The penultimate episode of HBO’s Stephen King series empowered all its baddies at once—with devastating consequences.
Kids being menaced by supernatural monsters is nothing new in horror, but it sure does seem to be happening a lot lately. Most recently, we’ve gotten reacquainted with Stranger Things‘ Vecna, now featuring military backup he didn’t ask for but is certainly using to his advantage.
But now, just a little over a week past the long-anticipated arrival of Stranger Things season five, It: Welcome to Derry has dropped an episode that declares its villains the best at being the worst. And if you think that plural is a mistake—that Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the guy who cackled through both Andy Muschietti movies, is the only game in town—think again. The show has been carefully laying the foundation for its big climax all this time, and the jaw-dropping events of episode seven deliver, deliver again, and then throw one last big twist in your face, just for funsies.
So, with that in mind, let’s break down the range of monsters featured in It: Welcome to Derry. We definitely can’t rank them because they’re all awful, but they’re also all awful in different ways.Ingrid Kersh
Ingrid (Madeleine Stowe) got major backstory in last week’s “In the Name of the Father,” and Welcome to Derry went deeper this week, returning to 1908 to show us Ingrid’s life with her father, Bob Gray, the original Pennywise the Dancing Clown. He was the actual human beneath the make-up, before the entity in Derry’s woods got ahold of him.
We don’t see exactly what happens when he gets “taken,” and we don’t learn exactly why the entity decided Pennywise would be its ideal form. But we get some hints. During a performance at that same dinky carnival we saw back in episode three—the one with the li’l Shaw and Rose flashback—we notice an emotionless child gazing at the clown from a distance, watching the clown’s effect on the kid-filled audience. Later, the boy appears during Bob’s smoke break (wig off, greasepaint smeared) and asks for help. Bob’s reluctant (he literally tells the kid, “Scram!”), but he eventually agrees to go into the forest.
In just a few scenes, Bill Skarsgård gets to explore new facets of his signature character, and he wastes not a second of the opportunity. (He also gets to reverse-engineer his scary Pennywise voice into something more earthbound; much like Bob himself, it’s got a forced chipper quality that almost masks all the melancholy pulsing underneath.)
Bob clearly mourns his glory days working for a real, big-top circus—where bratty kids don’t run onstage at the end of your act and rip the wig off your head. But he’s kind to Ingrid and supports her dream of performing, praising her efforts when she shows off her make-up, costume, and wig. He even suggests she use the stage name “Periwinkle,” as her mother once did.
The adult Ingrid is still clinging to the memory of that father-daughter bond with all her might; over 50 years later, she’s still seeking Daddy’s approval. We learned as much in last week’s episode. But in episode seven, we learn how twisted it gets. As you’ll recall, she sought the help of Charlotte Hanlon (Taylour Paige) to bring Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) to the Black Spot.
