This week’s ill-advised plan to rescue their friend from the sewers is what the series needed to finally move the story forward.
Photo: Brooke Palmer/HBO

It took a minute (four hour-long episodes, to be exact), but it finally feels like Welcome to Derry is going somewhere. It’s not just the arrival of Pennywise in his familiar clown form — though it is a relief to see him after all the heavy teasing. It’s more the sense that the storylines are coming together in a way that gives the plot forward momentum. In “Neibolt Street,” the disparate characters collide in a very literal sense as they navigate the sewers beneath Derry. Even as I struggle to imagine a satisfying conclusion for a prequel that, by its nature, can’t offer much closure, I’m starting to feel more confident in the journey.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still have lots of questions, like how Lilly is able to visit a convalescing Marge when everyone thinks that Lilly stabbed her in the eye with a metal wood chisel. For her part, Marge has told a semi-believable lie about her glasses breaking, and she seems fully committed to repairing her friendship with Lilly now that she knows the monster is real. At the Standpipe, Ronnie suggests to Lilly that Marge could tell the truth and exonerate Hank, which doesn’t really make any sense but I sympathize with her desperation. The kids don’t have much time to debate it before they’re interrupted by a new arrival: Matty, whose supposed death was the series’ inciting incident. He is filthy but alive, and he has a harrowing story to share about what he’s escaped from in the sewers. “That’s where it lives, the clown,” he reveals, launching into gruesome details about watching Pennywise eat Teddy’s brains and seeing Susie slowly bleed to death. According to Matty, Phil is still alive — something a commenter wondered a few weeks back — but incapacitated. While the obvious next move here would be going to the cops, Matty refuses, knowing they would immediately send him back to the father he ran away from. From what we know of Chief Bowers and the Derry Police, he’s probably right, and home sounds like a dangerous place. “I’d sooner go back to the sewers than there,” Matty says.

Over at Derry Air Force Base, Dick has finished plumbing the depths of Taniel’s memories for the location of the pillars. When Leroy once again demands answers, General Shaw spits out more exposition: Hundreds of years ago, the Sqoteawapskot people carved 13 objects from the thing that fell to earth carrying the creature, and they buried them to create a cage around its territory. “You’re telling me that Derry’s a prison and we’re looking for the bars,” Leroy summarizes. This is mostly superfluous to those of us who were paying attention to last week’s lengthy flashback, but we do get a much clearer idea of Shaw’s plan. If they can reduce the size of the creature’s cage, they can capture it. How that would actually translate to being able to use it as a weapon against the Soviets, I couldn’t tell you — and I’m not sure Shaw could either. That’s a later problem. For now, Leroy and Colonel Fuller will lead a team into 29 Neibolt Street, the abandoned house built over the tunnel system that will take them to the 13 pillars. Leroy is still stuck on the whole “Derry as a cage for ancient evil” concept. Couldn’t Shaw have given him a heads-up before the rest of the Hanlon family relocated there?

Charlotte gets another lesson on the dark side of Derry when she witnesses the prison transfer of Hank Grogan, who is being sent to Shawshank. As Bowers warns him that the last transferred inmate didn’t last a week there, an irate man pushes past the barricade with a gun. “You’re gonna fry for what you did to my kids,” the man (presumably Phil and Susie’s father) snarls, then opens fire. Miraculously, the cops protect Hank, but Charlotte is shaken — even more so when she sees one particularly sweaty officer watching the proceedings and flashing a Pennywise smile in her direction before disappearing. Later, Leroy comes home and tells Charlotte he’s going to share something crazy, but that she needs to believe him. While we don’t hear the rest of their conversation, given what she’s already seen, it’s not surprising she doesn’t put up a fight about leaving Derry and moving to the nearby base, which turns out to be just outside the boundaries of the creature’s cage.

Rose has also shown up at the base to confront Shaw, furious about the abduction of her nephew. Shaw admits that his memories of Derry actually came back five years prior, when he was administered a drug by the DOD (sure, why not), and that he returned with the intention of using the entity they encountered as kids to keep the country safe. “You think you can put a leash on this thing? It can’t be controlled, Francis,” says Rose, the only sensible person on this show other than Charlotte. Realizing she can’t stop Shaw from moving forward with his plan, she asks for the opportunity to prepare Taniel to go down into the tunnels with the military. She brings him the dagger carved from the fallen star and reminds him, “Keep it close and you’ll be safe.” There’s something Rose and Taniel know that Shaw and his men don’t, but we’re still in the dark about what that is. (Frankly, I think the military already knows enough to keep from going down there, but I’m not in charge of this mission.)

Lilly is carrying out her own ill-advised plan to venture into the sewers to rescue Phil, even after her Juniper Hill friend, Ingrid, tells her she’s not thinking straight. “Friends or not, it’s not worth you dying, too,” she says. (Yes, Madeleine Stowe’s character now has a name, and it’s a significant one. I’m keeping my thoughts in the Losers Club section, just in case you’re trying to avoid even speculative spoilers.) Lilly brings newfound ally Marge to the Standpipe, where she tells her friends they’ll need to travel down to the monster’s lair. Everyone is appropriately horrified, but Lilly is quite good at big, motivating speeches — plus, she threatens to drag Matty to the cops if he doesn’t lead them to Phil. Rich worries they’ll be eaten, which is a valid concern, but Lilly thinks they’ll be protected if they take her mom’s Valium. She reasons they can take three each since her mom pops these pills like candy. “If they weren’t safe, she’d probably be dead by now,” Marge chimes in, which really made me laugh. As did the idea that these children would be remotely functional on a triple-dose of benzos.

