‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ episode 4 recap: the sweet taste of fear

THIS GROUP OF KIDS in IT: Welcome to Derry have far clearer theories of It than the Losers Club in the films. After another incident in the river, Will concludes that It just wants to scare them, like a predator, before going in for the kill. Meanwhile, Charlotte is finding some independence by helping out Hank, which is proving difficult after his revelation. And after last week’s mission in the helicopter, it’s opened a can of worms for Dick Hallorann as he starts to use his abilities more and more.

Below, we recap this week’s episode of IT: Welcome to Derry, titled “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function”. (That’s a mouthful.)

Spoilers abound! Read our recap on the previous episode here.

It’s messing with the kids

The scope of what It’s powers are has me puzzled. Can It do post-print Photoshop on the graveyard photos? Do It’s shapeshifting powers extend to physical matter? Well, that’s what happened to the kids’ photographs when they handed them over to Chief Bowers the next day. The ghouls are omitted, but in Will’s photo, interestingly, It left Pennywise in. They’ll conclude later in gym class that It is messing with them – to spike their sweet fear levels.

Lilly relays her graveyard mission to Mrs Hersh over some diner coffee. Similar narratives of kids going missing start to ring a bell for the Juniper Hill head of staff: kids who went missing during the Depression in the ’30s, who supposedly left their families to alleviate the financial burden of raising a child. So these alleged missing kids would also hightail it out of town and look for better prospects elsewhere. But Mrs Hersh is being too coy about it. Maybe she simply doesn’t remember, but I feel she’s leaving a few details out. In that case, I feel she’s pushing Lilly more and more into It’s hand . . . watch this space.

Married a flyboy now we’re here

Charlotte is wondering how she got here. She can’t, for instance, stand living in a town where the news of the day is “Local Negro Arrested In Connection To Missing Children”. She is gaining a friend, though, in Rose, the antique store owner, who regales Charlotte in the area’s Native American lore. Her ancestors stretched as far as Nova Scotia in Canada. As they catch up over coffee, Charlotte is still getting to grips with the compromise that comes with being the wife of a flyboy. “He doesn’t question orders. I question everything,” she says. Rose leaves her calling card and with a warning: Derry is a beautiful place, but keep your loved ones close. Whether she means that emotionally or in terms of betrayal is to be seen.

Back at the house, of all the things you could find in a teenager’s drawer, Charlotte finds the graveyard photos in Will’s drawer. He immediately starts crying out of fear, leaving her a little helpless as to what he’s scared about – she enforces a curfew. At dinner later, Charlotte brings up that Will’s been hanging out with a girl. “I mean, is she . . . you know?” his father asks. Anyway, Leroy’s been spending a lot of time bound in work, so Charlotte proposes that father and son go fishing . . .

“You’ll burn too!”

It’s just dawned on me that a fear of fire is generational in the Hanlon family. Remember: It manifests to Mike Hanlon (Will’s future son) as his parents burning in a fire. With Will, it’s his father burning in a plane crash like he did during the Korean War. When father and son go fishing, Leroy leaves Will in the river to get more bait, only for It to appear under the water as a charred and burned Leroy dragging Will down. “You’ll burn too!” It says. (“You’ll float too”, “You’ll burn too”, It really has a limited imagination with verbs, no?) He tells his father what he couldn’t tell his mother: there’s something bad hidden in Derry. To top it off, and the first time It shows itself to an adult, a red balloon glides over the water.

The new incident only emphasises Will’s hypothesis about the fear factor, now adding that it spikes the fear hormones in mammals’ blood, making it sweeter to predators. To combat this, Lilly proffers her mother’s antidepresents, or “Mummy’s Little Helpers”, which can’t have a good outcome.

Offensive to the visually challenged

As someone with glasses, Marge’s encounter with It was especially hard to watch. Patty and the Pattycakes were egging Marge on to get back together with Lilly so they can organise a prank to embarrass her with a senior footballer (which is crazy because he, like, looks 20). The Tim Flanagan wants to go on a date with me? Lilly thinks. As Lilly freshens up in the bathroom, Marge follows in to tell her the truth until her eyes start to protrude out into jelly cones, like the parasitic flatworm that burrows into snails.

