The Thing In The Dark

Welcome back to a particularly gory 1962. Before jumping into the plot, let’s use some of the breathing room not afforded to us during the packed premiere to note this series has the participation of It duology helmer Andy Muschietti (he directed six episodes, including the first four) and his producer sister Barbara Muschietti, as well as the films’ composer Benjamin Wallfisch. Actor/writer Jason Fuchs, who co-produced It: Chapter Two, developed the show with the Muschiettis and wrote the pilot. Episode 2 of IT: Welcome To Derry, “The Thing in the Dark,” has a script by Austin Guzman (The Sandman).

Alright. Let’s break this down by characters and families.

THE GROGANS

The Derry Police are determined to arrest Hank the projectionist for the massacre at the theater, despite questioning and releasing him. “What do you think he did to ’em? Lot of blood, no bodies?” a cop asks his partner, parked outside the Grogan home. Hank’s mother is livid at their suspicion, while his daughter, our new friend Ronnie, is in despair.

Ronnie’s one of this week’s stars of a truly disturbing visit from It, marking our second birthing-based terror in as many weeks. Her bed morphs into a giant red womb at night, threatening to drown her. She claws her way out and is met by the face of her dead mother. “You came out of me and ripped me right open. Why’d you do it?” she cries, switching to a dreadful monotone as she also blames Ronnie for the deaths of her peers. She says Hank “will fry” because of Ronnie, decays into a skeleton, screeches, and orders the girl to “come to mama.”

It’s familiar many-rowed teeth chomp away as Ronnie is pulled into its maw via umbilical cord. Just as we think we’re about to glimpse It’s mysterious deadlights, Pennywise’s unmistakable eyes appear in the dark—a badass scare. Teddy’s skin-lamp last week was one level of bedtime horror; this is an absolute monstrosity of an experience for Ronnie. She escapes by chomping through the cord, and the figure of her ghoul-mom does that classic Pennywise shaky-run before her dad opens the door and the monster’s gone.

The cops do find a way to pin the deaths of Teddy, Phil, and Suzie on Hank—more on that in Lilly’s section below. Hank’s mother lashes out at the neighbors watching him get hauled away, saying they’re “feeding on other people’s pain,” which is the monster’s whole deal. (Fear, to be specific; The Outsider’s shapeshifting villain specifically feeds off the pain it sows.)

DICK HALLORANN (!)

Last week we glimpsed The Shining‘s very own Dick (Chris Chalk) driving Colonel Fuller on the Air Force base; this week, we learn his role. First, he’s having some drinks at the Falcon Tavern with a couple fellow Black airmen who’ve been questioned about the beating of Leroy Hanlon. Hallorann’s got special privileges that let him avoid suspicion, joking—maybe—that he’s part of a “super secret spy mission.”

Across the bar is police chief Clint Bowers, likely the grandfather to It bully Henry Bowers, whose dad was also a cop. He’s being strong-armed to arrest Hank Grogan by a councilman and another local. Hallorann & Co. have nothing to do with the crime, but they’re still not wanted in the Falcon. All it takes is a whisper from Bowers and a glare from the bartender (little fucker’s the spitting image of Mario, sans super mushroom) for the airmen to clear out. “Where are we supposed to go to relax around here?” one of the trio, Reggie, asks his friends. It’s an issue we’ll return to.

Hungover the next day and watching over a large-scale dig, Hallorann is berated by Colonel Fuller, who says this is the fourth such operation in as many months. “I’m getting tired of dragging my ass out into the middle of the woods for scraps,” Fuller says, speculating that Dick “might be fooling people with those so-called special gifts of yours,” but not him.

Dick promises they’re close to what the Air Force wants; his shine is guiding him. (Though to be clear, neither shine nor shining has been uttered yet.) And while I think there’s way too much graphic puking onscreen these days, this cut is hilarious:

THE HANLONS

Taylour Paige is here, as Leroy’s wife Charlotte, and that’s always good—even if the Hanlon family’s acting out a classic horror beat by moving into a big home in a town where things aren’t quite as they seem. After meeting the apparently friendly butcher Stan Kersh on her first trip downtown, Charlotte learns a key tenet of Derry: Adults Don’t Help, If They Even See at All. “Boys will be boys, what are you gonna do?” Kersh muses as three bullies kick the shit out of a boy on the street corner. Charlotte intervenes, and somehow her empathy is what scandalizes the townsfolk, not the violence. 

“Dogs. That’s what they looked like, a bunch of starving dogs getting ready to tear at a fresh piece of meat,” Charlotte recalls at dinner. Leroy asks her to “leave it alone,” hinting at her commitment to justice causing issues for them back in Louisiana. Their son Will—destined to father OG Loser Mike Hanlon—asks them not to fight, and we get this cute triple-jinx moment:

When he’s late to his first class at Derry High, Will deals with a petty teacher and gets his chair pulled, his peers’ glares turning to laughs. He befriends a fellow lonely kid named Rich, then slams straight into the same teacher as he runs from a stinkbomb. It’s detention for Will, where he meets Ronnie. It’s impossible not to love this little science genius as he explains how the chemicals that made up the stinkbomb are also found in the clouds around Jupiter and Venus. “So yeah, maybe I smell bad. Or maybe I’m just covered in stardust,” he says with the sweetest smile ever.

