‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Stars Break Down ‘The Thing in the Dark’ (VIDEO)

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry Episode 2, “The Thing in the Dark.”]

Happy Halloween, boos and ghouls. To celebrate the spookiest day of the year, HBO Max has dropped the second episode of It: Welcome to Derry a couple of days early, and in it are tons of chilling moments.

The episode finds Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) and Ronnie Grogan (Amanda Christine) reeling — pardon the pun — after the movie theater attack. The police are looking for answers, and they’re not inclined to believe that a flying mutant baby was responsible for the melee on three children. Instead, they’ve got their eye on Hank (Stephen Rider), whose alibi is that he was home at the time, and his mother can attest to it.

Over in Hanlon-land, Leroy (Jovan Adepo) is delighted when Charlotte (Taylour Paige) and their son Will (Blake Cameron James) finally arrive, but they’re immediately greeted with visibly irritated neighbors who don’t seem happy about a Black family moving in. “Are you sure we’re good here?” Charlotte asks in response to that chilly reception. The answer, in so many ways, is no, and she soon realizes as much when she sees a group of kids ganging up on a boy as the adults nearby just ignore the violence. After she runs over to stop the attack, people just stare at her. Making matters worse, Leroy also thinks she should’ve stayed out of it.

Of these experiences, Jovan Adepo told TV Insider, “Charlotte notices it much sooner, and I think that’s just because Leroy is just so laser-focused — and possibly to a fault — that he’s really not seeing those microaggressions and those little moments around town the same way that Charlotte would.. I’m spending so much time on the base and on mission, she’s actually experiencing the town in a more organic way.” Taylor Paige agreed with that assessment, adding, “Sometimes women know. We just know. We don’t know why we know, but we do.”

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Will gets his own taste of Derry’s particular flavor of cruelty when he has his chair kicked out from under him as he tries to sit down in class. He also gets chewed out by the teacher for being late, and he gets detention after someone throws a smoke bomb at him. On a brighter note, though, he later meets fellow outcast Rich (Arian S. Cartaya), as well as Ronnie, who gets detention for snapping back at people calling her father a murderer.

Ronnie has plenty else to deal with, too. She’s subjected to an individual scare involving her bed turning into a giant womb and then a corpse of her dead mother. Of that scene, Amanda Christine said, “Ronnie does feel guilty of her mom’s death and also… the fear of losing another parent. Because her father is the only parent that she’s known, and now having to live with her grandmother during the financial issues, I think it was very hard for Ronnie to know that she doesn’t have her mother, especially going through a tough time in 1962 during this era with the racial tension and everything that’s happening.”

While Leroy tries to have a moment of relaxation along with Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), in which the latter admits he’s part of a super-secret military project, they realize they are not wanted at this particular establishment and head back to base. There, they find out Dick has special privileges to come and go even in a lockdown, just like he bragged about; the perks of that might be nice, but we soon find out he’s also under immense pressure to find something before it’s too late.

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Chief Bowers (Peter Outerbridge), an apparent ancestor of It villain Henry Bowers, is pressured to arrest Hank and grills Lilly on what really happened at the theater. After threatening to send her back to Juniper Hill if she sticks to her story, she says she can’t be certain Hank wasn’t at the theater, which is enough for an arrest, which infuriates Ronnie as she confronts Lilly.

For Stephen Rider, portraying a false arrest was something all too familiar for him. “Unfortunately, I’ve had my run-ins with the police in my life, and that was an extremely traumatic experience, from when I was a child ’til now, and so I was able to draw on experiences that I had.” He also looked to the particularities of the era to enhance the fear factor of that moment, saying that because it’s 1962, “he’s helpless. He doesn’t have people that have access to cameras or social media, that can report what’s going on to everybody else to let them know the atrocities.”

On base, Leroy decides to perform an experiment to find out whether the racist airman from before, Masters (Chad Rook), was the one to attack him in his room. Knowing how complicated the weapon that was pointed at him is to assemble, he gives the man both the piece and the ammo and watches him struggle with it. It’s then that he confronts General Shaw (James Remar), saying he knows it was him who attacked him in his room. Shaw admits as much, saying it was a test of his loyalty that he passed. Apparently, Leroy’s amygdala was damaged in service, and he wanted to see it for himself before inviting him in on the classified operation.

Does that mean Leroy doesn’t have fears? Not so, according to Adepo: “We had a conversation about that earlier on in production because I was concerned that in a show that’s all about fear, playing a character who has zero fear, there’s a danger of making him really boring. But Andy [Muschietti, cocreator] reassured me that it’s not that he’s without fear, he just has a higher threshold for the feeling of fear.” Instead, what Leroy really fears is not being able to take care of his family and “the weight of being a Black man in 1962.”

HBO

Speaking of fears, Lilly is the next to experience a solo scare when she goes to the grocery store and hears everyone around her whispering about her mental state before she finds herself trapped in a corner full of pickle jars as her dead father’s face begins popping up in pieces inside of them.

As for whether Lilly’s true fear is going insane or being perceived that way, Clara Stack said of her character, “I honestly think that she’s just trying to convince herself that this isn’t happening, and she’s trying to ground herself because she’s hearing all these voices, and then she sees the kids printed on the cereal boxes, and then she goes into a corner where she’s trapped, and there’s pickles all over her… She’s trying to ground herself and kind of keep calm, and then she realizes that she’s not safe.” The result of the encounter is that she’s sent back to the mental institution anyway.

Watch the full video above for much more behind-the-scenes intel and deep dives from the cast and creatives into everything that happened in It: Welcome to Derry‘s second episode.

It: Welcome to Derry, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO & HBO Max