What follows are gruesome attempts of Marge trying to get rid of essentially her eyeballs: first with a chisel and the wood-cutting saw. Of course, it’s all part of It’s mind games. While not a result of fishing out the Little Helper from the toilet bowl, Lilly just sees Marge running around with her eyes covered. She stops Marge from stabbing her own eyes out, only for the whole school to walk in with Lilly on top of her, holding the chisel.

Hallorann’s new digs

After a successful mission, Dick Hallorann and his friends get their new digs, courtesy of General Shaw, far away from the prying, racist eyes of those on the base. But the cost of Hallorann’s encounter with It is catching up to him: he gets a vision of his grandmother (who also possessed the Shine) telling him to “mind me now” and to keep his lid on tight. What she means by this is to be seen, but it perhaps alludes to some unseen power that Hallorann might possess, and maybe have to unleash. Remember, this is a younger Hallorann to whom we meet in The Shining, who isn’t as tapped into his power as he will be.

Leroy, on the other hand, has some questions for Hallorann after the river incident. Will came away from that day with scratches and bruises. Hallorann doesn’t know what It is yet, and frankly, nor does he want to know.

Charlotte strikes out

Fed up with her passive existence as a housewife, Charlotte gets back into her advocacy groove as she visits Chief Bowers, telling him that by denying Hank his right to due process and prejudicial treatment, she’ll call JFK, RFK, every other FK, and a bus full of Freedom Riders singing “We Shall Overcome” on him. As she persuades Hank’s mother to grant her visitation rights, Charlotte has experience helping incarcerated POC out of forced confessions from being in the south.

It’s all very straightforward when she sees Hank at the holding facility. Proposing that he’s released on house arrest, Hank is reluctant to work with Charlotte. Why? Well, his alibi was a dud; he spent that night with a married white woman. If this got out, Hank says, the town will just find the nearest hanging tree.

Leroy hears about her visit after Pauly spotted Charlotte. He talks about her getting into “trouble” and previously being arrested as if it’s a narcotic addiction. In Derry, he wants her not to stir the pot. But she wants to make America a country worth defending.

Exposition time!

The last 10 minutes really packed a lot of exposition, did it not? Anyway, Leroy is on his last legs with the river incident after hearing nothing from Hallorann. The night before, Will had yet another run-in with It after he spotted it through his telescope hiding behind a tree. Leroy came out swinging with a bat, only to find another red balloon ominously caught in the tree. So he bursts into General Shaw’s office looking for answers; Shaw brings the Major into the fold with his plans, revealing another layer of why Hallorann is there. As an example, he brings Leroy in for a viewing between Hallorann and Taniel, Rose’s nephew, who’s detained after he was spotted spying on the excavation site.

The story of the Galloo

Using his abilities, Hallorann taps into Taniel’s memory bank to when his auntie asked him to recite a true story that all the children in the tribe are told about the Galloo, their name for It. The story goes that the Galloo was a fallen star that landed on Earth millions of years ago, before mankind. One of their first ancestors broke off a piece of the star debris, fashioning it into a dagger to repel the Galloo. The tribe lived peacefully along the edge of the Western Wood, but their population grew too big for one dagger to protect them all.

Sesqui, the great war chief, proposed that the tribe relocate, but her daughter, Necani, went rogue with her alternative plan to retrieve 13 more shards and set up around the Wood like a cage. Her mother would follow, unguarded without the dagger, eventually meeting her fear in an Anthony Hopkins-looking settler in religious garb. With her mother dead, Necani continued on her original plan, burying the shards in carapaces (another Maturin easter egg).

The location of the shards is what Shaw has been after all along. Still in Taniel’s mind, Hallorann is led to the abandoned house on Neibolt Street, the one with the well that leads to the sewer network, and now, apparently, all 13 shards. With Shaw’s plan fully revealed, he wants to act quickly before the cycle ends.

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