IT: Welcome to Derry‘s second episode is titled “The Thing in the Dark” (to which I say: which Thing? There are so many!) and was written by Austin Guzman and directed by Andy Muschietti. Let’s jump in…

As Brief a Recap as a King Adaptation Will Allow

We open on a replay of the carnage in the Capitol theater, from a slightly different angle. It’s a dream Lilly’s having, and she wakes screaming.

The cops lurk outside the Grogan apartment, making crass jokes. They’re convinced Hank Grogan is guilty. Inside, Hank argues with his mom while they think Ronnie’s asleep. Of course she hears it. Hank insists the cops won’t take him away, but his mother thinks he’s doing a disservice to Ronnie, that he has her “…thinking she’s Nora Charles—did she forget how the world really is?”—which is hilarious. Mrs. Grogan accuses her son of filling his daughter’s head up with Hollywood nonsense, but then she comes in with a Thin Man reference. When he realizes Ronnie is eavesdropping he reassures her again.

We cut to Leroy Hanlon, listening to Sam Cooke on his porch while he waits for his family. His wife Charlotte pulls into the driveway, and out pops his son Will—future father to Loser’s Club member Mike Hanlon. They all embrace, and the sweet family reunion is punctured a bit by an older neighbor walking by and giving a weird look to Charlotte’s wave hello. She’s unsure of their new neighborhood, but the Major replies: “Anybody’s got a problem with it they can take it up with JFK.”

Will goes into his room (I want to make note of the extremely 1950s wallpaper of cowboy campfire scenes) and discovers his new telescope. He’s thrilled, and overlooks his dad’s terrible jokes as they talk together about how it works. We see both the awkwardness between father and son, and the son’s advanced understanding of science. Charlotte watches from the doorway with some apprehension, which seems weird until we learn the telescope was her idea—better this than yet another baseball that the kid’ll use as a paperweight.

“At at his age I’d have given a kidney for a proper mitt!” the Major protests.

“Well he isn’t you!” Charlotte replies.

Wait, do we have a good parent in a Stephen King adaptation???

Oh no. Charlotte is fucking doomed.

The next morning at school (where a sign grimly orders: “Curfew in effect. Be home before dark.”) Margie tries once again to get in with the Pattycakes, literally circling them like a velociraptor while they ignore her. They laugh and include her when she makes fun of a nerdy boy… until Patty decides she’s taken it too far and tells her not to be mean. Ronnie comes back to school, and the other kids have all decided her dad’s a murderer. And Lilly comes back, but when Margie babbles at her about sitting at the popular table at lunch, she finally snaps at her friend: “Phil and Teddy are dead. Phil’s sister is dead. Who cares about your stupid Pattycakes!”

Will shows up late for his first class, and of course when he goes to take his seat another kid kicks his chair out from under him, and the teacher screams at everyone because, again, this is King Country, and the adults are worse than the monsters.

Meanwhile at the base, the higher-ups confirm that Masters is done after his racist attack on Major Hanlon (“This isn’t the South, and we don’t brook that kind of bullshit” says one. “Sure, Jan,” says I.)

And the Major confirms that the gun pulled on him was a Makarov PM, a Soviet pistol.

Charlotte ventures into town and passes people protesting the Paul Bunyan statue, but otherwise no one seems to notice her beyond polite nods. She goes into a butcher shop where she’s seemingly welcomed by Kersh, the butcher—until she runs out to stop some older boys from kicking the shit out of a smaller, nerdier looking boy, as other adults walk by without a glance. The butcher, who seemed nice, waves it away with “Boys will be boys”—but this is a gang of like five large teens curbstomping a younger kid who obviously can’t defend himself. The boys seem ready to attack Charlotte, too, then run off after the kid. Only then the other adults look at her, as though they’ve just realized she’s there.

They look at her with suspicion and outrage.

When she tries to talk about it with Leroy and Will, they both get annoyed with her. Leroy’s clearly worried that she’s going to stir up “trouble”, and makes pointed reference to Shreveport, where it sounds like she took part in civil rights protests.

