Movies & TV It: Welcome to Derry IT: Welcome to Derry Deals With Daddy Issues — “In the Name of the Father” Ingrid. What are you DOING, Ingrid. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on December 1, 2025 Credit: HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: HBO IT: Welcome to Derry has thoughts about fathers this week. Episode Six, “In The Name of the Father”, was written by Jason Fuchs, Cord Jefferson, and Brad Caleb Kane, and directed by Jamie Travis. …and it ends on a note of genuine terror. As Brief a Recap as a King Adaptation Will Allow We open in black-and-white, in 1935, at Juniper Hill. A woman who I have to assume is young Ingrid Kirsh wakes a little girl named Mabel late at night, and takes her down down down into the basement. “This is where the clown told you to meet him?” she asks. Uhhh… And right on cue, there’s a red balloon. It bobs into a hallway, Pennywise appears and hides his face behind it. He pulls the balloon down… and we cut to the credits, and then to a fight in the Hanlon household in 1962. Leroy is yelling at Will for being in the sewers, and comes right to the edge of blaming his son for Pauly’s death. Will pushes back, screaming that his father’s always told him to stand up for his friend, and not back down from a fight. “I have friends now!” But when Leroy says “You’re nothing like me,” Will snaps and says, “I know I’m not you! I would never let my friends die!”—and Leroy’s response is to slap his son so hard the boy flies and lands in a sobbing heap on the floor. Charlotte tries to step in, and Leroy tries to apologize, but Will’s reached a whole other conclusion: “IT got to you! IT’s in your head!” and he bolts out the door in terror. We see people papering over the signs for the missing children of Derry with WANTED signs for Hank Grogan, as armed, crew-cut white men gather in the town square under the American flag. Never a good sign. Courtesy of HBO Back at the Tower, Lilly shows the other kids the shard, and describes how it seemed to scare Pennywise—but she won’t let any of the other to touch it. She announces a plan to go back and kill IT. Ronnie, staring at a WANTED poster with her father’ face on it, finally blows up. She says all of this is Lilly’s fault, and, as Rich tries to jump in and says that this is what IT wants, Ronnie finally crosses into No Man’s Land and says that Lilly never should have been let out of Juniper Hill. Lilly starts crying, and Will goes after Ronnie. The others split up. Dick finally turns up at the Airman’s Club… but he’s already very drunk, and also seeing visions everywhere he turns. He wants to sleep in the back, but it’s already occupied by Hank Grogan. We cut back to Ronnie as Will catches up with her. She tells him that she’s tired of being scared, they embrace, and are probably juuuust about to kiss each other when Charlotte pulls up and tells “William Dubois Hanlon” to get his disobedient butt in the car—but also that Ronnie should come, too. She doesn’t take either of them home, she takes them to the Airman’s Club, and Ronnie is finally able to reunite with her father, as Will reckons with what a warm relationship with a dad looks like, and Dick looks on in horror and frustration. Meanwhile, back on the Tower, Margie has to change her eye dressing, and Rich appears and asks to help. “I was a Webelo for a couple years. I know trick to take it off without it hurting.” As he licks his thumbs to pry that bandage off Margie stops him—spit is gross—but he reassures her that “saliva has antiseptic properties.” Margie has her doubts, but this kid, who is GREAT, calmly says “Who knows? Science is constantly changing.” Fair enough. She’s still worried that he’s going to be squicked out by her wound, but when the bandage finally falls away—seemingly painlessly, I’ll add—Rich stares in wonder and pronounces it: “the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” With that done he muses on how the kids are stronger if they stick together, and flies ones of his balsa planes down over main street, where it crashes right into the sewer, and into a series of Dick Hallorann’s visions. He’s woken up by Major Hanlon, who’s finally tracked him down to his barracks. This is nothing like their last encounter. “Dick, what happened down there?!” he asks of the visibly terrified man who’s been trying and failing to drink himself into a coma. “I think we pissed IT off,” is Dick’s succinct reply. Major Hanlon softens his tone, slightly, and tries to get Dick to open up about the Shining. “You… see things. What kind of things?” “Dead ones,” Dick snaps. But then he finally decides to drop the walls a little bit. He tells the Major about his grandmother teaching him to shut the visions away, to “‘…think of a great big old box, and think of all the things you don’t want to see no more, put them inside the box, and close it up.’ So I did. I took all them dead things and threw ‘em in the box in my mind, and I shoved that goddamn lid on tight …I was nine. I ain’t seen ‘em since—’til yesterday. That goddamn thing forced itself into my head, ripped that lid off, and laughed as it all came spilling out.” When he goes on to say that they “know things the living aren’t meant to know” the Major switches back into Military Mode, and tells Dick that he has a duty to finish his mission. Dick, quite understandably, laughs at the very idea of this, and tells the Major to get out. The Major reminds him that if he doesn’t remember his duty to America, he might leave the base in handcuffs. The Major then walks into practically the same fight with his wife. He finds her packing her stuff. She informs him that Hank is in a safe place, that she’s taking him out of town tomorrow, and immediately thereafter she and Will are going back to Shreveport. He tries to counter with something about his duty to keep this country safe, and she snaps at him to fix his relationship with his son. Leroy’s getting yelled at a lot this week, and frankly, I think he needs to hear all of it. At school, Lilly is holding the shard in her lap like it’s the One Ring or something, and she’s, of course, confronted again by Pickle Dad—this time hidden in her desk! “You’ll die if you try!” IT shrieks, already knowing her plan to come back to the sewers. When she jumps up and faces it with the shard, the teacher, of course, tells her to get back in her seat and calls her “young lady”—but Lilly’s finally, finally, done. She walks out of the room as they all stare at her. Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO At lunch that day, Margie and Rich (who don’t seem to know about Lilly’s latest incident) have a ridiculously sweet conversation about jars of pee (can’t go to the bathroom in the middle of the night when your pipes are full of evil clown voices), medieval knighthood, and piracy. Rich gives Margie an eyepatch that was supposedly worn by a corsair ancestor of his in Cuba, and she immediately puts it on over her bandage. And of course, that’s when the Patty Cakes walk up, accusing Lilly of gouging Margie’s eye out, and asking if she wants to come back to them or stay at the table with the freaks. And Margie, whom I love now, jumps up, charges at them, and says “I AM A FREAK!” and lifts her bandage to force them to see her eye. The girls scream, one of them starts hyperventilating, Rich falls even deeper in love with her, it’s great. Later, to the tune of “Pretty Little Angel Eyes”, Will, Margie, and Rich go to the Airman’s Club to find Ronnie and convince her to come back. They debate their options.   “What if she says no?” Rich asks. “I don’t know man, say a prayer she doesn’t?” Will says. “Last time I said a prayer my dead tío almost killed us!” “OK, so no prayers then.” Margie turns backwards and crosses herself as they walk in, so Will won’t see. Inside the Club, the kids discover a magical new world. There’s music, dancing, grownups making out, everyone is drinking. As Will enters the back room to negotiate, Rich and Margie lean against the pool table to watch the band. Meanwhile across town, Lilly goes to Ingrid’s house, which seems abandoned? Once again there’s a creepy adult man who leers at her, just like in the grocery store, which made me think we were entering a true horror setpiece. Instead, parts of the house seem empty and derelict, but there’s music playing somewhere. She wanders upstairs to an attic room, and finds a book of photos documenting Ingrid’s life with Mr. Kersh. And then she flips another page, and there’s young Ingrid with a man who looks a lot like Pennywise without his makeup. Credit: HBO Ingrid comes up behind her, and seems weirdly chill about a stray eleven-year-old coming into her house and rifling through her stuff. Lilly tells her that they went to the sewers and she faced the clown, and then Ingrid’s whole demeanor changes. Not like she’s been possessed by IT, or like she’s been IT in disguise the whole time—no, I think this is worse. “You saw him!” she says, ecstatic. “Of course it was you!” Lilly is shocked and horrified at Ingrid’s seeming Pennywise fandom, and it’s soon revealed that it was her at the cemetery in the clown outfit, and her outside of the Hanlons’ house. Her father was a carnival performer called Pennywise. “He was taken from me,” she says. (So presumably it was Ingrid’s dad who we saw during the flashback to General Shaw’s childhood.) When the circus left, she stayed behind in Derry, and eventually got a job at Juniper Hill. When she overheard Mabel talking about a clown back in the 1935 (“There are no such things as clowns in pipes, clowns live at the circus,” Mabel’s doctor helpfully informs her) she somehow decided it was her dad, back after all this time. She took Mabel down to the basement thinking they’d have a reunion. We flashback to black-and-white 1935, and there’s young Ingrid looking at fucking Pennywise and asking “Papa?” IT laughs at her, unfurls ITs jaws, and they run. Ingrid makes it, and watches as IT eats Mabel behind a closed fire door. Then Pennywise pops back up, without the makeup this time. “Pumpkin? It’s me, Papa. Oh, how I’ve missed you all these years! Don’t be scared…” Ingrid lets him into the hospital, and presumably he’s been feeding on children there ever since. “He was changed by whatever he’d been through, but it was him all the same. A daughter knows… [t]his shadow would steal my father away, but I did what I had to to see him again… I know he’ll be able to break free.” Ingrid assures Lilly that she won’t let anything hurt her, and insists that surely Lilly would also do anything to be reunited with her own father. When Lilly pushes back to say that her own father is dead, Ingrid replies, “Oh sweetie, you know what they say about Derry. No one who dies here ever really dies.” Ooof. Oooooof. So anyway Lilly slashes her with the shard and escapes. Riding her bike, a giant bloody handprint on her shoulder, she finally screams the terrible gutteral scream that I think has been building up in her since her dad died. Photograph by Brooke Palmer/HBO Back at the Airmen’s Club, Hank Grogan has a serious question for the boy who wants to date his daughter: What is his favorite movie? Will tells Hank that he saw War of the Worlds back in Shreveport, and loved it, and this passes muster. “It’s good to know someone of your character is looking