{"id":107628,"date":"2025-10-31T09:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T09:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/107628\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T09:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T09:31:09","slug":"it-welcome-to-derry-recap-season-1-episode-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/107628\/","title":{"rendered":"IT: Welcome To Derry recap: season 1, episode 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Editor\u2019s note: This recap coincides with episode two dropping on HBO Max on October 31. Recaps will return to a Sunday schedule with episode three on November 9.]\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you take them strictly as a pair of recipes, the first<\/a> and second episodes of HBO\u2019s Welcome To Derry look a lot alike: You\u2019ve got a couple of big, grotesque set pieces (one significantly more effective than the other). You\u2019ve got some mixed performances from the younger members of the cast. And you\u2019ve got a bifurcated plotline that struggles mightily to bring the two halves of the show\u2019s brain into conversation. So given those base similarities in their constituent parts, why is \u201cThe Thing In The Dark\u201d a pretty good episode of television, while \u201cThe Pilot\u201d was outright lousy? It\u2019s the cruelty, folks.<\/p>\n

Which is to say that, while the premiere seemed mostly content to poke a stick at easy Stephen King signifiers as it trotted along toward its big, twisty bloodbath, \u201cThe Thing In The Dark\u201d begins tearing into those aspects of the author\u2019s work that continue to make IT such a compelling, queasy read nearly 40 years after its publication. Most especially, it begins peeling the skin back on the casual, cruel complicity of the people of Derry when it comes to awful things happening around them, whether those ugly moments come in the form of extreme instances of bullying or those terrible child murders that keep happening every 27 years or so. There\u2019s nothing to be done about it, of course. Boys will, after all, be boys.<\/p>\n

Austin Guzman\u2019s script gives us a brand new character to serve as a window into all this ugliness-peeking-out-from-behind-the-blinds action: Charlotte Hanlon, wife of Leroy, who\u2019s played by late-coming series star Taylour Paige. Paige\u2019s presence in the episode is another reason this is a significantly better hour of TV than last week\u2019s: The layers of reserve she holds in her eyes with every interaction with the perfectly pleasant (and perfectly monochrome) people of Derry tells volumes without ever having to spell things out\u2014or force the other shoe to drop. Paige, and the show, know we\u2019re primed for certain things to happen when we watch a scene of a Black woman walking on her own in a small, aggressively white town in 1960s America. Instead of going great for the jugular, though, the show teases us with moments when the turn might come, shooting each new approach to a potentially hostile Derry-ite like a horror film in miniature. (An early feint sees a car of hooligans yelling and apparently getting ready to hurl an egg at our heroine\u2014only to reveal they\u2019re actually pissed about the town\u2019s big, ugly Paul Bunyon statue.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

When the ugly moment comes, though, it has nothing to do with race\u2014because the thing lurking in Derry\u2019s heart is a surprisingly egalitarian predator. No, what IT gets off on is weakness, as Charlotte sees a crew of older boys pounding a younger one into pulp in the middle of a major thoroughfare, while the adults of Derry (including genial butcher Stan \u201cStanley Cleaver\u201d Kersh) happily look on. It\u2019s Charlotte\u2019s inability to tolerate injustice, not the color of her skin, that piques the town\u2019s ire, nicely subverting early thoughts on where this story might be headed. It\u2019s not like there aren\u2019t any racists in Derry, obviously: We see lots of ominous looks get tossed at Dick Hallorann and his buddies at a local drinking hole later on, to say nothing of the speed and ugliness with which the forces of \u201cpolite society\u201d seek to pin the theater deaths on Black projectionist Hank Grogan. But the scary thing about Derry, Maine, isn\u2019t that its residents are secret Klan members: It\u2019s that they\u2019re perfectly pleasant, totally normal people, who will smile and nod along while the strong messily devour the weak right before their eyes. Boys will be boys!\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s these moments of steadily ratcheting injustice that curdle the blood far more than the episode\u2019s big grossout ones\u2014which isn\u2019t to say that the first it shows us tonight, when IT tears into Ronnie Grogan\u2019s fears about her mother\u2019s death during her own birth, isn\u2019t a doozy. I don\u2019t entirely love how director-executive producer Andy Muschietti<\/a> shoots and conceives of these big sequences where IT tips its claw to its victims, presented with a taste for Grand Guignol excess that often threatens to render the whole thing excessively goofy. (It\u2019s hard to explain exactly, but it\u2019s something in the difference between the genuine, visceral horror of revealing that Ronnie, having clawed her way out of her faux-mother\u2019s stomach, is still connected to the monstrosity by an umbilical cord\u2014and the eyeroll that comes with the realization that the Caesarean wound she\u2019s now being dragged back toward has big, stupid-looking teeth.) But the slow burn descent into nightmare is an effective one, and the sheer horror the scene piles on Ronnie as her sheets transform into a bloody stomach is suitably overwhelming. (It\u2019s certainly much better than the late-episode set piece that sees Lilly Bainbridge playing peekaboo with Pennywise in the grocery store. I\u2019m not saying you can\u2019t make a monster made out of pickles scary, simply that Muschietti has failed to do so here.)<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s worth noting that the hour\u2019s most unsettling sequences have nothing to do with gnashing womb teeth or pickled dad pates and everything to do with the subtle twisting of bad ideas in people\u2019s heads. It\u2019s in the eyes of teen girls as they watch each other carefully for signs of too much weakness or too much strength. It\u2019s in the sound of their unwanted, hateful game of pattycake dominating the soundtrack as Ronnie fruitlessly begs Lilly to save her dad. It\u2019s in the supposed kindness of police chief Clint Bowers, as he subtly threatens to send Lilly back to mental hospital Juniper Hill if she doesn\u2019t give in and finger Hank Grogan for her friends\u2019 deaths. It\u2019s in the leering smiles of the orderlies at the asylum after she ends up getting dragged back there anyway, while her mother refuses to even acknowledge the horrors she\u2019s inflicting on her child. Welcome To Derry doesn\u2019t have the confidence to forego its grossouts entirely\u2014and it would lose a crucial, if over-the-top, aspect of its identity if it did\u2014but it does have the self-awareness to know that a single facial expression can be worth a thousand nightmare clowns.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Thing In The Dark\u201d is, by no means, a perfect episode of TV. The show still has no clue, for instance, how to marry the Air Base plot to its wider story despite now having members of the Hanlon family situated strategically in both the town and the school. Meanwhile, that story is just full-blown whackadoo, as General James Remar reveals that he\u2019s using Dick Hallorann\u2019s Shine to find and weaponize something that sounds like it might be IT itself in order to beat those dang Ruskies and win the Cold War. (Don\u2019t worry: Leroy has a damaged amygdala from Korea, rendering him The Man Without Fear, so he\u2019ll be the perfect pilot to launch the Pennywise Nuke.) There are good moments in this half of the show\u2019s severed brain, most especially the sequence where Leroy susses out that his attackers from last week couldn\u2019t have been a racist dumbfuck like Chad Rook\u2019s Masters. But god does it feel silly and out of place with anything else happening in this show.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s a marked improvement, at least in part because of that continued focus on the Hanlon clan. (Son Will is a fairly stock \u201cdweeb with a quirk,\u201d befriending Reggie in detention, and getting lightly bullied by classmates. But Paige\u2019s Charlotte is a breath of fresh air.) Last week, when I dinged Welcome To Derry for not trying to be about anything besides \u201cHey, you liked those two IT movies, right?\u201d this was exactly what I was hoping to see. Fingers crossed that this is the start of a trend, as the season dispenses with the deadweight, and gets down to the actual (and far more interesting) business of real horror.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stray observations<\/p>\n

