Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 2 of IT: Welcome To Derry, “The Thing in the Dark” (written by Austin Guzman and directed by Andy Muschietti). Spoilers also include plot points from the films IT (2017) and IT: Chapter 2 (2019).
If the first episode of IT: Welcome to Derry got us loaded up in the car, ready to go on a new adventure with the lore and history of Derry, Pennywise, and the terror of this story, Episode 2 turned on the GPS and told us where we would be headed. With the direction of many of our main characters now laid out in front of us, there is a major fundamental question that remains.
Are you satisfied with where this show is going to take us? Because it’s a direction IT has never taken us before.
Let’s break down the two major plot lines from this episode.
Major Leroy Hanlon and Derry Air Force Base
Major Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) watches his family arrive on the front steps of their new home in suburban Derry. His wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige) and son Will (Blake Cameron James) pull into Derry with different expectations of what will happen in this new stage of their life, having spent the last several years living on a base in Louisiana.
Will can’t wait to see his new room, is excited about a new telescope, and generally has a sunny outlook on their new home and his new school. His teachers are absolutely horrific (makes me glad I didn’t go to school in the 1960s). They don’t reprimand kids when Will is bullied, and he is falsely accused of throwing a stink bomb in a hallway, earning detention on his first day.
Still, he uses these opportunities to befriend Rich (Arian S. Cartaya), a quirky band kid who seems to have a shared affinity for nice pencils, and Ronnie Grogan (Amanda Christine), who gets thrown into detention for cursing in the lunchroom. These seem to be the beginning stages of an alliance that will form throughout this season (more on that below), and Rich and Will seem to serve as the 12-year-old replacements for Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) and Phil (Jack Molloy Legault), who have been confirmed dead despite no bodies being found.
Charlotte, on the other hand, is nervous that things won’t change after what they experienced in Louisiana. Based on an incident where she tries to break up a group of boys bullying another kid, it appears Charlotte is not one to stand for any kind of injustice, and that attitude might have made their lives hell in deep south, racist, Louisiana.
The citizens of Derry seem to wonder why she would interfere with “boys being boys,” and it appears she has managed to stand out right in the middle of town on her first day there. Leroy encourages her to keep her head down and not get involved like she did in Louisiana. We don’t know what that situation was, but rest assured, her inability to let injustice or immorality pass her by is going to play a major role at some point this season.
At the Air Force base, Major Hanlon and his commanding officers are trying to discover the identities of the men who attacked him and Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso). Airman Masters (Chad Rook) signed a confession that he was responsible for the attack, but Hanlon quickly realizes that’s bogus based on the type of gun that was used in the attack.
When Hanlon presents this information to General Shaw (James Remar), Shaw finally admits that the attack was a test. Not a loyalty test, as I speculated last week, but it was a verification test. It was a verification test to see if what Shaw and the Air Force have learned about Hanlon’s injury is true. Hanlon’s injury in Korea was apparently a brain injury that impacted his amygdala. Hanlon can no longer feel fear, making him the exact person to recover the “weapon” the Air Force has found.
Sergeant Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), who drove Hanlon around in the first episode, has special telepathic abilities that the Air Force has been using to locate this weapon, even though they are not sure what that weapon is. Frequent Stephen King readers or watchers will recognize that Dick Hallorann was the chef at The Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Hallorann can sense death and horror, and has been directing the Air Force to dig in certain locations to find the weapon.
Now, the obvious question is, why does the Air Force, and the military at large, want this weapon? There have been Cold War-related clues in the first two episodes for us to deduce that the military wants to use Pennywise (or their understanding of Pennywise) against the Russians. They want the thing that drives people to death with fear, and Hanlon will be the one to operate it.
How do I feel about this? Let’s just say they are going to have to convince me this is a reasonable, effective storyline. First of all, trying to control Pennywise is a stupid idea. Trying to think they can manage something that is not of this world, exists in a metaphysical plane, and can evolve to match people’s fears is ludicrous. Of course, this is coming from the perspective of someone who knows all of the background and what will happen in the future. These Air Force officials clearly have none of that knowledge.
How do they know about this “weapon?” That’s another great question, and one that I hope the show addresses soon.
Lilly Bainbridge and Ronnie Grogan
Throughout Derry, and especially at the local school, there is a heightened sense of anxiety because of the Capitol Theater deaths. There is a curfew requiring kids to be in before dark. Some children aren’t going to school. And the local police are sitting outside the Grogan apartment because the community desperately wants answers, and the easiest path to those is to blame Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), the projectionist at the theater. His mother being his alibi doesn’t sit well with everyone.
The police, in addition to their systemic racism, are getting pressure from councilmen, local officials, and powerful Derry citizens. They all want Hank arrested for the murders, but the sticking point appears to be Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack). She told police she was at the theater, but Hank Grogan was not. What she refuses to tell them, however, is the truth: That a demon mutant baby came out of the movie screen and killed three children.
She refuses to tell the truth because she does not want to be sent back to Juniper Hill, the mental asylum where she spent time after her father’s death at the pickle jarring factory. We have not seen what happens inside Juniper Hill yet, but trailers for the show, plus context from other Stephen King properties, suggest it is a horrific place. This was the time in our history of lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and inhumane imprisonment. Lilly clearly saw these things happen in her first stint there.
Eventually, Lilly is presented with a choice from Police Chief Bowers (Peter Outerbridge), whose family will have a connection to Juniper Hill in the IT films. Lilly has to either tell the police she can’t be 100% confident Hank Grogan was not at the theater, or Chief Bowers might have to send her back to Juniper Hill for a few days, because people will think she is crazy if she can’t remember what happened at the theater.
The next scene shows police arresting Hank Grogan, with his daughter and mother crying for a reprieve and wailing for help from the neighbors in their complex. This arrest, with a complete lack of evidence, seems consistent with how the police are being set up in this version of Derry. The well-to-do white folks don’t want anything or anyone spoiling their idyllic situation, so when children end up dead, the easy scapegoat is the closest Black man to the attack. While this might appease the rest of the town, it sends Ronnie into a frenzy.
She was already hysterical from this week’s frightening, I-never-want-to-see-it-again birthing scene. In a Pennywise-orchestrated moment, Ronnie appears to be trapped in her bed while sleeping, only to be birthed out onto her bedroom floor, still covered in mucus and connected to an umbilical cord. At the other end of that cord is a disfigured version of Ronnie’s mother, blaming her for killing her when she was born.
The combination of those two events drives Ronnie over the edge, so she rushes over to Lilly’s house to confront her for letting the police take her father away. I’m sure at some point this season, these two girls will be allies again, but for now, Ronnie is furious at Lilly for taking her father away, and for the reasons why she did it.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Lilly’s mother takes her back to Juniper Hill anyway, where I’m sure any number of terrorizing things await her, especially since it seems like Pennywise has her in his sights after the whole grocery store, pickle incident.
A full 25% of the way through the season, what we have is no fully-formed 1962 Losers Club and the military trying to weaponize Pennywise to win the Cold War. Points awarded for creativity, but we seemingly have a long way to go with these characters, and only six episodes to get there.
