‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ episode 7 recap: The Black Spot Massacre

IT’S THE PENULTIMATE EPISODE OF IT: Welcome to Derry, and the Augury is here. The final bloody event that Rose and the Native Americans say marks the end of IT’s cycle has taken place inside the Black Spot.

But first, we get a little backstory on Bob Gray, aka the OG Pennywise the Dancing Clown and how IT took his form to draw in children. We lose one of the children, but a brave death of a knight. And the military have secured their first pillar, but the plans have shifted to something of a national nightmare.

Plus, Bill Skarsgård answers some questions below, discussing joining the series six years after the films, bringing Bob Gray to life, and what he’d like to explore next in the role.

We recap this week’s episode of IT: Welcome to Derry, titled “The Black Spot”, below.

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

The Bob Gray story

At long last, the Bob Gray origin story. (These flashbacks between 1935 and 1908 are setting up future seasons quite nicely because: one) they already have the costumes and set design set up, and two) there’ll be more backstories to plumb.) It’s at the carnival where we meet Gray as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who is still terrifying as a human. His set is autobiographical: he’s mourning the death of his clown wife, Periwinkle, whose photos line the wall and costumes lie on the bed. As the kids storm the stage during the encore, the entity, in the form of a little boy, watches from a distance.

Meanwhile, little Ingird has been practising her makeup and routine for Papa. (A quick little aside: Bill Skarsgård’s voice is giving Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.) When she shows him her bow, he bestows upon her the stage name Periwinkle, her mother’s name. It turns out the carnival is second-rate in the clown trade; the circus is what this washed-up Gray yearns for the most after he was kicked out.

Getting in a cigarette and a drink on the fence before his night performance, the little boy/entity approaches Gray about the children being drawn to him. That’s a weird thing for a child to say, Gray says. It seems this has been how the entity draws out It’s victims: as a child who’s lost his parents. It leads Gray into the woods towards the screaming woman. Never seen again, Ingrid only has his bloody hanky with his initials, R.G., to remember him by.

The Black Spot massacre

Picking up at the Black Spot, the smob of masked racists interrupt the gathering, looking for Hank. One of the gunmen calls out a little white girl, Norma Price, presumably his daughter, for being there. “You should be ashamed,” he tells her, before running out. As Hank turns himself in to avoid bloodshed, the military men pull out their arms too, only theirs are government-issued. Outnumbered, the racists leave and lock everyone in, sending in flamethrowers and bullets.

In the middle of it all, Hallorann sees all of the spirits in Black Spot. Sesqui, the great war chief who hunted down IT some hundreds of years ago, appears. By acknowledging her, she leads Hallorann and most of the children out of the massacre alive.

All of this concentrated fear naturally attracts IT to manifest in the fire. It is the Augury, the final event of IT’s cycle that Rose and the Native Americans were talking about. His first victim is Noreen, whom Ronnie walks in on IT feasting on her head. “What’s the matter? Do I have face on my face?” IT says, which is kind of fierce. Hallorann also comes face-to-face with IT again. “Seeing things, Dickie? I think they see you too.”

RIP Rich

After spending most of the last episode with an inordinate amount of time with Marge and Rich, building up the feelings, we knew Rich was going to die. The two find a chest to hide from the fire, but in the grand Titanic crescendo of it all, it could only fit one (not like that floating door, which could fit two, just saying). Rich says that a knight exists to protect his fair maiden.

He tells her about the first time he saw her, what she was wearing, and that he couldn’t stop staring “‘Take a picture, it’ll last longer’,” is what she said to him then. What he would’ve liked to have said: “I wish I could”. If anything, Rich died not at the hands of Pennywise, but by protecting someone he loved. The next theory goes that Marge is actually Margaret Tozier in the films: Richie’s mother, whom she names after her first love.

Ingrid gets in her Periwinkle drag

Stanley Kersh, the town’s butcher and one of the gunmen, finally meets his father-in-law – sort of. Ingrid arrives on the scene all clowned up, watching as the Black Spot massacre unfolds. It was all her doing, planting Hank there for the town’s people to follow as she tipped off Bowers. (Though it’s unclear whether she actually loved Hank or not.) Her husband hates her outfit – rude – before he comes face-to-face with Pennywise, wielding a meat cleaver and decapitating him.

(Rest in peace, Stanley. No one could fillet a tenderloin like you.”)

