IT: Welcome to Derry’s premiere was a rousing success when it came to re-establishing Derry and Pennywise’s parasitic grip on the town for TV audiences. The second episode, which picks up in the immediate aftermath of Pennywise’s feeding frenzy at the Capitol Theater, continues to lay groundwork for that violence to escalate and gives more faces time to “shine,” but it also introduces some concerning plot elements which seem liable to really backfire through the rest of the season if they’re handled as shoddily as they are here.
Episode 2 maintains the split focus on the Hanlon family and the kids of Derry… or at least, the ones who survived the premiere. The fallout from Pennywise’s feeding frenzy at the Capitol Theater forms the backbone of the kids’ storyline in Episode 2, as Derry’s police chief Clint Bowers (uh-oh) seems all too ready to ignore the alibi of manager Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) in order to make a quick arrest and put the town at ease. Hank’s daughter Ronnie was reluctant to get involved by letting Lilly (Clara Stack) and her friends into the theater in the first place, and Amanda Christine as Ronnie does a great job with more of the spotlight this week, channelling the frustration, and (later) betrayal, that comes with being punished for a good deed, especially during a profanity-laced tirade Ronnie goes on in the school cafeteria. Lilly’s facing pressure too, as Chief Bowers threatens her with being sent back to the Juniper Hill Mental Hospital unless she incriminates Hank. This episode continues the premiere’s strong development of the imbalanced power dynamics in Derry, and how Pennywise as a force serves as an avatar for that generational, racial, and gender-based strife. All of those factors are in play when it comes to Derry’s newest residents: Leroy’s wife, Charlotte (Taylour Paige), and son Will (Blake Cameron James).
As one of the few Black families in Derry, the Hanlons are already finding themselves on the receiving end of sidelong glances and intimidation from their neighbors and classmates. After a charged encounter with some local bullies, Paige’s Charlotte is particularly strong in her resolve during a scene at the dinner table, where her softer parenting style brushes against Leroy’s feeling that Will is growing up too sheltered. For his part, Will’s intelligence and sensitivity certainly call forward similarities to the kid he’ll have one day, Losers’ Club founding member Mike Hanlon. He seems like he’ll fit right in with Lilly and Ronnie as they all discover more about Pennywise as the season goes.
We also learn a lot more about the nature of that “special projects” facility that Leroy inquired about last week, and how far the military seems ready to go to prevent the looming Cuban Missile Crisis. General Shaw’s (James Remar) explanation of those efforts, and his true purpose for bringing Hanlon to Derry, feels like some serious frontloading for a narrative gambit I am very, very reluctant to get excited for. Much has been said about how Muschietti’s It movies coincided with the explosive popularity of Stranger Things, which itself seemed to pay homage to Stephen King’s IT more than any other of the author’s works, so at first blush, these more sci-fi coded developments and the way they’re being presented here feel the snake eating its own tail. There’s still room for the showrunners to pull a fast one and subvert expectations here, but the exposition-heavy dump of Shaw’s goals in Derry represents what could wind up being a bizarrely specific embellishment for a horror conceit that’s already so malleable as it is.
General Shaw is relying on the extrasensory abilities of one of his subordinates to guide the search efforts: Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk). Episode two spends more time on introducing what kind of guy Dick is rather than focusing on his Shine, especially how he wields his tenuous protected status as Shaw’s golden goose to protect the few other Black airmen stationed at the base. Chalk does some very skillful work keeping this young Hallorann in line with the excellent performances of Scatman Crothers in The Shining and Carl Lumbly in Doctor Sleep, and while he’s tamping down some of Dick’s bravado, Chalk is absolutely channeling the intensity and respect for the supernatural that you’d expect from the character.
Even though episode two again keeps Pennywise proper in the shadows, It eats its fill of fear across a pair of attacks on first Ronnie and then Lilly, which represent the high points of this hour, playing on the insecurities of each girl to satisfyingly grotesque effect. Ronnie spends much of this episode plagued with anxiety over the idea the Derry police could be looking at her father Hank as a suspect in the killings of Teddy, Phil, and Susie in the theater he manages. The guilt at having let her friends into the building, thus opening Hank up to suspicion that the police seem all too ready to drop at his feet, reveals a trauma of Ronnie’s: her mother died during childbirth, and she holds herself responsible for both that tragedy and the subsequent hardship her father had to face because of it. Pennywise forces Ronnie to relive this trauma in grand fashion throughout a pretty terrifically-designed body horror sequence: Ronnie’s sheets become the walls of a uterus which fill up with amniotic fluid Ronnie nearly drowns in before exploding out of her “mom”, only then to be dragged back towards the gnashing, tooth-filled maw that opens up in her belly.
More often than not in horror, scare sequences like this are designed to animate the fears of the characters’ which we the audience are already aware of, so we understand why they’re scared in a specific way. The bedroom sequence inverts this, so the way Pennywise manifests for Ronnie actually fills in gaps in her backstory and gives us a better understanding of where her decisions going forward are rooted. That’s good, economical horror storytelling right there! And gross as hell, to boot!
The hits keep coming with Lilly’s trip to the grocery store, and the cleanup on aisle six that ensues is a patient and creepy-as-hell setpiece to close out the episode. As Lilly wanders the store, unseen forces slide endcaps in behind her, turning the aisles into a labyrinth filled with out-of-focus customers grinning Pennywise grins until she reaches the labyrinth’s heart. I criticized the CG-fueled scares of the first episode as being ineffective, so credit where it’s due to the much-better special effects that bring this sequence to a harrowing close. The way Lilly’s trauma about the very specific and strange nature of her dad’s death manifests here is goopy and awful. I’ll be skipping pickles for the foreseeable future. Actually, that’s a full-blown lie: I had some last night. But I thought of that scene, and it made me queasy. That is also a full-blown lie: pickles rule no matter what and not even Pennywise the Dancing Clown could convince me otherwise.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/it-welcome-to-derry-episode-2-review