‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 6 Recap – Your Dad Looks Like Pennywise

I was going to start this recap by saying that things aren’t looking too good in It: Welcome to Derry, but now that I think about it, that’s only a matter of perspective. Pennywise, or “The Entity”, or whatever you want to call the cosmic evil lurking beneath Derry, Maine, feeds on fear, which is important to remember. Everyone is at their most scared in Episode 6, “In the Name of the Father”. The kids now know their worst fears are real, and it’s tearing them apart. The adults – some of them, anyway – fear not just for their own lives but the lives of their families, driven to panicky violence as a way to “protect” them. The racists are out in force. For Pennywise, things are going perfectly.

We’re not supposed to root for Pennywise, obviously, but this episode is as much about him and his backstory as it is about the titular fathers who, in all their radically different circumstances, are all trying to reckon with their responsibilities. A murderous child-eating dancing clown doesn’t necessarily need a backstory, I feel, but when in Rome. And besides, if the idea of Daddy Pennywise resonates beyond the typical DeviantArt boards where that kind of thing typically lives, so much the better for this show’s financial future.

Welcome to Derry hasn’t been immune to a gimmick, and the one in Episode 6 is a tasteful use of monochrome – with Schindler’s List-style splashes of vivid colour – in 1935-set flashbacks revolving around Juniper Hill. We’ll return to these, since some of the best Pennywise business of the season thus far is contained in a late one, but it’s worth noting that this is where “In the Name of the Father” begins, even if it doesn’t linger there long.

Instead, we pick up proper right after the psychedelic set-piece in the tunnels under the Neibolt House. That little adventure confirmed to the kids and indeed to Leroy that the creature they were hunting is real and manifests as the most profound terrors of its victims. But the reactions are different. Will, for instance, is bravely adamant about following the mission through to its logical conclusion, whereas Leroy is focused only on keeping his family safe, which means Will being confined to the (relative) safety of the base. Things get nasty, and Leroy, out of anger, slaps Will around the face. Will immediately assumes that he’s under Pennywise’s sway, which is a nice way of folding the paranoia of how the Entity operates into the very confusing sentiments that swirl around parenthood.

But there’s also the paranoia of the era to consider. While it’s sometimes easy to forget that this show is set in the ‘60s, the lingering mob-justice mentality swirling up around the search for Hank is a cogent reminder. Who better to track down a Black fugitive than a gang of drunk, racist white dudes? If you were a fear demon, you’d definitely camp out somewhere where lynch mobs were liable to pop up at the slightest provocation. It’s easy work.

Bill Skarsgård in It: Welcome to Derry | Image via WarnerMedia

Hank is hiding out at The Black Spot, a juke joint operated by some of the Black airmen on the Army base, which is ironic when you consider that the base is supposed to be the only place safe from Pennywise’s influence. Much like how Sinners used the idea of a juke joint – the musicality, the sense of community, the contagious feeling of freedom that lives inside its walls, if not necessarily outside them – It: Welcome to Derry Episode 6 uses it to facilitate a number of worthwhile scenes. Ronnie’s reunion with her father occurs here. Will meets him, too. Later, Rich and Marge, who is now a fully-fledged member of the Losers Club after nastily losing her eye and using the lingering wound to torment the Patty Cakes, get slightly drunk, play drums, and party the night away, blissfully ignorant of the mob of white men assembling outside.

Within all this, “In the Name of the Father” unfurls some of that Pennywise backstory we didn’t know we wanted. And it chooses an unusual avenue for this – Ingrid, Lilly’s only trusted confidant. After experiencing another horrifying vision and visiting Ingrid at home, Lilly stumbles on her family photo albums and spots a man, supposedly her father, who looks oddly suspicious. As well he might – Ingrid reveals that her father was a circus clown named Pennywise. Uh-oh.

The monochrome flashbacks reveal Ingrid’s backstory. I’ve been deliberately mischaracterising it as Pennywise’s history, since there’s an element of that in the story, but I didn’t want to give away too early that Pennywise, as we know him, is obviously not Ingrid’s father. Instead, the memory of her lost father is what Pennywise used to manipulate Ingrid into consistently feeding it children while working at Juniper Hill. Pennywise played dad – Bill Skarsgård is having a riot here – to prey on Ingrid’s desperate wish to be reunited with the father who was taken from her. Incidentally, that’s the exact same kind of desperate grief that the alien-worshipping cult Infinitas in Apple TV+’s rubbish sci-fi series Invasion was built around. People will believe anything.

But the story is illuminating all the same, and clearly important to the Entity, since the Pennywise identity is the one it settled on for the most part, although we don’t yet know why. Lilly isn’t thrilled to hear this, obviously, and dashes off when Ingrid lurches at her, her one true confidante now having been revealed as a turncoat (I suspect it was also she who tipped off the white mob about Hank being at The Black Spot). The kids are not okay. Neither are the adults. And that will only make them more vulnerable than ever.