There’s something profoundly unsettling about watching a show that understands one simple truth: sometimes the real monsters aren’t the ones with sharp teeth and red balloons. They’re the ones who smile politely while the world burns around them. Episode 2 of HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, titled “The Thing in the Dark,” doesn’t just continue the story—it peels back the skin of 1962 Derry to reveal the rot underneath, and honestly? I’m still processing what I witnessed.
The Evolution From Shock to Substance
After the premiere’s brutal finale—that demon baby massacre that left three of our young protagonists dead—I wasn’t sure where this series could go. How do you follow up that kind of carnage? Writer Austin Guzman and director Andy Muschietti found the answer: you zoom in on the survivors and show us that surviving might be worse than dying.
Episode 2 is a masterclass in restraint. Where the pilot relied on visceral horror and shocking twists, this installment understands that true terror lives in the quiet moments. It lives in the way Police Chief Clint Bowers (Peter Outerbridge) gently threatens young Lilly Bainbridge with a return to Juniper Hill Asylum if she doesn’t change her testimony. It lives in the casual cruelty of the “Pattycakes,” a mean girl clique that torments Ronnie and Lilly with accusations about murder and madness. And it absolutely lives in the cold stares Charlotte Hanlon receives when she dares to stop white boys from beating another child in broad daylight.
The Hanlon Family: Anchors in the Storm
If the first episode belonged to the doomed children in the theater, Episode 2 firmly establishes that this is the Hanlon family’s story. And what a revelation that is.
Taylour Paige’s Charlotte Hanlon is the beating heart of this episode. From the moment she steps onto Derry’s streets, Paige conveys volumes with nothing but her eyes—the way they scan every face, measuring threats, calculating when to speak up and when to stay silent. Charlotte isn’t just a civil rights activist who moved from Shreveport; she’s a woman who’s learned that doing the right thing comes with consequences, but she can’t seem to stop herself from doing it anyway.
That scene where she intervenes in the bullying? Perfection. Everyone else watches with that “boys will be boys” indifference, but Charlotte runs across the street without hesitation. The aftermath—those disgusted stares from white townspeople, not because she stopped violence but because she, a Black woman, dared to disrupt their carefully maintained order—is more chilling than any CGI monster could ever be.
Jovan Adepo’s Major Leroy Hanlon operates on a different wavelength. He’s a man trying to navigate systems that were never designed for him to succeed. When he discovers that his assault in Episode 1 wasn’t a Soviet attack but a racist “test” orchestrated by General Shaw (James Remar), his controlled fury is palpable. Adepo plays Leroy as someone who’s spent his entire military career swallowing indignities, channeling rage into precision and excellence. But now, in Derry, something’s starting to crack.
The dinner table scene where Leroy urges Charlotte to “lay low” and references Shreveport reveals so much. This is a couple who’ve survived by reading rooms, by knowing when to push and when to retreat. But Derry’s different. Something in this town doesn’t just feed on fear—it amplifies every prejudice, every cruelty, every dark impulse that humans already possess.
Young Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James), meanwhile, represents hope tinged with inevitable loss. His first day at Derry High, where he’s immediately othered and bullied, connects directly to Charlotte’s street intervention. The show is drawing a through-line: this family’s tragedy isn’t random. Derry targets them specifically because of who they are and what they represent.
Lilly and Ronnie: Trauma Personified
Clara Stack’s performance as Lilly continues to be a standout. That opening sequence where she relives the theater massacre isn’t just a nightmare—it’s PTSD rendered in supernatural horror. Stack plays Lilly with this fragile determination, like she knows she’s one step away from breaking but refuses to give Derry the satisfaction.
Her grocery store encounter with Pennywise might be the episode’s most effective horror sequence. Those pickle jars—a callback to her father’s death at the pickle factory—transforming into containers of rotting body parts that congeal into a grotesque monster? It’s visceral, yes, but it’s also deeply personal. Pennywise doesn’t just scare; he weaponizes grief, guilt, and trauma.
Amanda Christine’s Ronnie faces her own nightmare in that bed scene—literally trapped under covers that transform into a womb, forced to confront her mother’s ghost accusing her of causing her death during childbirth. It’s body horror with emotional depth. The umbilical cord she must bite through to escape isn’t just gross (though it definitely is); it’s symbolic of cutting ties with guilt that was never hers to carry.
These sequences reveal something crucial about how this version of Pennywise operates. He’s not just a boogeyman who pops out and says “boo.” He’s a psychological predator who studies his victims, finds their deepest wounds, and twists the knife with surgical precision.
The Military Subplot: Hubris Meets Horror
Here’s where Episode 2 really surprised me: the Air Force base storyline actually became interesting. General Shaw’s revelation that he’s hunting for a “weapon” buried beneath Derry—one that “emits fear”—transforms what could have been a bland military plot into something far more sinister.