\u2022 An odd, and extremely brief cold open\u2014basically just a quick recap of last week\u2019s ending\u2014leads into our first look at the show\u2019s full title sequence: old-school comic book and magazine covers with little IT-bits hidden in the background. It\u2019s cute!
\n\u2022 Leroy and Will have a classic \u201cjock dad\/nerd son\u201d dynamic, exemplified when Leroy buys the boy a telescope (at Charlotte\u2019s guidance) and the only thing the older Hanlon can think to do with it is spy on the neighbors.
\n\u2022 Paige and Adepo are the first performers on this show to have actual chemistry with each other, whether they\u2019re flirting or delivering a unison \u201cWe\u2019re not fighting\u201d when Will asks them not to argue.
\n\u2022 It\u2019s fascinating to watch the desperate Marge drop herself into the class clown role to appease the Pattycakes\u2014and then get smacked down every time she gets too much attention for the head Patty\u2019s liking.
\n\u2022 \u201cAre you new to the concept of time, Mr. Hanlon?\u201d \u201cYou mean, like, relativity?\u201d Will\u2019s a real Young Sheldon type. (See also his new friend Rich, who\u2019s a nerd for pencils. Welcome To Derry has not suddenly learned to write kids who sound like actual kids.)
\n\u2022 Two new additions to our collection of future IT character family members: Stan Kersh is presumably related to eventual Loser Beverly, while Chief Clint Bowers will eventually beget psychotic bully Henry Bowers.
\n\u2022 Amanda Christine does good work projecting terror in the \u201cbirth\u201d scene. (And the transition from \u201csheets\u201d to skin is exceptionally gnarly.)
\n\u2022 I guess this is as good a time as any to note that I don\u2019t love Muschietti\u2019s conception of Pennywise\/IT, either here or in the films. My issue with the monster clown is that he has no chill, always going for extremes in situations where subtlety would be more scary. (See, for instance, his little wiggle-into-frame move while stalking Lilly in the grocery store. It\u2019s supposed to be unnerving\/funny, but it just comes off like IT has no sense of actual timing.)
\n\u2022 There\u2019s a cute cut from Hallorann upchucking into watching some very, uh, viscous mashed potatoes landing on Lilly\u2019s tray.
\n\u2022 I like Chris Chalk here, but it feels really silly to turn a small Shining cameo King included in the book and build it out to a full character arc.
\n\u2022 It feels worth noting that, unlike Teddy and Susie, we never actually saw Phil die during the mutant baby attack. (His face also doesn\u2019t rot the way Teddy and Susie\u2019s do when Lilly sees them on the cereal boxes during her IT freakout.)\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Editor\u2019s note: This recap coincides with episode two dropping on HBO Max on October 31. Recaps will return…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-107628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}