IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 4 Is Almost Here — Release Date, Global Streaming Times, and What to Expect
Halfway through Season 1, IT: Welcome to Derry tightens the noose—episode 4 looms, and Pennywise’s shadow stretches over the town, primed to turn simmering dread into full-blown terror.
Halfway there: IT: Welcome to Derry hits its midpoint this week, and the next hour looks like the show leaning hard into psychological dread, with a possible peek under Pennywise's hood. If you like your scares tense, talky, and a little mean, Episode 4 sounds like your jam.
Episode 4: When and where
Episode 4, titled 'The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet's Function,' streams Sunday, November 16, 2025 on HBO Max. HBO is rolling it out globally around the same moment, with regional drop times listed as Brazil 1:00 am (BRT), United Kingdom 4:00 am (BST), Central Europe 5:00 am (CEST), India 9:30 am (IST), Japan 1:00 pm (JST), Australia 3:00 pm (AET), and New Zealand 5:00 pm (NZDT). Weekly cadence stays the same: new episodes every Sunday.
Where Episode 3 left us
'Now You See It' pushed the search effort into the air, only for Leroy and Pauly to stumble on a letdown instead of a breakthrough. Rose, meanwhile, sat in on a tribal meeting about the military being deployed in Derry. The show is still mixing small-town politics with supernatural rot, and yes, Pennywise continues to toy with people from the shadows.
What the Episode 4 preview is teasing
There is a preview up on YouTube, and it is all nerves. Chris Chalk's Dick Hallorann sits in an interrogation room across from a local tribal man, and the conversation is not friendly. The clip drops one very clear warning:
'What they want me to do to you, it's not going to be pleasant.'
From there it spirals into pure head games and pain, cutting between the two men suffering through something we are not fully shown. Elsewhere, Matilda Lawler's Marge tells General Shaw (James Remar) that she was followed by the same person who killed Teddy, Phil, and Susie. Put it together and Episode 4 looks like a more psychologically twisted hour that might also brush up against the origin of Pennywise, or at least hint at it. If that sounds like the show widening its scope, it is.
Release schedule (Season 1)
- Episode One — 'The Pilot' — October 26
- Episode Two — 'The Thing in the Dark' — November 2
- Episode Three — 'Now You See It' — November 9
- Episode Four — 'The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet's Function' — November 16
- Episode Five — 'Nebloit Street' — November 23
- Episode Six — 'In the Name of the Father' — November 30
- Episode Seven — TBA — December 7
- Episode Eight — TBA — December 14
The vibe so far
Four episodes in, the series has built a fresh fanbase by stitching together nasty scares with a strain of nostalgia and melancholy backstory. If Episode 4 really does start threading in the clown's beginnings, we could be in for the show's most unsettling chapter yet.
IT: Welcome to Derry is currently available to stream on HBO Max.