It: Welcome to Derry Episode 2 Review – “The Thing in the Dark”

Like the series premiere, It: Welcome to Derry‘s second episode “The Thing in the Dark”, is a collection of familiar ideas and storytelling tropes, highlighted by a few fascinating sequences of horror and enticing allusions of stories to come. However, “The Thing in the Dark” takes these conventions, and doubles down on them in maximalist fashion, to its benefit and detriment; while “The Thing in the Dark” certainly ups the ante on its ability to construct terrifying visuals and sequences, its ability to build out character and narrative with the same care and depth is sadly lacking.

Set a week after the horrific double-headed baby demon massacre that closed “The Pilot”, “The Thing in the Dark” spends most of its time tracing two investigations as they being to sprawl through Derry and the characters within it – and the rest of its time with a third story caught between it, a story of race and class that It: Welcome to Derry ties to either end of its larger narrative. The underlying message running between them all – that Derry is a dark, sinister place where humanity begins to splinter – is a prescient one, of course, given that the town is under the influence of a semi-immortal monster that’s been there for a few million years, but how “The Thing in the Dark” goes about laying out that story runs the gamut from convincing to silly, from incredibly unsettling to groaningly straightforward, across those three interwoven narratives.

The top layer of “The Thing in the Dark” follows Lilly and Ronnie as they try to process what happened to them, and protect themselves from the terrifying possibilities lurking on the fringes – which include Pennywise, as it begins to draw them into its grasp with the obligatory horrifying visions. This obviously provides the most visceral satisfaction of the episode – though getting to its big moments are arguably the part of the episode that drags the most, extending the episode’s running time to an entirely unnecessary 63 minutes.

Especially with Ronnie; as she slowly realizes nobody in the town is going to stick up for her father, including the girl who she survived the whole nasty ordeal with, Ronnie is the most effective device in filtering the nastier elements of the town through her and her family; the cops lurking outside their house all hours of the day, the detention her (and young Will Hanlon) are given at school, and the general unease around Ronnie whenever she expresses passion or conviction about something are all wonderful, subtle signs of some of the town’s darker, more unappealing elements – both supernatural and human, as we see through the rampant mid-century racism running underneath the surface of just about every scene in the episode.

At its best, “The Thing in the Dark” observes the power of Derry and a teenage girl’s mind to throw themselves into states of terror; Ronnie gets a bit of thematic redemption by getting the best of these, in an incredibly terrifying scene featuring a uterus full of Pennywise teeth, an umbilical cord Ronnie has to chew through – and of course, the wet, veiny blanket she bursts through, which kicks off the episode’s most impactful sequence. As It fans know, these manifestations are the beginning of Pennywise’s “hunt” – and how it works, to both ground Ronnie as a character who feels an incredible amount of unearned guilt over both her parents, and as someone with the willingness to face terrible things and fight to survive, is the kind of strong foundation I wish more of It: Welcome to Derry was building itself upon.

Her reward, of course, is watching her father get dragged off in cuffs, arrested for the murder of three children even though the police chief (Chief Bowers, most likely the grandfather of the infamous Henry Bowers) admitted he had an alibi and there was no evidence to really suggest him. In what may be a sign of the times (after all, if this is the Pennywise cycle preceding the events of 2017’s It, this cannot end well for these children), there’s no scenario where Ronnie can find a solution to help her father – a lesson Lilly also learns quite harshly, after she “accidentally” implicates Ronnie’s father, and is rewarded with a first-class trip back to Juniper Hill Asylum (another well-known minor presence in Stephen King lore), the very place she was trying to avoid in the first place.

The story in the middle – The Hanlon’s families attempts to adjust to life on and off-base in Derry – is much less effective, and where “The Thing in the Dark” unfortunately drags the most. Once Charlotte and Leroy go their separate ways for the day, It: Welcome to Derry spends too much time on completely conventional elements of story that don’t add any texture to its characters – even in moments where it suggests fascinating ideas, like Delroy’s time as a Korean prisoner of war (which comes up in his self-investigation into his own beating… which turns out to be a farce set up by his boss? What? Anyway – I digress), or that the reason Delroy may have been sent to Derry was because of his wife’s activism, not a cushy assignment working on a top-secret mission.