Across town Ronnie’s listening to her dad and grandmother fight again, and we get the episode’s first horror setpiece, and it’s AWESOME.

Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO

The thing with IT is that you’re not safe anywhere. Once IT has you, even the most mundane things can become terrifying, often in intimate ways. Ronnie pulls her sheets over her face to try to muffle the adults’ argument. But then her sheets become the walls of a uterus, and she can feel a heart beating in the mattress beneath her, and suddenly her bed has transformed into her mother’s womb. She claws her way out in a sort of chestburster/birth moment to find her mother’s face in her headboard. Ronnie’s “mother” accuses her of killing her and endangering her father. The face transforms and becomes more and more demonic, and then the bed grows a many-toothed vagina mouth, and starts dragging her across the floor by a still-attached umbilical cord.

There are eyes inside the vagina mouth? Damn close to the Deadlights, I’d say.

At which point Ronnie chews through her own umbilical cord to get free and goddamn it I love you, television show.

The Mother rushes across the room to corner her and she screams loud enough for her father to come running in. Naturally, everything seems fine.

Three black airmen are at a local bar. (A bagpiper walks in and strolls through the room bagpiping! Sure!) One of them is the guy from last episode… he seems familiar? But I still can’t place it. He tells the others he can’t tell them about his work, and they tease him about his “super secret spy mission”. Some of the higher-ups of the town harass Police Chief Bowers (oh NO) to hurry up and arrest Hank Grogan, and when he tries to float the idea of rights, they reply “This ain’t America. This is Derry” and threaten his job.

He retaliates for his public embarrassment by getting the bartender to glower at the airmen until they leave.

They go off in search of moonshine, and apparently find it (presumably at The Ink Spot) as they later stumble back to base in quite a state. The familiar man finally introduces himself to the guard—it’s Dick Hallorann! The guy from The Shining! The guy WITH The Shining! AAAHHHH. But is this Book Halloran, who survives his time at the Overlook, or Movie Halloran, who gets an axe to the chest?

I mean I guess it doesn’t matter right now, but I like Dick Hallorann and I want him to live a long and happy life.

The guard who was ready to throw them in the brig for being off-base and drunk, instead lets them in. Halloran makes a drunken reference to “got myself some special privileges” and the camera zooms in on the asphalt beneath his feet, then fades into an overhead shot of forest *just like *THE *goddamn *SHINING. Now we see that there’s a secret dig site, and Hallorann is part of it, using his “gifts” to help the military find… something. Apparently they’ve gone through a few sites now, and there’s an accusation that Hallorann’s dragging the process out to hold onto his “special privileges”—but I’m guessing he’s trying to delay finding the thing that he knows might be a disaster. A group of Native American teens spy on the dig site from the woods.

At school, Lilly sits alone rather than succumb to Margie’s Pattypilling, Ronnie sits with Lilly, and then the two girls get into a massive fight because Ronnie’s afraid that Lilly’s vague account of the Capitol Massacre isn’t enough to keep her dad out of jail. This culminates in Ronnie yelling “BULLSHIT!” loud enough that she gets detention. Meanwhile, out in the hall, Will might be making a friend named Rich (If that kid’s last name is Tozier there will be NO LIVING WITH ME) who has an obvious crush on Margie, when another kid throws a stinkbomb into the hallway, and Will gets the blame. Which is how he ends up in detention with Ronnie, and the two tentatively start a friendship after he explains the scientific makeup of stinkbombs. (“Maybe I smell bad, or maybe I’m covered in stardust.”) I hope they become friends. They deserve to have one good thing in life.

BUT. I spoke too soon, because the cops drag Lilly away again, and a couple threats about Juniper Hill later, Hank Grogan is arrested for the murders at the Capitol. Ronnie runs to Lilly’s house to confront her, but Lilly’s mother slams the door in her face. Ronnie stands on their lawn and screams “WHAT DID YOU DO, LILLY BAINBRIDGE???”

