What’s scarier than a billion-year-old, shapeshifting, child-eating clown? A town full of people who just watch. A town that, when it’s faced with pure, mundane human evil, looks the other way.

After the perfect 10 out of 10 pilot of IT: Welcome to Derry, the big question was whether they could hold the line, or whether it was a fluke. I’m here to tell you Episode 2, “The Thing in the Dark,” holds the line and then digs the trench deeper. The monster is only half of what this show is about. The other half is the disease that is Derry, Maine.

And here’s the real reason your jaw is going to hit the floor. This episode just connected It to The Shining in a way that, realistically, changes everything. You heard me. Dick Hallorann from the Overlook Hotel. He’s here, he’s in Derry, and he’s on a mission. My mind’s absolutely blown.

So the pilot wasn’t a fluke. This is the prestige, long-form It adaptation we’ve always dreamed of. It’s using its runtime to make Derry itself the main antagonist, and I’d argue the human horror is just as terrifying as the supernatural. It’s a two-front war. On one side you’ve got the human evil, the horrifying apathy and racism the Hanlons and Ronnie are facing. On the other you’ve got everything from a Hellraiser-level pickle monster to a universe-bending reveal.

Picking up from the theater massacre, the episode follows the two survivors, Lilly and Ronnie. The town and the police are already gaslighting Lilly, trying to pin the blame on Ronnie’s father, Hank, who’s a Black man in a white town. No one wants to believe in a monster. Ronnie, devastated and furious at Lilly for not clearing her dad, gets a terrifying visit from Pennywise disguised, wait for it, as her dead mother. Lilly, meanwhile, gets stalked by It at the grocery store in one of the freakiest sequences I have ever seen. She has a breakdown, a very public breakdown, and gets sent back to Juniper Hill. Literally the thing she didn’t want to have happen.

At the same time we’re following the Hanlon family. Charlotte witnesses the town’s apathy to violence firsthand, and Major Leroy Hanlon gets read in on the real secret project at the military base.

The Town Is the Ecosystem

This episode makes one thing crystal clear. Pennywise is the predator, but the town is the ecosystem that lets him hunt. The real horror is the human cruelty and, ultimately, the inaction.

The most chilling scene in this episode had no monsters in it. It was Charlotte Hanlon watching a group of boys nearly beat another kid to death in broad daylight. And all the while, our grinning butcher just says, “Boys will be boys. What are you going to do?”

That’s the town’s sociopathy on full display. They’re so warped by the entity beneath them that they’re truthfully incapable of intervening. It’s evil by apathy.

That’s what makes Hank’s framing so terrifying. One racist cop would be bad enough. This is an entire town willing to sacrifice a Black man to close a case they’re too scared to actually investigate. You can call the racism a side plot, but I’d argue it’s a tool that Pennywise’s influence uses in order to feed.

A Nightmare on Elm Street by Way of Hellraiser

That said, the supernatural horror is top tier. This episode felt like it was channeling A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser.

Ronnie’s vision of her dead mother comes with this unbelievably realistic giant umbilical cord dragging her toward a tooth-filled stomach. A stomach with Pennywise’s eyes inside. That is visceral, psychological, A-grade horror.

And Lilly’s scene in the grocery store. Wow. My gosh. She’s trapped in a labyrinth of aisles, and she’s being stalked by these really creepy, leering guys who are all just avatars of Pennywise. As she walks down the different rows, the rows behind her close up. She walks by, and all of a sudden it seals shut. It’s very, very scary, and very creepy. Then her dead father’s brined body parts reassemble into this half-man, half-tentacle thing. It was grotesque for sure, and I’d argue deeply personal.

That goes way past a jump scare. It’s a psychological assault. And the punchline is that it makes her look insane, and she’s dragged back to Juniper Hill.

You have to understand, Pennywise is playing 4D chess. He’s isolating his victims physically and, very clearly, mentally.

Operation Precept and the Man Without Fear

Then there’s the military subplot, and it’s a lore bomb.

“I’ve spent enough time in combat to know a brave man when I see one. But you, Major, are the rarest of creatures, a man without fear, and I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long, long time.”

We find out the spy ring was a loyalty test for Leroy. Why him? Because apparently his time as a POW damaged his amygdala. He is quite literally, and they make this assertion in the episode, a man without fear.

And then they tell him what he’s been brought in for. “Welcome to Operation Precept, a classified DoD crash program with a single purpose. To win the Cold War before the first missile is ever fired.” “You’re building a weapon?” “Close. We’re looking for one.”

The moment they made it clear what was going on there, Mrs. Know-It-All said, “Oh, so it’s Stranger Things.” And I was kind of like, yeah. Yeah, kind of. It seems like that’s what they’re doing. So keep that in the back of your mind as this goes, and think about how it all compares to something like Stranger Things.

Dick Hallorann Is in Derry

The bigger reveal is the quiet, intense airman who’s been staring Leroy down. That’s Dick Hallorann.

The show confirms he’s telepathic, that he has the shine, and the military is using him as a sort of human dowsing rod to find Pennywise’s beacons, or deadlights.

This is massive, and it’s a whole lot more than an Easter egg. It structurally connects the psychic energy of The Shining to the cosmic, fear-eating nature of It. It suggests the shine is a kind of human defense against monsters like Pennywise. I really do feel like this one reveal blows the doors wide open on the connected Kingverse, and it feels kind of brilliant. I know I was blown away by it.

The Verdict

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 2, “The Thing in the Dark,” lands at a solid, rock solid 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

The pilot was a 10 out of 10 because it was a perfect, contained horror film. This episode’s not quite as high, and I’d argue that’s because it’s doing the hard, brilliant work of being a series. It’s waging a two-front war, the unflinching, very real-world horror of racism and apathy on one side and the mind-bending, visceral terror of Pennywise on the other. It’s expanding the lore in a way that feels earned, not cheap. And it’s proving that this show has the depth and the guts to be the new standard for horror on television.

So that’s the 9: the unflinching look at human cruelty, the Hellraiser-level scares, and that universe-bending Dick Hallorann reveal.

I’m genuinely falling in love with this entire series. I think what they’re doing is very, very interesting, and I love it so much when a show has something to say. It makes it great.

The pilot wasn’t a fluke. This show is the real deal. It’s horrifying, it’s smart, and it’s not holding back.

Let me know which is scarier to you: the supernatural evil of Pennywise, or the human evil of the town of Derry. Am I wrong? Am I right? Was I crazy? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.