‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 2 Recap – Horror With Extra Pickles

You can tell a lot about a show from its title sequence. It: Welcome to Derry boasts a fun one in Episode 2, “The Thing in the Dark”, which fittingly released on Halloween on Max and will occupy its usual timeslot on HBO. It’s an idyllic portrait of nostalgic Americana warped by cruelty and disaster; teases of old tragedies for those in the know, hints of Cold War nuclear paranoia, and the implicit nastiness of a bygone era always looked back on with rose-tinted glasses. It’s a treasure trove of references, hints, and deliberate idiosyncrasies, the kind of thing that Derry, Maine has been built on since Stephen King first conceived it.

There are a lot of similarities between “The Thing in the Dark” and the premiere, which also featured a couple of gnarly horror sequences and split the difference between a Losers’ Club style group of kids and a more enigmatic contingent of adults working on some top-secret military project. This is a better episode, though; surer of its setting and ideas, more confident in its storytelling, and more muscular in its nastiness. With that horrifying set-piece that capped off the premiere having culled half the kiddie cast, there’s more focus on Lilly and Ronnie as the only two survivors, and their respective plights become representative of the prevailing attitudes in Derry.

The theatre massacre can’t be explained by anyone who was there, let alone those who weren’t, so police chief Clint Bowers – yes, father of Butch and grandfather of Henry, so not exactly a storied lineage – is pressured to settle on the obvious suspect, which is Hank. The reason he’s the obvious suspect is because he’s Black, basically. Sure, he also worked at the theatre as a projectionist, but nobody’s looking at the popcorn vendor, you know? Pinning the crime on someone who most suits the locals’ prejudices is very small-town America, after all.

But this drives a wedge between Lilly and Ronnie, because even though the latter didn’t actually see what happened, she’s confident her father didn’t kill anyone, but Lilly can’t be sure of what she saw because what she saw was, in essence, impossible, so she can’t rule out Hank having been involved in some way. “The Thing in the Dark” does a really good job of weaving the classic themes of It as a text – that Pennywise is free to torment the kids because none of the adults take them seriously – with the social context of Welcome to Derry’s ‘60s setting. Because Lilly knows she won’t be believed if she tells the truth, she can be manipulated into supporting the lie.

And boy, does Pennywise torment these two. Episode 2 of Welcome to Derry has two standout sequences in which each is terrorised in turn. Ronnie’s is especially horrific, as she’s “birthed” by a gnashing monster representing her mother, whose death during childbirth Ronnie has always felt responsible for. Lilly, meanwhile, is put through the wringer in a labyrinthine supermarket set-piece built around her lingering trauma of her dad’s unfortunate death in a pickle factory. There’s a note of bleak humour to this at first, but it evolves into a properly nasty bit of business that must have cost a fortune to bring to life. Money well spent, as far as I’m concerned.

But while we know these experiences are very real, the residents of Derry don’t, nor do they care to ask, so Ronnie is continually dismissed on account of her Blackness, and Lilly is hurried off to Juniper Hill asylum. That’s another kid down, if you’re keeping count, but the worthwhile kid characters are expanding. Leroy’s son Will comes into his own here, and he forms a bond with Ronnie in detention, since they can both relate to each other thanks to the entirely unsubtle racism prevalent among the students and teachers both. I’m partial to Rich, too, though it’s worth keeping an eye on Marge, whose desperate need to impress the Pattycakes could go one way or the other.

Like the premiere, “The Thing in the Dark” divides its time almost equally between the kids and Leroy, whose story remains detached – for now – but begins to take more of a recognisable shape here. It’s revealed, eventually, that Leroy wasn’t assaulted in the night by Soviet spies but by men instructed to “test” him by General Shaw. Naturally, they went a bit far with the violence – the military being no more immune to the racism of the time than the schools – but Leroy “passed” with flying colours. But passed what?

Shaw is looking for a man without fear. While in Korea, Leroy suffered an injury to his amygdala that has manifested as a complete inability to be scared. This is just as well, since the U.S. military has found something buried in Derry that may help them win the war against the Soviet Union. It’s a “weapon” generating debilitating fear in anyone who goes near it. They don’t know who buried it, or exactly where, but they know it’s in the general area and surrounded by a group of beacon-like objects they can use to pinpoint it. And, when they find it, only Leroy will be immune to its effects.

For help in tracking the weapon down the military has enlisted the services of Dick Halloran, a crossover character from The Shining who is using his abilities – which nobody quite seems to understand, nor are they especially willing to given that Dick also happens to be Black – to narrow the search. At the end of the episode, they find something – the car of the Bradley Gang, the death of which was a key component in Derry’s dark, violent history, and the fatal shootout’s location is one of the ways to the Well House. Those “beacons” seem to be pointing to “It” itself.

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