Major Hanlon confronts Masters in his jail cell, and proves that the man can’t assemble a Makarov PM fast enough to shoot him with it. He goes to one of the generals about it, and learns that the late-night attack was actually a test. The general believes that Hanlon’s Korea injury—a damaged amygdala—had effectively killed his ability to feel fear. Now he knows it’s true, and he wants him to be part of a super secret mission called Project Precept.

Then we get to the second horror setpiece, which i liked even more than the first. Poor Lilly tries to go to the grocery store for her mother, but within moments weird stuff is happening. She hears people whispering “She oughtta be locked up” and other shoppers pop around behind her, moving in uncanny ways. She doesn’t notice, but extra walls of shelves creep around behind her as she walks through the aisles, until she suddenly trapped in one tiny square room. Every shelf is stuffed with pickle jars.

And what happens?

Body parts appear in the jars, gradually forming a face in one that speaks with her father’s voice. And as the jars fall, the body parts combine to form a horrifying wriggling mass that crawls toward her, asking for a kiss.

It’s… incredible.

Until she’s back in the normal store, cowering and screaming, the one jar she shattered on the floor in front of her, and the formerly friendly shopkeeper screaming “Lilly Bainbridge, what the hell’s wrong with you???”

I mean, where to begin.

Major Hanlon is taken to a secret area and told that they’re trying to dig up a weapon that can end the Cold War before the first missile is launched—a weapon that generates debilitating fear.

OH NO.

Oh you’re all so STUPID.

We end with poor Lilly being brought back to Juniper Hill by her mother. She might as well have stuck to her guns and kept Hank Grogan out of jail.

Which leads us to an important lesson: NEVER RAT, KIDS.

Do We All Float?

Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO

OK, this episode was strong overall, but those two horror setpieces were fucking PERFECT. Both of them followed the pattern of having characters in “normal” spaces that only gradually become terrifying, and in both cases they play so perfectly upon the kids’ trauma. Ronnie’s mom died in childbirth, and it was her choice to take the kids to the Capitol that might lead to her dad being arrested for murder. (I mean, it’s the racism that might do that, but not in Ronnie’s mind.) She views herself as a person who causes harm to people, and IT digs that out of her brain and uses it against her. In Lilly’s case, she sees herself as “crazy” because she didn’t get proper treatment for her trauma and grief. She’s an even easier meal for IT.

Oh, and speaking of that grocery scene: Calumet Flour spotted! I am a happy Shining fan. ALSO, in that same grocery store scene, Lilly walks past the old school Brillo boxes right before they announce a sale on Campbell’s Tomato Soup, and I mention it because I love anything that makes me think about Andy Warhol.

Margie annoys the SHIT out of me. Which is good. The show’s done a great job of showing a particular kind of person who’s so laser focused on becoming popular, because she thinks that will solve all her problems, that she alienates the weirdos who would actually be her friends, and can’t have real empathy for anyone.

Charlotte wraps her hair in a handkerchief to preserve her silky press, which I appreciated as a reference for the show to make—I was hoping they’d correct the sidelining of Mike from the films, but they seem to be going further than that. Rather than giving us raceblind casting, or cliche’s of Mid-Century racism, between the Shabbat dinner at the Uris’ house, and a lot of the stuff with the Grogan and Hanlon families, the writers seem to be digging into how people created and maintained culture amidst a white hegemony that actively hated them. Hopefully it keeps this up.

Credit: HBO

And now about those opening credits, comprised of a series of beautiful 1950s postcard art—scenes of happy white families doing happy white things, merged with the evil that lurks underneath or at the edges. A boy is lured by a tentacle monster waving a lollipop while the rest of the gang splashes around in a tranquil lake. A smiling teacher points at a blossoming mushroom cloud. A lovely little blonde girl peers into a sewer. And the sequence ends with “Welcome To Derry” splashed out over a postcard in that retro font that’s become so popular over the past decade. It’s goddamn beautiful. The thing that’s good about King, and the thing the best adapters of King bring to the surface, is that Stephen King understands America better than I think most people do—or at least, most white people. He understands that this obsessive dedication to presenting a happy-go-lucky, positive, hopeful vision of life, the idea that each generation will do better than the last, that Small Town Americana will save us all, can only be created to hide some nasty shit. He understands that parents tend to create stories about their children, and only glancingly interact with the lives their children are actually living. That adults simply don’t SEE children. That people with authority will pit the vulnerable against each other to maintain power. That they’ll do anything anything to sweep trauma under the rug or into the sewer and preserve the status quo.

