‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ episode 6 recap: Ingrid Kersh identity revealed

EVERYONE IS REELING after the events in the sewers. In episode six of IT: Welcome to Derry, Leroy is grieving the loss of his airmate, Pauly, after he jumped in front of his gun to protect Will. Hallorann’s mind lid has been pried off, leaving him compromised to the voices in his head. Lilly goes off on her own seeking refuge with Ingrid, but it turns out her confidante has been using her as bait (more on that below). The only ones to come out of the sewers with any luck were Marge and Rich, who bonded over pirates and knights pissing into chamberpots.

So, we recap this week’s episode of IT: Welcome to Derry, titled “In The Name of The Father”, below.

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

Who is Ingrid Kersh?

If you’ve been watching IT theorists on social media dissect every easter egg over the last few weeks like me, this episode confirms the biggest twist yet: Ingrid Kersh is the daughter of Bob Gray, the carnival performer better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. This doesn’t mean Ingrid is the daughter of IT (the entity can’t reproduce), except that IT takes the form of her father’s circus act.

In the black-and-white flashback to 1935, we meet a young Ingrid Kirsh working as a junior maid at Juniper Hill. One night, she wakes up little Mabel, a patient, and brings her down to the basement. Amidst the steamers and machinery, a red balloon (the only colour in these monochromatic flashbacks) floats by a doorway, until a white-gloved hand pinches its string. Mabel wants to leave, but Ingrid is fascinated by the clown.

In the name of the father

Later in the episode, Lilly wanders into Ingrid’s house, where she finds a photo album in her attic, filled with pictures from Ingrid’s 10th anniversary, wedding day, teen years, and then . . . as a little girl standing next to a very tall man who looks like the clown she encountered (Bill Skarsgärd with a receding hairline). Ingrid walks in and hugs Lilly, only for Lilly to see the extent of her confidante’s Pennywise paraphernalia: a framed photo of Bob Gray in his full Pennywise outfit. “You’ve seen him?” Ingrid says. “You did it! Of course, it was you. You brought him back.”

Ingrid got close to Lilly the same way she did Mabel in 1935 to draw out Pennywise. In another flashback, Ingrid talks about how her much-adored father went missing one day, and then the carnival moved on, and only she remained to wait for him. Back in the basement, she calls Pennywise “Papa”, which hilariously gags IT. (Maybe because it isn’t fear that IT smells on her, but love? Never in IT’s millions of years in existence has anyone called IT daddy. Who’s your daddy?)

IT devours Mabel and then shapeshifts into Ingrid’s father, Bob Gray. Here’s the twist: Ingrid has rationalised that IT is her father after all of these years, but just different. In that moment, she felt whole again, and wanted to help free him from this predatory form. It’s unclear yet if Ingrid has lured more children to IT, but in 1962, she found Lilly would have potential to do the same. So, Ingrid dressed up in her old Periwinkle costume to follow the kids around town, and hopefully run into her father. It was Ingrid in the cemetery that night and outside of Will’s window.

Ingrid’s betrayal

Lilly naturally feels betrayed after finding out she’s been used as bait. But Ingrid continues appealing to her “daughter with daddy issues” judgment, saying that Lilly would do the same to see her dead father again. “A daughter knows,” Ingrid says. But Lilly knows her father is gone forever. “Oh, you know what they say about Derry, dear. No one who dies here ever really dies.” Unsure if this is one of IT’s manifestations, she takes out the dagger and slashes Ingrid’s palm. Fleeing on her bike, a hand bloodstain on her shirt, Lilly retreats into her friend group.

The kids now have the star dagger

Now that we’ve unpacked Ingrid Kersh, here’s what happened with everyone else. The kids, Leroy, and Dick Hallorann are all left reeling after going into the sewers last episode. Will is haunted by the phrase, “Duck and cover, kiddos”, while he has to sit through his father’s tirade about why his son was even down there. Will is sorry his father had to kill Uncle Pauly. Leroy tells Charlotte IT “could change shape, it could see inside my head”. Will still wants to go out and help save his friends, to do what his father would do. But Leroy says he isn’t him. That’s right, Will retorts, “I know I’m not like you, ’cause I would never let my friends die”. Shots fired, and Will gets a slap on the face.

