallorann, the Hanlons, etc. — are the only adults who seem to be taking the threat seriously speaks volumes about Welcome to Derry’s poignant social message. It ties into the show’s racial commentary, contrasting its ghost story with the then-ongoing civil rights movement. It reflects the 20th-century fight against inequality by showing that only the people who are personally affected by the horror understand the seriousness of it.

Welcome To Derry Is A Bleak, Deromanticized Stranger Things

It Accurately Reflects The Harshness Of Its Historical Setting Without A Hint Of Nostalgia

As the plucky kids’ investigation collides with the shady government conspiracy on the outskirts of town and the monsters start to emerge, it’s hard not to see parallels with Stranger Things. But what sets it apart from Stranger Things is the same thing that set the movies apart. Stranger Things has a very romantic, nostalgic view of the past, but both the It movies and Welcome to Derry have done a great job of deromanticizing their historical settings. Welcome to Derry shows the early ‘60s for how bleak it really was: the rampant prejudice, the patriarchal society, the cavalier approach to mental health.

Thanks to its lame-duck CGI, It: Welcome to Derry still isn’t very scary — seriously, would it have been so hard to create a zombie Uncle Sam with practical effects? — but, while it doesn’t really work as a horror show, it does work as a straightforward drama. From Lilly and Marge’s heartwarming reunion to Hallorann’s harrowing flashback to his abusive dad, there’s a lot of great character work in this episode. I’d rather watch a horror show with compelling characters and very few genuine scares than a horror show with plenty of scares but painfully one-dimensional characters.