This is why the two main sections of the book are set in the late ‘50s and the mid-‘80s—during times of increased nuclear fear. The mushroom cloud, the utter annihilation that hung over everything humans did in those times, haunts the book. The book spends a lot of its wordcount poking at the moment the terror of World War II became the terror of the Cold War, and the the way all that terror roiled around under the plastic sheen of the 1980s. Its point is to explore the aftermath of the 1940s and 50s; the idea that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—and that if you really think about it for more than a second that’s the most terrifying sentence this side of “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

And now the show has given us a man whose Cold War injury damaged him to the point that he cannot feel fear, and a group of military dumbasses who are going to try to weaponize a FEAR MONSTER to fight the Russkies. And it’s going to entangle that plot with the plucky kids who either end up dead, orphaned, or institutionalized.

Maybe it isn’t subtle, but when have we ever lived in subtle times?

#JustKingThings

Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO

The way the adults walk past a brutal beating is perfection. The way the teachers glare at the children, teach them useless crap, scream at them at every opportunity, have no interest in their emotional lives or problems—it’s unrelenting. The look Lilly’s mom gives her as she pulls up to Juniper Hill? Come on.

Also the choice to set Ronnie and Lilly’s argument against a soundtrack of the Pattycakes playing their stupid loud obnoxious game is fantastic. Not only does it provide a perfect drumbeat of idiocy to a conversation that has actual stakes, not only does it underscore the failure of Lilly’s friendship and allyship, but it’s way louder and more annoying than Ronnie yelling one single word in a moment of real panic. And yet who gets sent to detention? Who describes themself as Guilty as hell?

Turtles all the Way Down

Credit: HBO

I didn’t spot any Turtles this time, did I miss any? But we did get a glimpse of what I think of as IT’s true form in the scene in Ronnie’s bedroom.

Mike Hanlon’s Photo Album

People really hate that Paul Bunyan statue!

Ridiculous Alien Spider, or Generationally Terrifying Clown?

Credit: HBO

The horror scenes in this episode are both real, unsettling, visceral, uncanny, HORROR. And I love them. I also need to mention something specific, which is that both setpieces are extremely sexualized. This is a thing that makes people really uncomfortable about king—just over the weekend I saw yet another Instagram influencer complaining about him and conflating his work with the work of V.C. Andrews, and basically saying that no responsible parent should let even a teen read his work. But, well, I don’t know about y’all, but I started getting sexually harassed and straight-up threatened when I was 10, and a lot of the girls and AFABs I know had it WAY worse than me, and when I came to King at age 11 he was one of the few authors—certainly one of the few cis male authors—who actually dealt with that.

Reading his work, particularly IT, reassured me that I wasn’t imagining it, or exaggerating it.

Could it be that Deadlighting is the opposite of gaslighting?

But here, Ronnie’s fears on focused on the idea that she killed her mother, right? So the obvious imagery would be her mother’s corpse, or ghost. Instead we get this bloody, sticky birth imagery, and a vagina dentata that threatens to eat the girl. Lilly’s dad ended up in pieces, in jars of pickles all over Maine, allegedly, so her vision makes sense—but why is he trying to kiss her on the lips with this thick tuber of a tongue?

Just as I think it was good, in today’s world, to side step the more infamous bits of the book in the film adaptation—it’s one thing to read it, it’s another thing to make a child actor do that—here I think the way they’ve brought the imagery in works perfectly, because it feels rotten and gross without being as obvious about it.