It’s about to get very crowded in those sewers! Leroy and Fuller lead a team into the Well House and down the well (it’s the titular role). Fuller tells his men, “Whatever form this enemy takes, it will use your own personal fears against you,” urging them to shoot if they see anything unusual down there. Despite that warning, things go to shit pretty instantly. Two soldiers get lost and are attacked (and presumably eaten) by It in the form of a giant demonic Uncle Sam. Taniel runs from Fuller and immediately drops the protective dagger. Leroy and Pauly get separated from the others, and Leroy is shocked to discover that Charlotte is also wandering the sewers. As she takes on Pennywise’s favorite form — a CGI monster running jerkily at the camera — Leroy remembers Fuller’s advice just in time to shoot her in the head. But Dick has it the worst of all. He finds himself transported to a bathroom with his grandmother, who once again warns him, “He’s coming for you.” It turns out she’s been sounding the alarm about the arrival of Dick’s abusive grandfather, who shows up with a lockbox in hand. He knows that lockboxes are how Dick and Rose keep evil spirits at bay, and he demands that Dick open this one. (I can’t believe how hard this show is leaning into Doctor Sleep lore. Head to the Losers Club section for additional context!) It doesn’t seem like Dick has much choice in the matter, though. His grandfather’s face contorts into a Pennywise grin as he busts open the lock.

Elsewhere in the sewer, Matty leads Lilly, Ronnie, Will, Rich, and Marge — so high on Valium that Rich and Marge are dazedly holding hands — to where he’s been held captive. Right away, they stumble on the bodies of their friends: Teddy, Susie … and Phil. Looks like Matty hasn’t been entirely honest. In fact, as you might have guessed well before this moment, he’s not Matty at all. At long last, the boy transforms into Pennywise the Dancing Clown. “Duck and cover, kiddos,” he growls. Suddenly he’s chasing after them as they flee in terror, Valium be damned. Lilly falls behind, and it briefly looks like she won’t make it out of the sewers. Pennywise catches up to her and opens his gaping maw wide, but at the last moment, he’s thwarted by Taniel’s dagger, which had conveniently fallen right in front of the spot where Lilly is standing. Nearby, her friends have problems of their own — as they run toward the sewer exit, they cross paths with Leroy and Pauly. Naturally, Leroy assumes that his son is another trick by the shapeshifter. He aims his gun at Will and fires, but not before Pauly steps in front of the bullet’s path. Yes, Leroy has accidentally shot his best friend, though at least he’s spared the trauma of killing his child. Pauly takes it shockingly well, using his dying words to tell Leroy to “make it count.”

It’s chaos in the sewers, but that doesn’t mean things are much calmer on the surface. The prison bus transporting Hank to Shawshank was attacked — by what, we don’t yet know — and he’s escaped. We catch up with him in the backseat of Ingrid’s car, and after she drives him out to the woods, the two embrace. As I speculated last week, she is indeed the woman Hank was with on the night of the Capitol Theatre massacre. With officers everywhere looking for him, there’s no safe way out of Derry, but Hank has an idea: He sends Ingrid to the Derry Air Force Base in search of Charlotte. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s husband is debriefing with Shaw, while obviously fudging the details of Pauly’s death. “These people, they will answer for what they led us into,” Shaw assures Leroy. (I don’t doubt that he will find a way to blame Derry’s Indigenous population for the sewer slaughter, but … come on, man.) He also confirms that Hallorann still hasn’t reported back to the base. We catch up with Dick as he finally exits the sewers, looking haunted by what he’s endured. It surely doesn’t help that the first thing he sees is a dead Pauly wandering aimlessly through the woods. We flash to the lockbox on the bathroom floor, now open and glowing. Whatever Dick was trying to keep trapped in there has been set loose.

• Okay, so let’s talk about the lockbox. Last week, I mentioned that Dick’s grandmother Rose telling him to “keep that lid on tight,” might be a reference to the lockboxes introduced in Doctor Sleep. In the novel, she teaches him that he can get rid of harmful spirits by trapping them in a lockbox in his mind. He passes on this knowledge to Danny Torrance, who is being tormented by malevolent ghosts from the Overlook Hotel following the events of The Shining. At the end of Doctor Sleep — stop reading to avoid spoilers — Danny is able to open his mental lockbox to unleash the Overlook spirits on the True Knot.

• Dick’s terrifying grandfather is also mentioned in Doctor Sleep. He was physically and sexually abusive toward Dick, and continued to torment him as a ghost. In fact, he was the first spirit Dick trapped in his lockbox.

• So what was in the lockbox that Pennywise opened? Given Dick’s reaction to seeing Pauly at the end of the episode, it could be that the box wasn’t holding one person, but rather the entire “I see dead people” aspect of Dick’s shine.

• Patting myself on the back for my throwaway comment last week about Madeleine Stowe playing a younger version of Mrs. Kersh, the old woman Beverly encounters when she returns to Derry as an adult. In the novel It and the movie It: Chapter Two, Mrs. Kersh is not a real person, but a manifestation of Pennywise. That doesn’t mean the creature wasn’t telling the truth about Mrs. Kersh being Bob Gray’s daughter, however.

• For the time being, Mr. Kersh seems to be the bigger threat — he’s implied to be an abusive alcoholic. But if Ingrid really is the daughter of the clown whose form Pennywise took on, then perhaps she was the little clown girl in the carnival flashback in episode three. (Shoutout to the commenter who made this connection!)

• I know I’ve already gone heavy on lore, so just one more brief note: The Sqoteawapskot people have an explanation for the population of Derry being varying degrees of messed up. The creature sheds, and “its discharge has tainted Derry’s groundwater since the town’s founding.” Gross!

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