out for my baby girl,” he says, and holy shit is it emotional to see this man try to just be a solid dad in the midst of all the horror that’s being done to him. Out front, Rich attempts to order himself and Margie Cokes at the bar, and they’re given what the barkeep calls “Air Force Coke” which I’m gonna assume is straight rum. “That’s the taste of freedom,” he says. “Freedom tastes weird,” Margie muses. The bandleader notices that (a) his drummer is passed out with a bottle in his hand, and (b) Rich has drumsticks in his back pocket. The kid tries to play with brushes, but soon switches back to his sticks, and he’s actually good and the adults are all excited to let him have a solo. “I love Air Force Coke!” Margie sighs. But obviously the Good White People of Derry can’t allow this harmony and justice bullshit to continue. The armed mob—alerted to Hank’s whereabouts by an anonymous tip from the recently fired police chief—drives up, shines their headlights into the front of the building, and gets out of their cars to reveal that they’re all wearing Halloween masks. Reggie—one of Dick’s airmen friends—tells the girl he was flirting with to get behind him. Do We All Float? Photograph by Brooke Palmer/HBO There’s so much going on here! First of all, I kind of like how everything comes back to DADS. No matter what else is going on, Ronnie is always, always, always terrified for her father. Lilly is always grieving her father. Will finally pushes back on his father’s comparative coldness, and gets slapped for doing exactly what his dad has always taught him to do. And then there’s Ingrid. For a second I was annoyed about this because it seems so ridiculous, but then thinking about this woman wearing a vaguely Elizabethan clown get up just to try to find her father, whom she believes is still inside IT somehow, and will just have to “break free”—it’s been nearly 60 years and she still hasn’t accepted that the man was eaten. There’s no “breaking free” of EATEN. I love the mirroring of Ingrid donning her clown apparel just as the masked mob shows up. I love getting to see Margie’s actual personality after so long—and how touching is her Weird Kid romance with Rich? I will ding the show slightly for letting Rich be that good at drums. That felt a little over-the-top for the show about a child-eating alien spider clown. And I really really love how blatant the show is in its thematic work. The posters of missing children are replaced with posters of an innocent scapegoat. The teachers are still scolding the children like they’re actual children. Major Hanlon is still blathering on about duty and country as though any of that matters in the face of IT—and as though his country gives a single shit about him or his rights. At the end of this episode we’ve been invited to a joyful, sexy, happily interracial party—and of course the stalwart white men are going to storm in and try to kill it like a cockroach on a kitchen floor, and of course their nice white wives would never dream of asking where they were all night. How are any of these people going to survive the mob violence that’s coming? Why does Major Hanlon still care about his mission, after everything that’s happened? Of all the white women in town, why did Hank have to get involved with an extremely unstable kinda sorta clown-worshipper? Where the hell is Lilly’s mom? Also, how old is Ingrid meant to be? Is this some IT magic, where she’s staying suspiciously youthful even though she should probably be older than Rose and Shaw? Or is she actually simply a puppet of IT already? I feel like no, but there’s definitely something off there. #JustKingThings Photograph by Brooke Palmer/HBO So much clown stuff in this one! And I love the multiple iterations of the voices in the pipes that only kids can hear. That is some prime King—the horror isolates the most vulnerable people, and then feeds on them once they’ve been locked away for being “crazy”. Also the constant tonal shifts between young romance, and kids dealing with the idiocy of their peers, contrasting with all the horror. The kids are still trying to continue their normal lives, and they’re extremely resilient. Although I think Lilly’s nearing her breaking point. Turtles All The Way Down Lilly’s turtle charm was prominently displayed as she wrenched her hands away from Ingrid, and the shard seems to be doing a fine job of protecting her. I am a bit nervous about her increasing Gollumization, however. Mike Hanlon’s Photo Album Courtesy of HBO We see another literal photo album! We get to see Ingrid’s dad out of makeup at the circus (you know, where clowns live) and then in his full Pennywise get up. (As my beloved colleague Sarah mentioned, IT sees Ingrid’s Papa and thinks: “this guy’s vibe is SO GOOD I gotta steal it.”) We also, obviously, spend a lot of time at the club that the show has so far called “The Black Spot” rather than the Ink Spot, and we see the arrival of the mob that will presumably set the place on fire. Ridiculous Alien Spider, or Generationally Terrifying Clown? Pickle Dad has already been done too many times, as has Pennywise’s Super Scary Run. But the vibe in Ingrid’s house is creepy as hell, and calls forward to Bev’s encounter with her decades later. And watching the mob gather and radicalize is almost as terrifying onscreen as it is in life. I’m dreading next week. But scariest of all might be Ingrid’s devotion to her father, and her willingness to feed IT as many helpless children as it wants, as long as IT keeps reality at bay.[end-mark] The post <em>IT: Welcome to Derry</em> Deals With Daddy Issues — “In the Name of the Father” appeared first on Reactor.