At the water tower, Lilly shows off the star dagger she found, talking about how IT looked almost afraid of it. The dagger’s provenance is ancient, Will believes, with the hieroglyphs. Lilly gets possessive of it, too, treating the dagger almost like “My precioussss“. With IT’s weakness in their hands, Lilly wants to go back down to the sewers and kill IT once and for all. But Ronnie is thinking otherwise, who has seen the town awash in WANTED posters for her father and men around town walking with shotguns looking for him. She calls Lilly crazy, and wishes she, Phil, Teddy and Susie had never shown up at her apartment in the first place – maybe her father wouldn’t be dragged through the mud now.

Ronnie is reunited with her father

Will follows Ronnie after her fight with Lilly. She thinks she went too far with her remarks by calling her crazy; she really likes Lilly, but she’s just tired of being scared, which is so valid. Will and Ronnie hug, and as they part, give each other the triangle method. Before they can do anything else, a familiar voice calls out, “William Dubois Hanlon”. It’s his mother. “Dubois?” Ronnie asks of his French middle name. She tells them both to get in the car. “Ya’ll think ya’ll grown?” Charlotte says, “Mhm”.

Last episode, Ingrid visited Charlotte at the base about “helping their mutual friend”. What came of that is that Hank is hiding on the Black Spot, the off-site hangout for Hallorann and the coloured airmen. Hallorann has mentally checked out after his run-in with IT, who has left him compromised after opening his mind box. While he disagrees that his friends let Hank hide in their place, Ronnie is finally reunited with her father. Watching the parental display of affection, Charlotte comforts Will about The Slap, but he’d rather not talk about it. Stoic, then, like his father, after all. Later at the apartment, Charlotte is packing her and Will’s bags to leave town and go back to Shreveport, far away from this monster’s cage.

Hallorann is crashing out

Hallorann really doesn’t have time for this sh*t right now. On top of harbouring a wanted fugitive in the hangout he bagged for his friends, Hallorann is also dealing with the world’s worst migraine. Trying to wash the voices out with bottles of Pap, Leroy visits him about a new order from General Shaw that he’s still on the hunt for the pillars. The man is relentless.

Anyway, Hallorann gives Leroy a crash course in his Shine abilities: about how he’s had them since he was a child, how he can see the dead, and how, when he was nine, his grandmother taught him a trick to keep all the dead’s voices contained in a box. The lid has been sealed tight until IT went inside his mind and ripped it off. (This is also the mind trick he’ll eventually teach to Danny Torrence in Doctor Sleep.) The trick now is to not acknowledge the dead, like how he saw Pauly walking around the woods, or a soldier with half his head blown off behind Leroy when he walked in. (Apparently, the soldier met his maker in that very room.)

“The dead always wander back to where they died,” says Hallorann. And the dead know things the living aren’t supposed to. Naturally, Leroy wants to know, and thinks it’s simple enough for Hallorann to put the lid back on the voices.

A knight and a pirate

The only positive thing to come out of that sewer is Rich and Marge getting closer. At the water tower, our guy Rich helps redress her eye (with his suspicious anti-septic saliva). And at the school cafeteria the next day, he gives her an old family heirloom eye-patch, which supposedly belonged to a corsair his ancestors knew back in Cuba. They’ve both been hearing voices from the pipes; Rich hasn’t been able to go to the toilet at night, so he’s been peeing into a jar/chamberpot. He’s a knight to her pirate, and that’s their costumes sorted for next Halloween – “It’s a date!” says Marge.

Patty and her Pattycakes spot the two catching feelings. They so want to hear about Marge’s encounter with death, but she’s sitting with Riccardo and the losers. Marge, the now reformed Pattycake, flips open her eye-patch to repel the Pattycakes. Her oozing eye scab is so gruesome that it chokes Rhonda. As the half-season trailer showed, the final two episodes won’t be good for Patty and the Pattycakes – but we’ll leave that to be seen.

Later, Marge, Will, and Rich head to the Black Spot to convince Ronnie to come back and join them. Hank has a little sit down with Will to see if this pre-pubescent child has good intentions with his daughter. So he asks, “Will, what’s your favourite movie?” A litmus test, perhaps, let’s hope he didn’t say Citizen Kane.

The attack on the Black Spot

Rich and Marge get drunk on “Air Force Coke”; he hops on the drums and bamboozles his friends and the rest of the Black Spot party guests. Meanwhile, Bowers has been relieved of his duties to serve and protect. So he starts rallying other racists to hunt down Hank. He received an anonymous tip from a woman (potentially Ingrid?) that Hank is hiding out in the Black Spot. Sounds about right. The lynch mob presents itself as the very real-world threat outside of IT. Soon they turn up to the party in droves, masked and wielding shotguns. Ingrid, on the other hand, gets ready in her Periwinkle drag, sensing daddy Pennywise is close.

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