Change often disguises continuity, and that paradox lies at the heart of HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry. In just two episodes the series has begun to map Derry’s layered history—its violence, entrenched prejudice, and the uncanny forces that haunt it. Still, the most unnerving element is the ordinary malice displayed by the town’s residents.
That cruelty manifests not only in overt acts but in silence. In episode 2, Charlotte Hanlon (Taylour Paige) witnesses a group of children tormenting another kid at a busy intersection while everyone else looks away. Driven by her activist instincts—she and her family have only recently relocated to town—Charlotte steps in, hoping to stop the bullying, only to discover how quickly bystanders can turn on someone who breaks the social code.
After she helps the targeted boy flee, the young aggressors menace her and pursue him, and the crowd that once shrugged off the violence now directs its ire at Charlotte as if she were the provocateur.
Photo: Brooke Palmer/HBOPaige told Polygon the sequence felt both timeless and painfully contemporary: a moment that highlights how many bystanders now default to recording injustice rather than intervening. She argues the series deliberately broadens its terror beyond the famous clown, showing how collective indifference can be as corrosive as any supernatural threat.
For Paige, scenes like this expose something unnatural in Derry’s social fabric. The Hanlons, as newcomers, react with alarm to a tolerance for passivity that the town accepts as normal.
Photo: Brooke Palmer/HBO“There’s a shared sense that it shouldn’t be this way,” Paige says, reflecting on how communities can recognize harm yet fail to act. “When we’re divided and uncertain how to respond, that paralysis becomes its own kind of menace.”
Although Welcome to Derry is a prequel set decades before the original story, its anxieties echo the present. At a time when heavy-handed enforcement policies and public spectacle around immigration and other flashpoints have provoked controversy, the series’ depiction of passive prejudice and mob mentality feels uncomfortably timely: people who watch rather than intervene help sustain the harm.
Paige suggests that moral confusion and fragmentation amplify fear, and that social complacency—whether quiet or explosive—keeps old hatreds alive beneath a veneer of normalcy.
Just as the original It channeled the tensions of the 1980s, this incarnation underscores a persistent truth: progress does not eradicate the uglier impulses that linger in communities across generations.
Paige warns that such dynamics can spiral, producing a sort of societal hysteria when cruelty becomes routinized rather than opposed.
It: Welcome to Derry — episodes 1 and 2 are currently streaming on HBO Max. New installments arrive on Sundays.
Source: Polygon
