It’s 1962 in Derry, Maine and Matty Clements is making a run for it. He won’t make it. The consequences of his death will echo down the town for generations.

The prequel series to the often interesting but wildly uneven two part movie version of IT gets off to an often interesting, wildly uneven start. The uneven first, and it’s a surprise weakness I never expected the show to have: the horror. The episode is bookended by moments of startling gore, including a demonic pregnancy that starts unsettling, gets hard to watch and finishes in a manner that feels entirely different to the rest of the show. The gore is punctuation, beginning, a little in the middle and the end and it doesn’t feel like it’s moving at the same speed as the rest of the show. There’s a shrillness to it, a sense of a show (or being kind, perhaps Pennywise) working too hard and it means the shock is all there is, with very little actual menace or horror under it. It’s a surprise and a massive shame, bluntly, given the show’s pedigree. One hopefully later episodes will correct.

What makes it all the weirder is how great the rest of the show is. The new, or perhaps first, Losers’ Club are all engaging fun characters. Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim Fidler) is a gentle, softly spoken kid still haunted by the loss of his friend while Phil Malkin (Jack Molloy Legault) is his fast talking conspiracy theorist friend who needs him to move on. Lily Bainbridge (Clara Stack) is a girl haunted by her last meeting with Matty while Ronnie Grogan (Amanda Christine) is the daughter of the local town cinema projectionist who may have been the last one to see him alive. Susie Malkin, Phil’s little sister, might be the most sensible member of the group but is definitely the youngest. All four of the young actors are great and apparently more are on the way as the series progresses. Miles Ekhardt too impresses as the doomed Matty and if the show does anything, it looks set to establish a major new talent pool of teen actors. One note that does have to be made though: as yet none of this iteration of Derry’s youth are fat. Ben Hanscom was a major part of the book and every adaptation to date and it’d sure be nice to see a fat kid get to save this era too.

But weirdly where the show gets most interesting is where it strays furthest from the source. Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) and Captain Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso) are USAF officers flown into the Strategic Air Command wing at Derry Air Base to test fly the new B-52 bomber. The Cuban Missile Crisis is likely to take place during the show’s run. ‘Duck and cover’ is a major part of the kids’ education and introducing the spectre of nuclear war on the outskirts of town is a really interesting choice. Especially when you consider that Hanlon is a black officer during a period of extreme racism, the mysterious fenced off and guarded ‘Special Projects’ hangar on base and the episode’s title. Not ‘pilot’, but ‘The Pilot’. Hanlon looks to be vital for what comes next, but I have no idea how. Honestly that intrigues me more than anything else we see here.

Verdict: ‘The Pilot’ feels like two episodes thrown together. One is a gorefest of operatic exuberance and the other is a creeping supernatural menace viewed through the exhausted lens of adolescence and the horrors of Mutually Assured Destruction. One is definitely worth your time, the other not. Here’s hoping they find a way to work together. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart