Never underestimate the element of surprise, even in pop culture. TV shows and movies are usually advertised years in advance, but occasionally, no heads-up is the best marketing imaginable. You’d never know it from how much it’s being talked about, but Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary You Can See Everything was announced just 40 days before it hit theaters.
The TV equivalent is the secret episode, one dropped with absolutely no fanfare as a delightful surprise for fans. It: Welcome to Derry is the latest show to pull this trick, dropping a surprise episode on Halloween that’s set centuries in the past.
“A Story of Derry” is set hundreds of years before the rest of the franchise.
While It: Welcome to Derry Season 1 was set in the 1960s, it jumped back as far as 1908, particularly when focusing on the local Indigenous population, which used special stones to keep It boxed in. “A Story of Derry” goes back even further, following three Indigenous teens as they explore the Western Wood and discover a terrifying supernatural being called “Kollu,” which will of course come to be known as Pennywise the Clown.
But why make a single, standalone episode set so far back in the past? Well, it’s a great marketing tactic, for a start, but with Season 2 of Welcome to Derry moving back to 1935, it makes some sense to keep the hopping around to a minimum. It’s one thing to have a coherent flashback set a few decades ago, but a few centuries is pushing it.
Surprise episodes have been having a bit of a moment recently; Yellowjackets fans have obsessively theorized about the contents and potential release date of an unreleased episode known to star Jason Ritter, while some Stranger Things fans were so let down by the series finale that they convinced themselves another, better finale was coming. But it turns out that the most effective use of a surprise episode is to just, well, surprise people with one.
It: Welcome to Derry’s “A Story of Derry” is now streaming on HBO Max.
