Season 1, Episode 2: ‘The Thing in the Dark’
Instead of a haunted house, what if there were a haunted city? What if the troll lurking under the bridge hid beneath the entire municipality? What if small-town America’s racial, sexual, gender and class divisions could be exploited by a billion-year-old cosmic shape-shifter that has taken the form of a child-eating clown?
These propositions are fundamental to “It,” Stephen King’s 1986 doorstopper of a horror novel, which for my money is his most frightening book. Derry is not just a setting, it’s a secondary antagonist. The real horror of “It” is that the presence of the evil entity beneath that quaint Maine town has warped the place’s inhabitants.
No one in Derry ever seems to notice when bad things happen — when outcasts are bullied, Black people tormented, L.G.B.T.Q. people bashed, women assaulted, children abused. The good people of Derry stare, dead-eyed, and do nothing. The second episode of “Welcome to Derry” conveys this pervasive sense of wrongness by fleshing out the city, with the Main Street shopping district, the Black side of town and the nearby air base all taking their turns in the spotlight. Derry feels like a real place, where real children live and grow and, frequently, vanish.
Lilly and Ronnie, the sole survivors of It’s massacre at the movie theater last episode, are now the center of malicious gossip in school and around town, with Lilly’s history of mental illness and Ronnie’s skin color being held against them. But instead of bringing the girls together, the killings are driving them apart. Ronnie, you’ll recall, was in the theater but didn’t see the killings and can’t provide eyewitness testimony, except to assure the police that her father, Hank, who owns the theater, wasn’t there that night.
Lilly, who had front-row seats for the carnage, has already spent time in Juniper Hill, a local mental institution which seems barely a step up from Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum. Unless she testifies truthfully about what she saw that night, Ronnie’s father, a Black man in a majority-white town, will almost certainly have the crime hung on him. But if she tells the police that a giant flying two-headed baby ate her schoolmates, back to Juniper Hill she’ll go.
Threatened by the chief of police, himself under pressure by the town worthies to wrap up the investigation, Lilly is tricked into undermining Hank’s alibi. He is promptly dragged away, which devastates and infuriates Ronnie. She knows exactly who is to blame.
Ronnie, meanwhile, is still not free of It. The creature appears to her in the form of her mother, who died during childbirth. An umbilical cord still attached to Ronnie starts dragging the girl toward the mom-thing’s tooth-studded stomach, deep inside of which the eyes of Pennywise glow. Only Hank’s timely intervention makes the thing go away.
In the end, jamming up Hank does Lilly no good anyway because Pennywise has Its eyes on her too. The entity turns the local grocery store into a labyrinth, trapping Lilly inside with various customers who are no more than Its twitching, leering avatars. A cascade of dozens of pickle jars comes crashing down around her, and Lilly’s dead, dismembered father reconstitutes himself as a kind of half-man, half-tentacled monster from a pile of his brined body parts scattered among the shards. The attack on Lilly is uncomfortably incestuous, as well. Exactly what kind of relationship did she have with her father before he died?
It’s visits to Ronnie and Lilly in this week’s episode, which debuted a few days early on HBO Max for Halloween, recall favorably the visceral visual effects of the splatter classics “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Hellraiser.” They are augmented by the show’s innovative, cacophonous score and sound design, which batters you rather than startles you.
Ultimately, Lilly snaps out of it and discovers It has made her look insane in front of a store full of very real customers. Her mother hauls her back to Juniper Hill. Thus Lilly learns that even indirectly serving Its interests is poisonous.
That’s something the airmen at Derry Air Force Base might do well to remember. We once again catch up with Leroy Hanlon, ace pilot and former prisoner of war in Korea who was assaulted by an ostensible spy ring last episode. But Leroy deduces that Masters, the racist hayseed on whom the brass have pinned the crime, could never have pulled off that kind of attack. When he brings this information to his superior, Gen. Shaw, he is finally made aware of the true nature of his mission in Derry.
