Summary
It: Welcome to Derry is thoroughly awful – by design – in “The Black Spot”, delivering the most emotional and tragic scenes of the season.
Whenever people think of It, they invariably think of a scary dancing clown, but if Welcome to Derry is proving anything, it’s that Pennywise is the least of Derry’s problems. There’s something horrifying about a cosmic monstrosity that feeds on children, but the bit that’s often overlooked is that Pennywise feeds on fear. The terror tenderises the meat. And Episode 7, “The Black Spot”, is a brutal reminder that there’s no magical, unexplainable origin to the kind of fear and pain that satiates Pennywise. It’s innately human.
This isn’t immediately obvious in the 1908-set prologue that fleshes out the dynamic between Ingrid and her father that was revealed last week. Here, Pennywise is a man, still played by Bill Skarsgard, but not an evil child-eating monster. He’s just a morose performing clown whose star has waned and who has swapped the big circus shows for backroad pop-ups. The children love him, though, or at least they love his act, which is why Pennywise is attracted to him. The children follow him. He can manipulate their emotions with his performance; make them laugh, and make them cry.
“The Entity”, appearing in the form of a young boy with glowing eyes – a recurring motif throughout this episode, and indeed throughout the season overall – asks Pennywise for help finding his mother, luring him into the woods from which he never emerges. Ingrid, here a child wanting nothing more than to assume her late mother’s performing role as Pennywise’s assistant clown, loses her father for what seems like no reason at all. “The Entity” is just evil. Derry and its people are victims.
In the present day, the terms have changed. Now, Derry and its people, including Ingrid, seem very much to deserve everything that’s coming to them. As predicted, it was Ingrid who led the bloodthirsty white racists to The Black Spot, knowing they’d cause untold carnage in their search for Hank. She knew the suffering would attract Pennywise, whom she still mistakenly believes to be her father. When she turns up outside the burning juke joint in full clown regalia, she’s expecting a tearful reunion. What she gets is a blinding flash of the Deadlights, rendering her immediately paralysed and comatose. She isn’t dead – we see her eyes move towards the end of the episode – but her idyllic vision of her father is shattered. She has condemned all of these people to death for nothing.
The burning of The Black Spot is the major event of It: Welcome to Derry Episode 7, and it’s awful. Most shows would have implied what went on here, or perhaps shown it from the outside, but this isn’t most shows. When it seems like the initial stand-off has reached a semi-peaceful resolution, the departing racists lock the building from the outside and set it ablaze, leaving all of the soldiers and children – everyone’s present except Lilly – to burn to death. And most of them do. Pennywise roams through the carnage, feeding on a buffet of terrified victims. By the time he emerges, he’s more than ready for his 27-year nap.
Blake Cameron James and Bill Skarsgard in It: Welcome to Derry | Image via WarnerMedia
But at least he emerges. In what is easily the most tragic moment of the series thus far – and that’s saying something given its introductory gambit killed half the kid cast – Rich sacrifices himself to save Marge, choosing to suffocate to death from smoke inhalation to keep her safe. He’s one of many who don’t make it out, even though Dick is able to save most of the key players by communing with the ghosts, albeit at the expense of his own sanity. Hank, who was the original target, lest we forget, survives and is spirited by Charlotte to Rose’s place, from whence they plan to smuggle him over the Canadian border. All that death and suffering, and the racists didn’t even kill the one person they were trying to. There’s no wonder Pennywise is always hungry.
Dick was always reluctant to communicate with the ghosts, and in so doing here in “The Black Spot,” he is led by the spirit of a Shokopiwah war chief to one of the pillars that form the boundary of Pennywise’s prison. Despite all available evidence suggesting it’s a deeply terrible idea, the U.S. military removes the shard keeping the barrier intact, so they can experiment on it while Pennywise is napping, the logic being that they can use it to better understand its nature and thus find the other shards more easily.
Leroy is just about the only person who realises this is stupid. He’s so convinced of the fact that he later pulls a gun on the personnel carrying out the experiments, causing General Shaw to summon him to his office to reveal the military’s real ulterior motive. Harnessing Pennywise’s power has nothing to do with the Cold War after all. Shaw plans to use it to terrify a fracturing American society into submission. With race riots and women’s rights marches and other politically contentious battles happening out in the open, he’s worried about another Civil War, and is determined not to let that happen.
But all of this has consequences. Leroy standing against Shaw’s plan puts him in the firing line, even though he feigns agreement after hearing the full explanation, and the episode ends with Pennywise waking up way ahead of schedule. The reprieve that Derry’s citizens thought they were getting is going to be very short-lived indeed. It’s more than most of them deserve, but I still don’t fancy the kids’ chances either.
RELATED:
