It: Welcome to Derry Season 1, Episode 2
"The Thing in the Dark"
Writer: Austin Guzman
Director: Andy Muscietti
Cast: Clara Stack, Amanda Christine, Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Blake Cameron James, James Remar, Chris, Chalk, Stephen Rider, Matilda Lawler, Arian S. Cartaya, Peter Outerbridge, Chad Rook
New Kids on the Block
Now that half of our Proto-Losers Club from the previous episode are down for the count — a pair of cops inform us that all that remains of Teddy, Phil, and Susie is their blood — it’s time to meet the real ensemble going forward. Of course Lilly (Stack) and Ronnie (Christine) remain, though their bond is fraying by the second; more on that later. Fairweather friend Marge (Lawler) is even less of a chum now that “Loony Lilly” is muddled in the Capitol Theater massacre. She’s far too concerned about her social standing with the popular Pattycakes clique to extend much kindness.
Leroy Hanlon’s family settle into their new home in suburban Derry, much to the chagrin of their snooty white neighbors. On his wife’s guidance, Leroy sets up a telescope in their son’s room. Young Will (James) loves it. Kid’s a starry-eyed science buff, browsing reference books on his lunch hour in the safety of the school hallway. There he meets short king Rich (Cartaya), a fellow outcast who, judging by his uniform, is a band geek? Color guard maybe? The post-credit supplementals emphasize that Rich is Cuban-American, which compounds his ostracization in this particular time and place. Both of these kids are total sweethearts and it’s going to suck when their worlds inevitably turn upside down.
Meanwhile, Leroy’s wife, Charlotte (Paige) makes fast friends at the local shops, but is alarmed when no one intervenes when a group of boys start pummeling another. The butcher dismisses the assault as “boys being boys” but Charlotte races across the road to put a stop to it. Unfortunately the bullies take off in pursuit of their prey and everyone gives the woman some serious side-eye.
Police Chief Clint Bowers (Outerbridge) — whose nightmare of a grandson will go on to serve as a kind of Renfield to Pennywise in the events of the novel — is feeling some overt pressure from town leaders to tidy up the recent string of child murders. Though Ronnie's father Hank Grogan (Rider) clearly isn’t the doer, proximity and skin color make him an ideal scapegoat. Bowers summons Lilly back to his office to coerce her into revising her statement. She can’t put Grogan at the theater that night, but she can’t definitively say he wasn’t there either. Faced with a ticket back to the mental institution at Juniper Hill, the girl is forced to go along with it. Some really gross “Good ol’ Boy” shit.
That’s all it takes for Bowers to drag Grogan out of his home in full view of the neighborhood, leaving Ronnie and her grandmother to pick up the pieces. Ronnie saw Lilly being escorted to the police department earlier and knows the girl was reluctant to give a full report of what she saw that night — understandably so; everyone already thinks she’s crazy — so she’s quick to blame Lilly for her father’s arrest. What a mess!
Cleanup, Aisle 666
In terms of scares, we’ve got two really impressive setpieces this week.
First, a troubled Ronnie slumps into bed and throws the sheets over her head, only for the linens to take on the slick texture of human tissue. Then the space begins to flood with amniotic fluid. Scrambling to the foot end of the bed, she tries ripping her way free of the nightmarish sac. She’s finally expelled onto the floor, awash in goo and still tethered by umbilical to the horrific image of her dead mother. Compounding the tragedy, the phantom is clad in a wedding gown and cap, mimicking the only image Ronnie has of the woman who died in childbirth. It says some pretty rotten stuff to her, dolling out considerable psychic damage.
Lilly, still smarting after Ronnie ran to her house to blame her for her father’s arrest, heads to the grocery store with a list from her mother. All the vintage cereal boxes and canned goods lend authenticity to the production until you realize the layout of this store makes no sense. Then it feels dreamlike. A strange, menacing man follows the girl as she pilots her cart through increasingly tighter aisles. The voice droning over the loudspeaker shifts from the day’s specials to pointed remarks about Lilly and her mental state.
Suddenly she’s trapped in liminal space surrounded by shelves of jarred pickles. Scrutinizing one such jar, she recognizes her father’s broken head floating in the brine. His macerated head, hands, and feet explode outward. Pickled tentacles emerge from another jar and writhe into a chokehold around her neck. Pickle Daddy draws her in for a kiss. It’s delightfully gross, but poor Lilly. She’s still screaming when the illusion collapses, the shop manager demanding to know why she smashed a jar of pickles on the floor.
This episode is too much for her mother. Lilly’s headed back to Juniper Hill.
Man Without Fear
Leroy initially suspects his late night assailants were Soviet spies looking for intel on the new bomber project. He certainly recognized the pistol aimed at his head. A Makarov. Thus, when his unfriendly subordinate, Sgt. Masters (Rook), lands in the brig, Leroy doubts the man was involved. He confronts him in his cell, setting an unloaded pistol and magazine between them. He doesn’t think Masters is capable of posing a threat, let alone loading the weapon as quickly as the masked attacker. He’s right. Baited with a remark about his sainted mother, Masters fumbles to load the Makarov. That’s enough for Leroy to bring his suspicions to General Shaw (Remar).
Shaw ultimately concedes that the attack was orchestrated to test Leroy’s mettle. Shaw was looking for a man with a diminished fear response. During the war, Leroy sustained damage to his amygdala. That much is in his file. That likely clicked with something Vincent Price had said in some lurid Sunday matinee, so the General arranged for Leroy’s assignment to the base.
As it turns out, Shaw has Leroy in mind for the same secret project his friend Dick Hallorann (Chalk) is being so tight-lipped about. This is the same Dick Hallorann from The Shining and Doctor Sleep, a man with a touch of “the shine.” Dick has a sizable Midi-chlorian count, dig? This affords him kinder treatment, which comes in handy when the three Black officers return drunk to the base one night after curfew. Not that he’s doing Jedi mind tricks; Shaw just affords him more leeway because he sees him as an indispensable dowsing rod in his search for a super weapon.
Here’s a wild sentence: The U.S. military, gravely concerned by Soviet activity in Cuba, wants to weaponize the cosmic entity stirring beneath Derry. They’ve somehow determined that “It” is capable of inflicting a debilitating fear A.O.E. and believe they can harness that power for the war effort. Leroy’s brain injury makes him uniquely suited to retrieving the object (or objects) that would devastate any other man.
Isn’t that bonkers?
I think I’ve warmed to this outrageous premise as a bold use of the I.P., but also harmlessly non-canonical? It’s such a deranged “What If” I can’t help but admire it.
But you know who doesn’t admire it? The indigenous population in and around Derry, some of whom we see observing the military’s excavation of the Barrens with mounting dread. Eager to see more from their perspective in coming weeks.
We end on the image of a crane lifting a ruined vehicle laden with corpses from the latest dig site, one step closer to finding their secret weapon.
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