Ingrid is kind of gagged by her husband dying, but hey, she got to hug him and do her bow for her Papa again. “Good job,” IT tells her. IT tells her that he’s going to go back to sleep again, and she keeps pulling at his arm like a little girl. Not used to clinginess, so IT brings out the Deadlights. Ingrid isn’t dead, as she’s carted off back to Juniper Hill, this time as a patient. She’ll be there until her death; IT uses her form during the 2016 cycle to scare grown-up Beverly.

The army found a pillar

In the aftermath of the massacre, Hallorann uses Sesqui’s spirit to guide him and General Shaw to her burial ground, where one of the pillars is located. It’s blasphemous as Taniel watches on from the trees. Once they pry it open from the carapace, Leroy thought they’d be moving it to make IT’s territory smaller. But the plans have changed again: the army is going to incinerate it.

Leroy stops them in the nick of time before General Shaw gives him his whack spiel about using the entity to instil fear in Americans. (Turns out Leroy was on a need-to-know basis, plans within plans.) He wants to stop another Civil War, with all the women’s rights, race, and anti-nuke movements that have the Greatest Generation up in arms. The pillar plunges into the lava, effectively leaving the cage door wide open now for Pennywise to wake up again from hibernation.

While Leroy is ordered to stay on site for the finale next week, Charlotte and Rose are making moves to move Hank and his family over the border. “It’s just a line,” Charlotte says. She has friends in Seattle and Montreal who can get him and his family new papers.

Bill Skarsgård on returning to the IT universe a few years after Chapter Two

“I had the experience when I went in to do the second film, where I was worried the character wouldn’t be that accessible to me – but he was immediately. And the same thing was true for the show. I know the character very well, so everything just came back. He is the way he is! When I enter the state of Pennywise, I feel free to sort of improvise and do things that are in line with that character. It’s quite easy to slip into him and out of him. It’s quite rare. I’ve never been a part of a character that you get to
revisit so many times. God, it’s been what . . . Nine years since we did the first movie?

“Going into doing the show, there was nothing that worried me about the character. There’s not much apprehension. The big deep-dive into the psychology of Pennywise happened in the formation of him, and that I’ve already done. So this was just kind of jumping back in. I loved seeing [showrunners] Andy and Barbara Muschietti again. I just kind of showed up to . . . clown around. [Laughs]”

On shooting his first scene of the series

“[Episode 5, ’29 Neibolt Street’] actually was the first thing that I shot on the show, spinning around—the pole dancing scene. [Laughs.] That was the first time he appeared on the show, and that was the first thing that we did. As soon as the camera was rolling, it was fun.”

On working with prosthetic again

“It is the same guys, like Sean Sansom and Shane Zander, who do the prosthetics back in Toronto. A lot of the same crew. It was kind of sweet to see everybody after the success of the first two movies, but also after everything that’s happened in one’s life. It’s been quite a few years, maybe six or seven, since we wrapped the second film. I didn’t have this kind of big feeling of like, “Oh my God, I’m back as Pennywise.” It was more everything around it that felt surreal at times. You’re like, has any time gone by? Am I still stuck here in the sewers?”

On exploring more of Bob Gray with director Muschietti

“I remember we had a lot of conversations when we were doing the second film about, okay, how would you do a third instalment? And a lot of what came up is not exactly what the show is, but there are remnants of it. I had the idea to do a third feature that would be very different tonally from the two movies. It was this interesting kind of prequel origin story, about the man behind the mask. The man who Pennywise takes – and eats – and takes the shape of, which is Bob Gray. That was something we had flirted with in the second movie. That was a completely different guy that we sort of got to do in the show.”

On shooting the episode 6 flashback

“The flashback scene was fun because that was a thing that happened in the moment. He realises who she is and the fact that she could be useful to him, that’s like, ‘Huh . . .? Oooooh!’ And then he started to laugh. I think it’s important that he wasn’t wanting to be sweet to her. It is just a calculating creature that goes, ‘Ooh, now I know who she is. And she can be useful to me!’ That’s that little moment you’re referring to in that episode.”

On depicting Bob Gray

“I don’t think he looks a lot like me! There’s a photo of Bob Gray in the movies, so we did the prosthetic piece with this kind of giant bald head and fake eyebrows for that photo. In the show, we kept the same look for the Bob Gray flashbacks. In the second movie, there’s a scene where Pennywise is kind of painting the makeup with blood as Bob Gray. So we’d peeked at him, but you’d never seen the real guy. You’ve always seen either a picture, or It being Bob Gray to scare someone.

