That was hands down the worst episode of the season. From a writing/directing standpoint it was atrocious. There were a number of scenes that were utterly superfluous:

-The drive to the chicken shack w/ the stop on the road
-The chicken shack scene
-The wife in the driveway (which was so clumsily staged/filmed)
-The left-behind wives
-The endless scenes of those little motherfuckers and their dad lost in the cave
-Holly teacher bf Mr. Sentient Dollop of Mayonnaise about the Spanish Civil War
-Anything with the brother being the absolute worst. Over and over again
-The weird cutaway to the brother loading the gun in the back seat while the lawyer yells at him to stop. Seriously, I thought 'Is he gonna shoot Marvin in the face?!'

So this has turned into "Not IT" but fails to do all of the things that IT does to set up the characters. They basically made a group of Losers out of secondary/tertiary characters and it has halted any momentum the series had. As a result, they're forced to use cheap tricks to try inject some sense of tension like the prolonged flashback, Mendelson's wife almost hitting a jogger.

It was, I believe, the shortest episode of the season but seemed to be the longest. Oh btw, if you use a significant chunk of your episode showing kids in peril only to reveal about midway through that it's a flashback you undercut any tension you've tried to establish. And it all feels like a giant waste of time.

Mendelson's character has been robbed of any agency and Holly is there just to explain away things about "Not Pennywise" that she can't possibly know even if she's Sistapedia. The asshole brother is has all the answers they need when he is not being an asshole or working out in his defunct yard gym.

Was this the penultimate episode of the show? I have no idea anymore because until the last few minutes/cliffhanger it felt like a midseason episode in terms of pacing, structure, and endless revelations of new information.

I'd honestly be happy if the show ended w/ the gunshots over a black screen. At least that'd be interesting.