About time, It: Welcome to Derry. Pennywise has been teasing his grand entrance all season, and this week, the show finally delivered. But while the fan-favorite monster (as played by Bill Skarsgård in full clown regalia) may have been the most anticipated debut on HBO’s Stephen King series, episode five was stuffed to the brim with things that made us scream, both in terror and with incredulous laughter.
Here are 10 memorable things that happened this week on It: Welcome to Derry, ranked from mildest to wildest.
10. Matty’s return
The pint-sized movie fan who seemingly met a grim demise in Welcome to Derry’s first episode unexpectedly reappeared, haunted and weak but very much alive. His friends were too shocked and grateful to really question his story of being held captive in the sewer for months—a mistake they’d soon regret.
9. The kids gobble pills, thinking that will prevent them from feeling fear
Intent on rescuing any other survivors from Derry’s sewer, Lilly, Ronnie, Mike, Margie, and Rick follow Matty back underground, but not before they each pop three pills of “Mother’s Little Helper” (presumably Valium) stolen from Lilly’s mother. We get a brief and mild slow-mo “tripping” sequence… but the effects seemingly wear off before the group’s next scene and certainly do nothing to diminish their fear.
8. Rose tells Francis his plan isn’t going to work
“You think you can put a leash on this thing? It can’t be controlled, Francis!” The Air Force should listen to Rose and call off Operation Precept, like, yesterday.
7. Francis reveals the drug experience that jogged his Derry memories
The reason Francis remembered what happened to him in Derry back in 1908—namely, that close encounter with It, which would have ended an entirely different way if not for Rose’s spot-on slingshot aim—is because he took experimental drugs as part of a Department of Defense security operation. LSD, probably. Too bad, as Rose points out, it didn’t also revive the fear he felt as a kid and prevent him from returning to Derry’s woods to capture the “weapon” he thinks will end the Cold War.
© Brooke Palmer/HBO6. Ingrid’s last name is… what?
We had kind of already suspected Ingrid, the Juniper Hill housekeeper who’s been giving Lilly kind advice and support all this time, might be the married white woman Hank Grogan was having an affair with. (Process of elimination, if you looked at who’s been introduced in the cast so far.) We also weren’t surprised that Hank escaped the bus that was carrying him and others to Shawshank Prison; he’s already spent way too much time behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.
What we didn’t expect was the reveal of Ingrid’s full name: Ingrid Kersh. As in Mrs. Kersh, a character from King’s book who made a vivid impression in It: Chapter Two. The adult Beverly Marsh meets her when she returns to Derry and stops by her childhood home; though Mrs. Kersh seems like a kindly old lady at first, we soon realize she’s yet another deceptive form for Pennywise.
What’s the connection between Ingrid and the Mrs. Kersh that we meet 50-plus years later in It: Chapter Two? Is the latter a supernatural form of Ingrid? Has Ingrid been supernatural all this time? When Ingrid talks to Lilly about her father, is she talking about Bob Grey? And did Pennywise have a hand in Hank’s escape, since all Hank can say about it is “Something attacked the bus… I don’t know what it was”?
© Brooke Palmer/HBO5. Dick Hallorann’s trauma box opens
Dick’s extended vision quest deep beneath 29 Neibolt Street brings him face-to-face with his sinister grandfather, who torments Dick and his grandmother before taking sadistic delight in breaking open Dick’s trauma box. It’s where he’s long been mentally locking away all the psychic horrors he’s encountered, and while we know Dick will get through this—he has a date with the Overlook Hotel, after all—it feels like he’s got some stuff to work through before he can wake up from whatever brain fog he’s trapped in at the end of the episode.
4. Pauly’s sacrifice
As soon as we heard the military guys being told, “If you see something that by any rational measure should not be down there, shoot it,” and then watched Lilly, Will, and company heading into the very same sewer, we knew a collision course was inevitable and tragedy would result.
The feeling intensifies when Major Leroy Hanlon has to light up a nightmarish vision of his wife and warns his best buddy, Captain Pauly Russo, that they can’t hesitate: they must kill “whatever you see down here that’s not supposed to be here.” An old girlfriend, a high-school gym teacher, a… group of Derry kids, including Leroy’s son, Will? Fortunately for the Hanlon family, Pauly realizes the kids are real and dives in front of the bullet meant for Will, sacrificing his own life in the process.
© Brooke Palmer/HBO3. Matty is Pennywise
Surprise, kids! Matty’s been dead all this time, and you’ve been palling around with pure evil. Duck and cover, kiddos!
2. Pennywise can’t cross the dagger
Once we get the full Pennywise reveal, he very nearly makes Lilly his next victim—but stops short just before devouring her. We then see the sacred, 400-year-old dagger, forged from the star that encased the entity when it crashed to Earth, glowing in the sewer water right where a fleeing Taniel dropped it. The entity can’t cross it, and Lilly is saved, though that image of Pennywise with his oversized mouth agape, full of way too many pointy teeth, is going to be hard to shake. (Love the pissy little eye flick when he looks down and realizes what’s stopping him from his tasty meal.)
1. Uncle Sam
The entity thrives by inspiring fear that’s specifically, personally tailored to the person it’s tormenting in that particular moment. Lilly’s jars of pickles, Margie’s worm eyeballs, Ronnie’s gruesome birth, etc. So the fact that Pennywise decides to freak out a pair of soldiers by transforming into Uncle Sam—hissing “I want YOU!” in a way that all but homages the 1996 schlock horror flick of the same title—was maybe episode five’s most shriek-worthy moment.
New episodes of It: Welcome to Derry arrive Sundays on HBO.
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