Season 1, Episode 5
Let’s hear it for the power of friendship! Well, to an extent, anyway. In this episode, the guileless love among the young circle of friends at the heart of “It: Welcome to Derry” is the children’s greatest strength but also their biggest weakness.
Early in the episode, Lilly approaches her frenemy Margie in the hospital. The last time we saw these two, Margie had just sawed one of her eyeballs out because of Its machinations, and it appeared Lilly would take the blame.
But Margie isn’t playing along. She isn’t saying what really happened, of course, since “My eyes were hijacked by giant parasitic worms” is the kind of thing that gets you sent to Juniper Hill. She has defended Lilly the whole time, however, saying that her broken glasses caused her injury and that Lilly was only trying to help. The two girls grasp each other’s hands and reconnect.
It’s a lovely moment, due in large part to the fine work of the actors Clara Stack and Matilda Lawler. As Lilly, Stack brings equal parts vulnerability and grit to her role as a wrongfully persecuted child, while Lawler lends Margie’s apologies an air of genuine, desperate regret.
Speaking of people framed by It for crimes they didn’t commit, Hank Grogan is almost assassinated by the enraged father of Phil and Susie Malkin when he is loaded onto the bus for the notorious Shawshank prison. But an offscreen attack crashes the bus and enables his escape. He is next seen hiding in the back seat of a car owned by Mrs. Kersh (Madeleine Stowe), who has appeared throughout the season as the one Juniper Hill employee sympathetic to Lilly’s claims.
Mrs. Kersh is the married white woman with whom Hank has been having an affair. This is both his alibi for the night of the murders in his theater, and a death sentence should their relationship be exposed. Her husband is the town butcher (Larry Day), whom we’ve already seen display a cavalier attitude to violence — he watched those bullies beat a kid earlier in the season and did nothing. In this week’s episode, we also get a glimpse of his abusive temperament toward his wife.
Yet there’s something additionally worrying about Hank’s plight. If you’ve seen the “It” films or read Stephen King’s novel, you’ll recognize “Mrs. Kersh” as one of Its disguises, albeit when she is decades older. Is this Mrs. Kersh a real human being? Or is her attempt to secure help for Hank from Charlotte one of Its ruses?
It can do elaborate impersonations, after all. Case in point: the shocking return of Matty Clements. The missing boy shows up, corpse-white and shaggy-haired, in his old friends’ secret clubhouse. Claiming that he was able to escape thanks to Its predictable sleep cycle, he tells the other kids he was kept alive so that It could feed on his fear. Their friend Teddy, he says, was killed in the movie theater. Susie was dragged into the sewer to bleed out with one arm torn off, screaming and sobbing in terror, slowly dying in front of her still-living brother, Phil.
That settles it for Lilly. She convinces the kids that they can use her mother’s supply of “mommy’s little helpers” to suppress their fears and venture into the sewers to rescue their friend. Once again, Stack displays real talent here, radiating the tremulous self-confidence that damaged kids sometimes generate as a response to their trauma.
Loaded up on Lilly’s mom’s benzos, the kids wander through the sewers, high as kites. Puppy love blossoms as Rich and Margie hold hands, cooing about it with blissed-out glee.
Unfortunately, it is all in service of Its biggest ruse to date. Leading them deep into the sewers to a dead end, Matty transforms into Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), revealed in full clown form for the first time. The sob story about his captivity and Phil’s survival was designed to turn the kids’ biggest virtue, their loyalty to one another, against them. The devastated, terrified children flee as It gives chase.
They’re not alone down there. A squad of soldiers led by Leroy, Dick and their Native prisoner, Taniel, infiltrate the sewer system through the basement of the cursed house on Niebolt Street. The plan is to follow Taniel to the location of the 13 “pillars,” or meteorite shards, that hold It within the Derry city limits in order to capture It and deploy It as a Cold War weapon.
But Taniel has conspired with his Aunt Rose to lead the military into the sewers, then abandon them the first chance he gets, using his own shard as a talisman against Its power. He successfully escapes, but he loses the shard in the process.
Meanwhile, It begins picking off the squad, one man at a time. It kills some while posing as a giant, skeletal Uncle Sam, like something you might see on a 1980s heavy metal album cover. It drags Dick deep into his own traumatic memories, where It poses as his sadistically abusive grandfather (a chilling Andrew Moodie). Against the will of both Dick and his psychic grandmother (Lazzelle Gelias), “Grandpa” breaks open a locked box containing something Dick is desperately trying to keep hidden. Its unseen contents glow like fire and shriek like the damned.
Back in the sewers, Will, Margie, Rich and Ronnie run into Leroy and his friend Pauly, who have been sent on the mission to track down the pillars. Having already nearly been duped by It when It took the form of his wife, Charlotte, Leroy prepares to open fire on his own son, whose appearance in the sewer is otherwise inexplicable to him.
Pauly, however, can see the boy too, and realizes Will isn’t one of Its tailor-made apparitions. He blocks Leroy’s shot, saving Will but succumbing to the wound that results. Leroy and the four kids escape, with the surviving airman carrying his friend’s body across his shoulders.
By this point, Lilly has been separated from the group, and It has her cornered. But It is stopped from sinking its countless teeth into her by Taniel’s shard, which the sewer’s current has washed to the spot where Lilly happens to be cowering. After It flees, she claims the rock-hewn, rune-inscribed dagger as her own.
But is it the innate power of the rock that stops the creature, or Taniel’s latent belief in it? A cryptic conversation between Rose and Taniel earlier in the episode appears to indicate that even Dick’s psychic interrogation was unable to extract the whole truth about It and the pillars that contain It.
In the aftermath of the disastrous raid, Leroy is debriefed on the death of Pauly. By this point, his relationship with Gen. Shaw — whose memories of his Derry childhood were restored by a drug administered by the military — is noticeably strained. If your boss lured your charming family to a town used as an all-you-can-eat buffet by a Lovecraftian entity, you would be pretty ticked off, too.
Elsewhere, Dick stumbles out of whatever limbo It had imprisoned him in and emerges from a tunnel to the surface world. The first person he sees is the shambling, reanimated corpse of Pauly. Somewhere in his mind, that box emits a hellish glow and an earsplitting, bone-chilling roar. What is in there? And why was his grandmother so determined to keep Grandpa Pennywise from finding out?
The military-pillar subplot never devolves into dopey first-person-shooter shenanigans. From the start, when dozens of troops descend on a haunted house that looks as if it might fall over in a stiff breeze, the operation is depicted as hubristic folly. Men die for no reason, nothing is achieved, and the end result will be the persecution of Rose’s community for her role in the debacle.
As much as Gen. Shaw wants to believe otherwise, sending fully armed troops rolling down American streets to storm houses is a cure worse than any disease it purports to treat. Some problems can’t be fixed with boots and guns. If you try, you’ll only hurt the country you’re claiming to save.
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