That mission, which is where Dick Halloran begins to step into the main narrative and provide the third prong of storytelling, may be the most underwhelming part of It: Welcome to Derry two episodes in. As we await the return of Stranger Things, another series with a disappointing story about humans trying to turn creepy monsters into weapons it can control to fight the Cold War is not exactly an exciting proposition – even when it involves one of the most iconic characters of The Shining, it turns out, as “The Thing in the Dark” struggles to understand. It also ungrounds the story of Welcome to Derry in a way that immediately recalibrates everything around it, in a way that’s incredibly un-Kingian; part of It and many other King stories of its ilk is in the care put into observing the small-town lives of its characters, before slowly teasing out the underlying elements driving the heart of the story.

By revealing Dick Hallorann is basically searching for It in the second episode is an incredibly disappointing setup (and basically lays the narrative track from this to the burning of the Black Spot, in incredibly obvious fashion); it is an entirely unnecessary story, an allusion to a larger developing story that’s already been effectively told in so many other forms of media – and to boot, kind of sidelines Delroy inside of his own story. Here, it feels like some weird mix of Love, Death + Robots filtered through a King adaptation, with the added bonus of being able to flagrantly attach itself as a King-flavored Easter egg (in It, his presence is but a mere mention in the middle of a flashback sequence, told as a story to Mike Hanlon), which feels less like a necessary bit of story, than a navel-gazing attempt at an “in-universe crossover”, which itself feels like HBO creeping ever-so-much-closer to an inevitable rebooting of The Dark Tower series that is bound to disappoint.

It’s kind of a feeling a lot of this episode has; by tying itself directly to the families of the source material it is inspired from, It: Welcome to Derry feels entirely willing to shrink its possibility space by adhering to familiar names and characters, tying it back to the 2017 and 2019 films in ways the series shouldn’t have to be married to. On a structural level, it makes the series feel a bit formulaic and tied to its most superficial elements – a feeling that is hard to shake through a lot of this episode, as it goes through perfunctory beat after perfunctory beat, pausing only enough for two terrific, mind-bending sequences that stand in contrast to the creativity and execution of the scenes around it – the only real moments “The Thing in the Dark” is able to turn allusion into momentum, where it feels like the story is willing to step outside its most straightforward, boxed-in structure for something more free-flowing, weird, and frightening.

“The Thing in the Dark” might not be the most compelling second hour – and some of its structural problems already seem to be settling comfortably into the show’s foundation – but it executes its worldbuilding and moments of horror just well enough to keep one’s attention through its wholly-unneeded hour-plus running time. Though I’m still not entirely convinced It: Welcome to Derry has an interesting – or even just unexpected – story to tell, its combination of patient storytelling and thoroughly distressing crescendos suggest there’s still plenty of untapped potential in this high-profile prequel.

Grade: C+

Other thoughts/observations:

• Love hearing Ronnie’s grandma say “Fuck ’em!” to the police lurking around their house all hours of the day.
  
• It is insinuated that Will is a smart kid – which, in TV language, means he cannot have interest in any sports, no matter how bad Daddy wants a game of catch.
  
• Love little bits like the woman complaining about the Paul Bunyan statue putting her butcher order on a tab.
  
• “Maybe I smell bad, or maybe I’m just covered in stardust.” – No. Just no. Sorry! But no.
  
• Look, I don’t think Lilly is crazy – but anyone who starts grocery shopping in the store’s middle aisle needs at least a little bit of help.
  
• At the end, the military dig up a vehicle of dead bodies… which I assume we’ll learn about later, but I’m willing to bet came from one of Pennywise’s previous cycles awake (for those who forget: 27 years off, 12-18 months on).