If you’re anything like me, you spent Thanksgiving weekend watching all four hours of the newest Defunctland video on YouTube. (If you haven’t, do check it out. You’ll thank me later.) The channel’s epic deep dive into the failure of Disney’s Living Characters Initiative was fresh on my mind as I watched Bill Skarsgård, in full Pennywise getup, pop out from behind a blood-red curtain and dance his bizarre routine before getting upstaged by kids who will never know the joy of a Game Boy.
There’s not a lot in common between Pennywise and Mickey Mouse. One is an otherworldly creature of alien origin who feeds on the innocent, the other is Pennywise. But both are avatars of dreams in their own ways. “One day, the big tent will come a’calling again. You’ll see,” the (human, not particularly evil) Pennywise tells his daughter. You can see in Skarsgård’s eyes the longing for a life out of reach. He will never see his dream through, just as Walt Disney never saw the behemoth his empire became. I say that removed of bittersweetness and sentimentality—it’s just a fact. Try as we might, none of us control who we become after we’re gone.
IT: Welcome to Derry episode 7, “The Black Spot,” plays out an inevitability: The burning of Derry’s only Black-owned bar. What was just a few sentences in Stephen King‘s novel and described in retrospect is now fleshed out with all the necessary horror and rage it demands. The tragedy of a community in peril is that no matter who its perpetrators are, violence follows them. You can also say that about everyone in Derry.
Here’s what happened in IT: Welcome to Derry episode 7, “The Black Spot.”
Eyes of the Beholder
It’s impressive how much the IT films and Welcome to Derry recognize the power of eyes. I’ve mentioned before that the visual motif of eyes in darkness is something of a personal trigger of mine; I get spooked at the notion of something staring back at me. Welcome to Derry has used this motif to incredible effect, and in episode 7 especially. It’s dawning on me now it’s all one big nod to the Deadlights—Pennywise’s true alien form.
In a prologue set in 1908 that kicks off the episode, we see Pennywise as a living man. He’s little more than just a sad clown (played by Bill Skarsgard, of course) with a contempt for his audience of children. Though he knows how to make them laugh, he also makes them cry, with his act being a bizarre nonverbal performance that explores the cyclical nature of life and death. Despite how much of a bummer his show is, it’s still a hit; it’s exciting enough to inspire kids to rush the stage. But Pennywise isn’t thrilled with his modest success. Backstage, he tells his daughter—at work on a clown persona of her own—that he’s just biding time until he can perform for a bigger audience again.
At night, a boy steps out from the forest, eyes lit from underneath, and asks in a voice devoid of spirit if he can help him find his mother. “The Entity” has taken a new shape, different from the wendigo, and it lures the real Pennywise into the dark from which he’ll never return. Suddenly, a girl has lost her father, which will make it very easy for her to fall for anyone, or anything, that claims to be him.
“We Have Sinners at Home”
In the same year that Sinners was such a major hit, IT: Welcome to Derry has unwittingly put on its own rendition of a Black establishment under siege by white racists. But unlike Sinners, the monsters aren’t only outside. They’re inside, too.
Following a tense standoff over Ronnie’s dad Hank (Stephen Rider), the Maine Legion of White Decency (or so they might name themselves soon) locks the building to burn it down. That’s when Pennywise slithers his way in to feast and fatten up for another 27-year slumber.
Some of our heroes are caught in the fire. All the kids except Lilly are present at The Black Spot. While Ronnie (Amanda Christine) and Will (Blake Cameron James) scramble to get Hank and themselves out, Rich (Arian S. Cartaya) valiantly saves his fair maiden Marge (Matilda Lawler, who is low-key the MVP of this whole show). In what is easily the saddest moment in all of Welcome to Derry thus far, Marge and Rich express love and goodbyes as Rich suffocates and burns to keep Marge safe. Recalling their first encounter, “You saw me staring and you said, ‘Take a picture, it’ll last longer.'” He then tells her what he wished he said then: “I wish I could.”
Jesus, this show.
Anyway, the burning of The Black Spot is the episode’s core, its destruction evolving from an elaborate set piece to a flashpoint moment where multiple story threads unravel at once. While Rich dies to save Marge, Dick (Chris Chalk) finally speaks to the spirits haunting him. It was just two weeks ago when Dick told Leroy (Jovan Adepo) that he avoids addressing the ghosts directly. Now with his and other people’s survival at stake, he bothers to ask for help getting the kids out. Some, like a Shokopiwah war chief, are more willing to help than others. Ahead of the final episode, Dick learning he can directly communicate with the dead, and that some might be willing to help, might pay off big-time soon.
In It: Welcome to Derry episode 7, we learn much more about Pennywise’s origins.
After the Fires
Even after the fire clears and Pennywise withdraws into his long sleep, there’s still plenty of an episode left to go. The kids, plus Will’s mom Charlotte (Taylour Paige), figure what to do with Hank. Charlotte brings him to Rose (Kimberly Guerrero), cashing in on Rose’s offer to help her that she made earlier in the season. They cook up a new plan to smuggle Hank across the Canadian border. But that will have to wait, now that the military has their hands on something they shouldn’t.
Dick’s communication with the Shokopiwah chief leads him to the location of one of the pillars, where the U.S. military extracts a shard from the ground. Although Dick is in rough shape, his work pays off as the military begins experimenting with the shard—and casually, I may add, in a way that doesn’t vibe with Leroy, who knows the danger of Pennywise better than the rest of them. The episode’s climax takes place in a military lab, where Leroy pulls a gun on his superiors, compelling General Shaw (James Remar) to talk him down.
Ever the diplomat, Shaw delivers his big (villain?) speech to reveal his ultimate motive: He doesn’t wish to use Pennywise as a weapon against the Soviets, but as a weapon against Americans. “You see what’s happening out there, Leroy? Americans are at each other’s throats, and it’s only getting worse,” he says. “This country is slowly fracturing into a thousand jagged, ill-fitted pieces. I am only trying to prevent another civil war … and the one thing that makes people listen is fear.”
Leroy eventually stands down, an act Shaw commends to his face. But when Leroy walks out the door, he orders another soldier: “Make sure that man does not leave this base.” I never trusted Shaw, and I’m glad my instincts were right again.
The episode ends at the sudden awakening of a familiar face: Pennywise. See, halfway into the episode, Ingrid (Madeleine Stowe), in full Periwinkle makeup, “reunites” with her “father” right outside The Black Spot as it burns. Still in the delusion that the people-eating monstrosity is her dad, she grows heartbroken when Pennywise insists on turning in for his long sleep.
That’s when it dawns on Ingrid that this thing isn’t her father (duh!!!). “You are not my father. What have you done with him?” she demands. “Oh. I ate him,” he says before laughing in his signature way, a laugh that sounds like the whistle of a rusty pipe. He then taunts Ingrid by using her father’s memory against her, freezing her in the Deadlights. But he doesn’t eat her. Ingrid’s dead body is recovered later by the medics the morning after, but an eerie movement of her eyes (again: eyes!) suggests she’s not dead. Not completely.
The episode ends with the man it started with. Pennywise now dwells in the sewers of Derry. Surrounded by the severed limbs and insides of his victims, Pennywise sleeps, until he’s suddenly awoken by something. Seems he doesn’t need all 27 years to rest.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.esquire.com ’
