In The Name Of The Father

Hanlon finds a drunken Dick on the floor in his room; Hallorann immediately sees the ghost of a soldier behind Leroy, with a big old chunk missing from his head. When the major asks what happened to Dick underground, we hear a description of the shining as we first got to know it all those years ago with Hallorann and Danny Torrance: the ability to see ghosts, and the difficulty of switching it off. Dick says at age nine his grandmother taught him to “think of a great big old box, and imagine putting all the things you don’t wanna see no more inside the box, closing it up.” The ghouls stayed locked away until, as we assumed last week, It “ripped that lid off and laughed as it all came spilling out.” Leroy’s first question is one of validation: “Are they here now?” Indeed, they are. Dick says they don’t speak to him if he doesn’t acknowledge them. “But man, if I open my mouth, the voices, they don’t ever stop.” Leroy gets pushy about Dick completing the mission for General Shaw, and is shocked to be called a bootlicker.

The day gets worse for Leroy, who finds Charlotte packing up to leave. She says Will’s out with his friends, “about the only people he can trust right now.” Leroy tells her he wasn’t himself when he hit their son, that the sewer debacle fucked him up badly. Charlotte shows him tenderness, then pulls away when he murmurs he’s “just trying to protect this goddamn country.” She reams him out for putting them all “in a cage with a goddamn monster,” then reveals she’s helping Hank Grogan. She gives us the first name-drop of the soon-to-be juke joint, the Black Spot, and says she’s helping Hank get out of town in the morning before “Will and I are heading back to Shreveport, with or without you.” And after all this, the major’s still talking about the mission.

Will, Rich, and Margie bike out to the Black Spot, refusing to give up on Ronnie rejoining them in the fight against It. Way too many people know about this place, and the fact that Hank is there—which isn’t incidental. Inside, the environment is that of a jazz club, one where the presence of several small children is somehow unremarked-upon.

Haunted by her encounter with Pennywise, Lilly opens her desk at school to be met again by Pickle Dad, who gurgles out one of the clown’s catchphrases, not yet heard on IT: Welcome to Derry: “You’ll die if you try.” She leaves school and bikes straight to the home of Mrs. Ingrid Kersh, strolling in when no one answers the door. She follows some music upstairs, straight to the big reveal/confirmation: Ingrid’s father was Bob Gray, the carnie who seemingly inspired It’s favorite guise. 

“Have you seen him? You saw him! Oh my word, you did it. You brought him back!” says an increasingly joyous Ingrid. (Stellar work by Madeleine Stowe, in her first role since 2019.) As Lilly spots Mrs. Kersh’s “old costume,” she learns it was Ingrid following them in the cemetery in full clown regalia, and peeping up into Will’s window. (To the tune of Agatha Harkness’ theme: It was In-grid allll alonnnggg.) “I was worried I might miss him if he showed himself to you.” 

Ingrid tells Lilly her father “was a carnival performer,” throwing it back to IT: Chapter Two (and the novel) by pronouncing it fadder. “He called himself Pennywise the Dancing Clown. I adored him. And he was taken from me. The carnival moved on, but I stayed in Derry. I suppose you could say I felt drawn.” (So, yes, she was the little clown girl watching Frank in 1908.)

We return to the black-and-white Juniper Hill, understanding the staffer is a 27-years-younger Ingrid, who overhears Mabel telling a doctor about Pennywise—he’s in the pipes and “wants to show me his carnival.” Once the clown makes his entrance—his orange eyes join the red balloon as the only pops of color in the monochromatic sequence—Ingrid is spellbound, murmuring, “Papa?” The glee on Pennywise’s face as he comprehends this fortuitous circumstance is bone-chilling, segueing into one of the better, dancier renditions of his shaky-run. Mabel gets caught while Ingrid finds safety behind a door, and the meaty child-chomping commences. 

And then, peeking through a window, is It in the shape of Bob Gray—plain old Bill Skarsgård, who we fittingly last saw in Mrs. Kersh’s house in the second film. 

“Papa” says he’s missed his little pumpkin and will explain everything if she lets him in, which she does with a smile. In the present, she tells Lilly she willingly turned Juniper Hill into a feeding ground after this:

“It was him. Different, perhaps changed by whatever he’d been through, or wherever he’d been—oh, but it was him all the same. A daughter knows. And suddenly I felt whole again, for the first time since that awful day. But every time that he would return, this shadow would steal my father away. I had to find a way to free him. So I did what I had to, to see him again. If he could just see me once more as his Periwinkle, remind him of the love that we shared, I know that he’ll be able to break free.”