It was written in this scene like, “Oh, he’s such a sweet father.” He was this innocent, sweet man who lost his wife. I’m sure he loves his daughter, but I just didn’t want it to be this kind of simplified, reduced version of a human being. He’s this alcoholic, and I think he’s really miserable because at one point in his life, he was at the big circus, the big tent, and now he’s just reduced to this travelling carnival. So he’s not very happy where he is. He has his daughter, but he lost his wife, and he drinks way too much. There’s just something funny about how sardonic and bitter he could be, even though we only had a few scenes to do it. It’s something different. It’s not Pennywise.

It was really quite interesting to perform Bob Gray performing Pennywise. I was like, ‘How do you do the human version of the clown?’ It’s not the demonic thing, but what the demonic thing emulates.

It’s the early 1900s, so it’s like this kind of Vaudeville mimicry. I had fun with that. I just didn’t feel like I’d entirely figured out the Bob Gray character. Then I was like, “Okay, now I’m playing Bob Gray.” But Bob Gray is playing Pennywise, which is his clown performance. So there were layers to it. The more layers you add to a performance, the further away from yourself you’re going to get.

That whole thing was choreographed and written into sequence. Yeah, there’s something kind of sweet there. I think Bob Gray is an artist who uses his life as entertainment. So there’s the sadness of him losing his wife in this quite bizarre little clown performance. But the kids seem to like it, and that was the point. The whole point is that the entity of It is seeing kids being drawn to this clown, and the entity finds that useful.”

On Bob Gray’s voice

“There was something about the period that I thought, ‘Okay, you can go somewhere with this.’ When I had the look of that guy, I knew I needed to fill out this face with a voice, and that’s kind of what came out. It’s my attempt at being old-timey. Who knows what his background really is, but he’s from a bygone era and he’s very dry, and he smokes a lot of cigarettes. That just bubbled up into how he sounded.”

On the opening flashback

“I did have fun with the Bob Gray character, especially in that scene with the little boy. It was written more like: Bob Gray’s very concerned about this child that appears, and he goes into the woods. ‘Oh, I’ll help you . . .’ But I’m like, there’s no way. This guy does not particularly like kids at all. He’s on his break, he’s drinking whiskey, he’s smoking, and at the time of the early 1900s, I don’t think adults were known to be very nice to strange, homeless looking children. Of all the scenes that are in the show, that one is the one that made me laugh the most in terms of the performance. I found Bob Gray fairly amusing.”

On grown-up Periwinkle

“It is at a point where Pennywise feels like she’s been useful to him, but now he doesn’t care anymore, and he becomes very vicious to her in revealing the fact that . . . [laughs] he ate her father. That was really fun.”

On Pennywise’s new red look

“Andy wanted to create a visual of Pennywise that is different and unique from the movies. And that was it. There are other subtle differences. He looks a little bit more period. The wig is different. The wardrobe is essentially the same, but when he is forced awake again from going back into hibernation, he comes back completely red. So if you want to dress up for Halloween as the show’s Pennywise, you’re going to be coloured down from here [points at upper lip] in red. “Okay, so I see you’re from Welcome to Derry and not It: Chapter One or Two.”

On why IT likes the Pennywise form

“In the book, Stephen King writes that Pennywise was his ‘favourite’ form. It’s not his true form. I’m not so sure that the spider thing is his true form either. Pennywise is, for sure, something that he really enjoys. It’s just the most evil kind of bully. That’s what he thinks is the most fun. I always wanted to have an animalistic thing about him, this thing that just needs to feed. But there’s also this kind of really twisted prankster. You could see some of that in the show as well. And those things are fun to play.”

On what makes IT tick

“I think that It is very childlike. There is a chapter in the book where it’s told through the perspective of It in first person, and it just reads like an angry child who just wants to eat and sleep. The heart and the soul of the book, and the films, and the show is: it’s about kids. It’s about growing up, and it’s about changing into adulthood. And Pennywise is in line with them in that regard, because he’s also a child. He uses children because they have the most imagination and they’re easily scared and the fear aspect of it, but he’s kind of a child as well. It is just the worst bully imaginable. That is something that I use a lot in the performance. It’s just like . . . he laughs. He laughs at you. He’s a sick bastard.”

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