The fake Soviet spy attack was a loyalty test. Leroy isn’t there to pilot an experimental B-52 or anything of the sort. His experiences in a North Korean P.O.W. camp, which left his face and body scarred, also inflicted a unique injury to his brain. His amygdala, responsible for regulating fear among other intense negative emotions, is damaged, effectively cauterizing his flight response. He is literally the man without fear. It isn’t hard to imagine why this would make him a valuable asset for a top-secret military project in Derry, Maine.
Leroy isn’t the only cold warrior with special abilities in Gen. Shaw’s service. We learn in this week’s episode that the quiet airman with the intense eyes who’s been staring down Hanlon since his arrival is none other than Dick Halloran. Years later, he winds up being the telepathic employee of the Overlook Hotel who tries to save young Danny Torrance in “The Shining.”
Halloran, who has a brief cameo connected to the Hanlon family in the novel, is being used as a human dowsing rod by the brass. With the help of his psychic abilities, they hope to uncover “beacons” that have held Derry’s infernal visitor in place all these years. The episode ends with an indicator of such a beacon being dragged to light: a shot-up car full of corpses carrying machine guns. This corresponds to imagery of a gangland shootout that recurs in both the films and the show’s creepy opening credits.
Highly classified, highly foolhardy, potentially apocalyptic military operations are a staple of some of King’s best and most beloved works. The super-flu that wipes out humanity in “The Stand” originates in a biological weapons program named Project Blue. The horde of disgusting primordial monsters that overruns Maine in “The Mist” is unleashed by something called the Arrowhead Project. (Considering the Indigenous observers of the military’s activity in this episode and the similarity of some of the critters, I wonder if the two are connected.)
Whatever the case, adding a black ops element to “It” is in keeping with King’s existing preoccupations. In that it depicts the impunity of the government to impose its military on unsuspecting communities at will, it also has the benefit of being timely.
The same, sadly, is true of the inescapable undertow of racism that drags at the show’s Black characters — a central theme in King’s book, depicted with nauseating bluntness, but largely absent in the movies. Masters slings an ear-stinging slur at Leroy. His son, Will (Blake Cameron James), is bullied by bigoted students, for which he is invariably blamed by equally prejudiced educators.
Ronnie gets the same treatment when she screams a curse word at Lilly, though she is more than willing to accept responsibility for that one. Dick and his friends are chased out of a bar in the middle of a round. Hank is straight-up framed for a crime he didn’t commit. (A psychotic, transforming clown-god committed it, but try telling that to an impatient assemblyman in an election year.)
Most troubling, perhaps, is the experience of Charlotte (Taylour Paige), Leroy’s wife, who arrives in town with Will this episode. Charlotte is happy to be in Derry, but she isn’t the cockeyed optimist Leroy is about the North’s supposed racial paradise. Her civil rights activism, we learn, got the family pushed out of Shreveport, La., and Leroy is worried she’ll be at it again before long.
But what she witnesses on Main Street is something that staggers even her. There isn’t a racial element to the savage act of bullying she encounters, as three vicious boys pummel some poor kid in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses. There is no reason for anyone watching, Black or white, to just … let it happen. But that’s exactly what they do.
“Boys will be boys!” says the grinning butcher, watching a full-on felonious assault take place that he could stop with a single “Hey, cut it out!” Something similar happens in Ronnie’s neighborhood, where everyone just stands around silently as her father is taken away past her screaming grandmother. Even if nothing supernatural is at work in that neighborhood and it is simple state-sponsored, race-based intimidation that has silenced them, that too plays to Pennywise’s advantage.
In the world of “Welcome to Derry,” we can blame this society-wide sociopathy on the presence of Pennywise, but it isn’t hard to see what it means when you strip away the greasepaint. For evil to flourish, you need more than just the people swinging the fists and pulling the triggers — you need everyone else in town to be too swayed, or too afraid, to do anything to stop it.
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