Season 1, Episode 6: ‘In the Name of the Father’
If you’re an evil entity, it pays to have a human on your side. They make for reliable dogsbodies, getting things done for their malevolent masters in places where those beings’ supernatural powers can’t reach.
Saruman from “The Lord of the Rings” counts not only on wizardry to bring down the government of Rohan, but also on a weird little guy named Wormtongue, who whispers poison into the king’s ear. When the titular vampire of the classic 1931 Universal Pictures film “Dracula” invades London, he drives the real estate agent who sells him the land so memorably mad with devotion that his very name, Renfield, has become synonymous with the character type. (Renfield appears in the Bram Stoker novel, too, but the actor Dwight Frye seared the character into the cultural consciousness.)
For some time now, King-heads like myself have been curious about the nature of Ingrid Kersh, the Juniper Hill nurse played by Madeleine Stowe, who shares a name with one of Its most nightmarish manifestations in the two “It” films. Her support for her patient Lilly bordered on the suspicious. But when Ingrid was revealed to be Hank Grogan’s secret lover, it seemed that her conspicuously positive portrayal had a perfectly natural explanation.
But this is Derry, and nothing is perfectly natural here. A flashback sequence — filmed in vivid high contrast black-and-white with red spot color for balloons and blood — and some storytelling by Mrs. Kersh herself set the record straight.
Mrs. Kersh first came to Derry with a carnival as a young girl. She was traveling with her sideshow-performer father, a familiar-looking figure who went by the nom de clown Pennywise. Like many who find themselves within the Derry city limits, he never made it out again. For some reason, his clown persona has been Its favorite form to take ever since.
Ingrid, too, stays in town, growing up to become a nurse at the asylum. When she overhears an adorable young patient talking about a clown in the pipes, she seizes on the long-shot possibility and leads the girl down into the basement where It promised to be waiting. The monster that shows up is not the dad the desperate woman expected, of course, and she flees with the girl, who falls behind and becomes trapped on the other side of a locked door. Ingrid must listen in horror as the little girl is eaten alive.
Its hunger satisfied, It then turns on the charm. It appears to her from the other side of the door as Robert Gray, Ingrid’s father, sans wig and makeup. He can explain, if she would just let him in.
Thus, Ingrid becomes Its Renfield. She has been steering Lilly and her friends toward a confrontation with It — sometimes dressing up as a clown herself to help speed things along — so that she can encounter the creature and free the soul of her father. (A good Renfield always turns on his master in the end.) This plan seems … unlikely to work, but I suppose that when you’ve pinned your happiness on the idea that your father has been kept alive for decades as a shape-shifting child-eater, hope springs eternal.
Knowing what we know about her now, it is almost certainly Ingrid who calls in the anonymous tip about the location of her own lover, Hank. Wrongfully suspected of murders Ingrid’s “father” committed — one wonders now if Hank was singled out for this purpose all along — his escape en route to prison costs Chief Bowers his job. The furious ex-cop immediately turns to vigilante justice for revenge, rallying a rifle-toting lynch mob to besiege Hank’s hiding place.
With what tastes like brewing tragedy, that hiding place is the Black Spot, the informal nightclub Dick secured for his fellow Black airmen. Charlotte, Hank’s rescuer, brings him there with every intention of having him out of the club and out of the town by the next morning. The presence of the racists outside makes that feel increasingly unlikely.
I’m counting on Dick’s psychic powers to save at least some people, but those powers come at a cost. Earlier in the episode, Leroy comes to visit Dick after the disastrous sewer raid, and the telepath explains that It broke open the lockbox in which he had sealed all the dead and horrible things he had been hiding from his mind’s eye since childhood. Now they’re out free, walking around. Dick is safe from them as long as he doesn’t acknowledge or engage them. The moment he does, they’ll tell him “things the living aren’t meant to know” until he goes mad.
Leroy is sympathetic. He is also a real live nephew of his Uncle Sam. He knows that the dead can tell Dick the locations of the missing pillars that will enable the military to capture It if he asks them.
“Did you hear a word I just said?” Dick deadpans in response. He doesn’t stay deadpan for long, though. When his increasingly brusque responses draw a reminder from Leroy that he is the superior officer, Dick bellows an expletive in response. His voice drags it past the point of vulgarity or bravado and into the realm of discomfort. This isn’t a soldier, cursing just to curse. This is a man in torment.
There are children in the crossfire, too. Charlotte brings Hank’s daughter, Ronnie, to see him at the Black Spot, and her son, Will, comes along for the ride. Will and Ronnie are growing increasingly close — maybe not as close as Hank’s over-familiar “at least I know she’ll be in good hands” speech to the boy makes them sound, but close. Will also discloses Hank’s presence to his friends Margie and Rich, who show up to the Black Spot themselves.
These latter two have already had a scream of a scene, in which Rich attends to Margie’s gnarly eye wound. (“It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”) At the club, they once again get entertainingly buzzed, this time on surreptitiously spiked coke, served to them by a mischievous bartender, and enjoy the great live music. (And the dirty dancing, though they can’t quite figure out what that’s all about.) Rich even gets to sit in on drums when the usual guy gets too drunk to play. The kid is a regular Gene Krupa, too!
It’s all very adorable. It’s also clearly intended to soften us up for the pain to come.
Although our attention has been largely occupied by the kids and the clown, let’s not take for granted how good this show’s three grown-up leads are. Chris Chalk, Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige make the adult material as magnetic as that of the young losers.
They don’t feel as if they’re playing characters in a spooky popcorn flick; they feel as if they’re playing human beings who are worried about their families, their ethics and their sanity. That scream from Chalk is one of the most harrowing things I’ve heard on television all year, and it’s been a harrowing year.
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