The Cold War paranoia, the nuclear anxiety, the desperation to find any advantage over the Soviets… Shaw represents humanity’s arrogance in thinking we can control or weaponize forces we don’t understand. Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann (yes, that Dick Hallorann from The Shining) clearly knows more than he’s letting on. That wink he gives Leroy after reporting the dig site discovery? He’s playing a longer game.
And what they find—a 1930s car filled with human skeletons—connects directly to the show’s larger mythology. Andy Muschietti revealed in interviews that the three planned seasons would explore 1962, 1935, and 1908 respectively. This isn’t just backstory; it’s laying groundwork for Pennywise’s entire timeline in Derry.
Race, Fear, and American Mythology
What makes Episode 2 truly exceptional is how it uses Stephen King’s supernatural framework to examine real-world horror. The episode doesn’t just gesture at racism—it makes racism and supernatural evil uncomfortably intertwined.
Consider: Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) is arrested not because there’s evidence, but because the community needs a Black scapegoat for unexplainable violence. Lilly’s words are twisted by police who know she’s vulnerable. Charlotte is viewed with suspicion for showing basic human decency. Meanwhile, white children can literally be ripped apart by demons, and the adults’ first instinct is still to blame the Black man who runs the theater.
The episode’s title sequence—those Norman Rockwell-style paintings of idyllic Americana gradually revealing Pennywise lurking in the backgrounds—is perfect visual storytelling. It’s saying: the monster was always there, hiding in plain sight, fed by the very people who claim to be its victims.
This is what Stephen King’s novel always understood but what the films somewhat sidestepped: Derry itself is complicit. The town doesn’t just suffer Pennywise’s presence; it enables him. Every time adults look away from bullying, every time authorities ignore evidence to pursue easier targets, every time neighbors choose comfortable silence over uncomfortable truth—they’re feeding the entity.
Technical Excellence and Atmospheric Dread
From a craft perspective, Episode 2 is gorgeous. The production design captures early 1960s Maine with impressive detail—those period-accurate costumes, the vintage cars, the way light filters through windows. But more importantly, it captures the feeling of that era: the surface pleasantness masking deep anxieties, the nuclear family ideal cracking under pressure, the sense that America was on the cusp of violent transformation.
Andy Muschietti’s direction is more controlled here than in the premiere. He trusts his actors to convey horror through expression rather than always relying on effects. That said, when the effects come, they’re memorable—even if, as some critics noted, the CGI can tip from terrifying into absurd (looking at you, umbilical cord scene).
Benjamin Wallfisch’s score, returning from the films, continues to be effective. It knows when to swell and when to pull back, letting silence do the heavy lifting.
Unanswered Questions and Building Dread
As Episode 2 ends with Lilly dragged back to Juniper Hill by orderlies with leering smiles and her mother refusing to acknowledge her suffering, I found myself with more questions than answers:
- What exactly is General Shaw planning to do if he finds Pennywise?
- How much does Dick Hallorann know, and why is he helping the military at all?
- Will Ronnie and Lilly’s friendship survive Hank’s arrest?
- How will young Will Hanlon navigate a school environment that’s hostile to his very existence?
- And most crucially: how does one family’s arrival in Derry connect to whatever awakened Pennywise this particular cycle?
The Verdict: Horror That Resonates
Episode 2 of IT: Welcome to Derry proves that this series isn’t interested in being a simple horror prequel. It’s using King’s mythology to explore how societies create their own monsters through complicity, how fear becomes a tool of oppression, and how the most vulnerable among us—children, minorities, the traumatized—bear the brunt of collective denial.
Is it perfect? No. The pacing occasionally drags, some effects undermine rather than enhance scares, and the ensemble cast means certain characters get shortchanged. But when it works—and it works more often than not—it’s genuinely disturbing television that understands horror’s true purpose: holding up a mirror to real-world atrocities.
Taylour Paige and Jovan Adepo elevate every scene they’re in. Clara Stack continues to make Lilly the emotional anchor we need. And the show’s willingness to make 1962 racism as terrifying as supernatural evil? That takes courage.
I’m not sure I enjoyed Episode 2, but I couldn’t look away. And isn’t that what great horror should do? Not just scare us with what lurks in sewers and shadows, but with what lurks in human hearts?
Next Sunday can’t come soon enough. Derry has its hooks in me now, and like the characters themselves, I’m not sure escape is possible anymore.
Rating: 8.5/10
The scares might be hit-or-miss, but the character work and thematic depth are exceptional. This is horror with something to say—and in 2025, that feels more necessary than ever.
IT: Welcome to Derry airs Sundays on HBO and streams on HBO Max. Episode 3 premieres November 9, 2025.
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