Ingrid promises a terrified Lilly that she’ll never let harm come to her, but “you above all people should understand” that the rest of the kids are necessary sacrifices—likely on this very night. “If you could see your father again, hold him, be his little girl, wouldn’t you do everything you could to make that happen?” When Lilly helpfully points out her dad’s dead, we get the very line Mrs. Kersh delivered in the film: “Oh, you know what they say about Derry, dear: no one who dies here ever really dies.” Lilly slashes Ingrid’s hand with the dagger and escapes.

GIF: 42:35-42:39: shoe in blood > Bill’s face w/ optional caption “Let me in.”

At the Black Spot, the kids still can’t convince Ronnie to take another run at the sewers. Will follows her into the room where Hank’s hiding. Grogan won’t let his daughter go, but steers the conversation toward Will being her “new gentleman friend” and asks for his favorite movie. (The War of the Worlds.) “If anything were to happen to me, it’s good to know someone of your character is looking out for my baby girl,” Hank says.  

On the other side of the door, the music and dancing picks up. A singer channels Ella Fitzgerald doing “It’s All Right with Me,” with the lyrics echoing Ingrid seeing Pennywise imitate her long-lost fadder: “Though your smile is lovely, it’s the wrong smile/It’s not his smile, but such a lovely smile/That it’s all right with me.” Mere days after the kids got super duper high popping mommy’s little helper on their dungeon crawl, they’re getting drunk on “Air Force Cokes.” (The man could’ve given them regular soda! Kinda sketchy!) These kids freely hanging out in the Black Spot is crazier than trying to win the Cold War using Pennywise, and it only gets wilder as Rich is asked to sit in for the band’s passed-out drummer. Was Rich previously established as a little drummer boy?? Yes or no, he kills it with brushes and sticks alike, and actor Arian S. Cartaya sells it. Some much-needed merriment is being made.

GIF: 53:01 – 53:06: Rich drumming w/ cut to kids

Clint Bowers, now ex-sheriff after getting shitcanned, heads to the Falcon Tavern as the posse tries to figure out where they can capture (or, more likely, kill) Hank. Bowers says a “lady called in a tip” anonymously, pointing them to the Black Spot. Could that lady be the one putting on her Periwinkle costume just before the mob pulls up to the Black Spot, toting not pitchforks but rifles and shotguns, more than a few of them in clown masks? We’ll see next week, in the penultimate episode of season one. 

QUESTION CORNER

• Where the heck are Taniel, Rose, and the Sqoteawapskot Tribe this week? It doesn’t feel great that we spent two weeks getting into their role in all of this, only to completely leave them out of “In the Name of the Father.” We don’t even know what happened to Taniel in the sewers!
• Is the theme song getting subtly creepier each week, as this viral tweet suggests?

• Andy Muschietti confirmed it is. Speaking to Get Rec’d host Juju Green, the director said the first run-through of Patience & Prudence’s “A Smile and a Ribbon” over the opening credits is unaltered, “clean all the way.” But with each subsequent episode, “every time we go into worse and worse situations, there’s a little bit of a score that creates a little dissonance with the song.” Clever stuff.
• What happened to Bob Gray on “that awful day” Ingrid references? Will we have to wait for season two, which is supposed to zoom back to 1935 for its primary story?
• Will the big black bird make an appearance next week? We’ll circle back.

STEPHEN KING TRIVIA CORNER

• The angry white mob gathers at the Falcon Tavern, our second visit this season. (Good god, that man reaching elbow-deep into a jar of floating boiled eggs was as scary as anything we’ve seen.) In the novel, it wasn’t built till 1973, after which it struggled to make ends meet till 1977, when it got adopted by the gay community. 

• Will thinks It has gotten into his father’s head. We’ve seen this happen with cruel, creepy adults like Bev’s dad Al Marsh and the pharmacist Norbert Keene, but have we ever seen it happen to one of the good guys? This is likely just more terror filtering Will’s experience, but it’s interesting to consider.
• On HBO’s official podcast last week, Jovan Adepo spoke about his second go-round with a King project, saying he got to dig deeper this time. “I played another character in a Stephen King series called The Stand, I played Larry Underwood in the limited series. So the Stephen King world is one that I am at least somewhat familiar with,” he told co-host Marc Bernardin. “So getting a chance to come back in a different character and really get to explore a world much more intimately was an exciting prospect that I was honored to have.”

Zach Dionne is a Mainer writing in Tennessee; he makes Stephen King things on Patreon.