Back on base, Leroy heads to the stockade to confront Masters, the racist dick who confessed to being part of the gas mask gang that beat up the major. Hanlon uses some clever pistol detectivery to prove Masters was never in his room. General Shaw admits to Leroy that the ambush was a setup to prove his suspicion: Leroy is “a man without fear,” the type he’s been seeking “for a long, long time.” Shaw enlightens Hanlon about the secretive Operation Precept and its “single purpose: to win the Cold War before the first missile is ever fired.” They’re hunting a long-buried weapon that “generates debilitating fear in anyone who comes near it,” speculating it could “scare a man badly enough to kill him where he stands.” And at the moment they find it, they need Hanlon “to help us secure it.” Dick Hallorann’s still honing in on where to dig, and the men haul an old-timey car out of the earth, full of bullet holes and machine gun-toting skeletons.

Operation Precept is a wild development. The idea of this many adults knowing this much about It, and wanting to turn the entity into a Russian nuclear deterrent, is certainly a bold invention by the show. Will it turn people off? Is bold the right word?

LILLY

Our time with Lilly and Margie reminds us this is our first case of high school kids banding together against It, rather than preteens/middle-schoolers. The mean girls, with tentative inductee Margie, do their little pattycake game at lunch, the latest instance of rhythmic background sounds/chants ratcheting up the tension. Margie, Pattycake cadet or not, is also the apple of Rich’s eye, giving us one of the great shots of the season so far:

Lilly tells Ronnie she can’t come clean to the police about the monster at the theater, even if it endangers Hank—her fear of being recommitted to the asylum is too strong. At the police station, we see a litany of posters for missing kids, confirming to us that It has been very active. Chief Bowers summons Lilly to threaten her with a return to Juniper Hill unless she gives them a loophole to arrest Hank: “Can you be absolutely, positively certain that he wasn’t there?” With tears streaming down her face, we already know she’ll tell Bowers what he wants to hear. Tough beat for Lilly, and a soul-crushing beat for the Grogans. After Hank’s arrest, Ronnie instantly knows what Lilly did, and runs to the Bainbridge house to give her hell.

Alone on a grocery run, Lilly is hounded by guilting voices and creeped on by a man we’re not sure if she even sees. The whole store seems to be pushing her mind toward the edge, ultimately bringing her to a display of Pennywise’s Corn Flakes, featuring cover models Matty, Suzie, Phil, and a decomposing Teds. Suddenly Lilly’s completely boxed in by shelves of pickles. With the squeakiest squelch (the SFX are extremely on point on this show), her dead father’s jarred head twists itself into view. Then she’s smashing the jar, and all the others are flying off the shelves at her. Even before this gets supernaturally worse, just a mess of pickles and glass covering the floor is actively disgusting. But it’s when the body parts start showing up in jars that the real revulsion begins. Her dad’s sliced-up head reassembles itself and his appendages clump together to create a bodypart-octopus that lurches toward Lilly, gurgling for “just one kiss for papa.” When the monster and the whole pickle situation abruptly vanishes, we see Lilly’s in the middle of a mess that’ll get her shipped off to Juniper Hill again.

QUESTION CORNER

• The monster is obsessed with tormenting these children with stuff about birth and parents. Even with the demonic bat-baby, a second baby head was gestating on its shoulder. What’s going on here?
• Who among these adults and elders have faced/been haunted by It before?
• This is our fifth of six Stephen King projects this year. Is it shaping up to be a decent little diversion (The Monkey, The Institute) or a forever-rewatchable, like The Life of Chuck and The Long Walk? (We’ll have a read on The Running Man once it’s out next week.)

STEPHEN KING TRIVIA

• The Shop is King’s shadowy, legendarily inept government entity responsible for things like causing The Mist and forcing Firestarter‘s Charlie McGee to play lab rat until she torched their whole shit. General Shaw’s experiment in the woods must be destined to fail, but are we seeing the makings of the Shop?
• Last week I opted to let a few more turtle appearances accumulate before giving the obligatory infodump on the cosmic turtle Maturin, he of “enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth,” with regards to It and The Dark Tower. Here’s something better: The Kingcast‘s Eric Vespe pointed out on his and Anthony Breznican’s Watching It: Welcome to Derry podcast,  “[Matty] gives [Lilly] his turtle and the turtle stays on her charm bracelet. … The turtle could have been part of his protection against the evil of Pennywise, and he gave it away to this girl who’s going through incredible trauma. … I do like that [it’s] at least represented there, and especially the way that it’s shown, the turtle charm being passed on from one kid who isn’t making it out of this episode [to] another kid who is—could be very symbolic of the power of that being.”
• Our opening credits, set to the delightfully creepy “A Smile and a Ribbon” by Patience and Prudence, stylishly animate some of what we’ll see if Welcome to Derry gets to execute its full three-season plan, moving to 1935 in season 2 and 1908 in season 3. These vistas include the Neibolt House, the Bradley Gang shootout, and the Easter explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks. Aside from those glimpses, the credits generally illustrate the creepiness of Derry—and It’s omnipresence—in sickly-sweet postcard fashion.

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