(If the embed above stops working, the promo is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gWe_l1iZBs.)
When we covered HBO Max’s surprise Halloween drop of A Story of Derry yesterday, nobody outside the building had actually watched it. Now people have, and the headline is not the clown. Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise doesn’t appear at all. The breakout star of this half-hour IT: Welcome to Derry special is a turtle: Maturin, Stephen King’s cosmic reptile, making his first proper on-screen appearance some forty years after the novel came out.
For anyone whose copy of IT lost its back half to the dog, Maturin is the ancient, benevolent opposite of It. He is a creature so old that he cheerfully owns up to having made the universe during a bout of indigestion. He turns up again in The Dark Tower as one of the Guardians of the Beam, which makes him the nearest thing King’s multiverse has to a senior civil servant. The 1990 miniseries left him out. Andy Muschietti’s two films kept him as an in-joke for the faithful. Welcome to Derry spent its first season scattering turtles about like breadcrumbs, from Lilly’s lucky charm to the school’s Bert the Turtle safety signage, and only got round to saying his name in the finale. Bert, for those who remember 1950s civil defence films, was the cartoon turtle who taught American schoolchildren to duck and cover. For a god whose main tactic is retreating into his shell, he’s a fitting mascot.
The special, directed by Tazbah Chavez from a script by Cherie DiMaline and Jasmyne Flournoy, goes back centuries before the 1962 setting of the main series. A young woman, Necani, remembers a stranger’s tale and reaches out to Maturin in a vision brought on by smoking powdered Maturin root, a sacrament with fewer hymns than most. The turtle answers. We also get the origin of the dagger made from the glassy meteor-rock that It fears, and the binding itself: fragments sealed inside turtle shells and buried at key points across the forest, forming the barrier that keeps the creature penned inside what will become Derry. So the show has finally explained how the clown got trapped, and the answer is a deity, a dagger and some spectacularly committed gardening.
Whether Maturin returns for season two, which heads to 1935 and the Bradley Gang, is anyone’s guess, and HBO isn’t saying. But half the fun of any King adaptation is watching film-makers wrestle with the parts of the books that are frankly bonkers, and here at SFcrowsnest magazine we’re pleased to see one of the strangest finally played with a straight face rather than as a background prop. It took forty years, but the slowest character in horror has finally arrived.
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