Let’s journey back millions of years to one of the most captivating moments in Stephen King’s universe: the arrival of the monstrous entity known as It. While we caught glimpses of this event in King’s 1986 novel and the 2019 film adaptation, IT: Chapter Two, Episode 4 of IT: Welcome To Derry offers an in-depth exploration of this eerie occurrence and its aftermath.

In this episode, we witness a tense interaction as Rose’s nephew, Taniel, portrayed by Joshua Odjick, is subjected to a painful psychic probe by Dick Hallorann. This probing is an attempt to uncover clues about It’s whereabouts. During this process, we are transported back to Taniel’s childhood, where he recounts the haunting legend of “the monster in the Western Wood” at his aunt’s behest.

The young Taniel, brilliantly portrayed by Tres Garcia, narrates:

“Millions of years ago, before the dawn of humankind, an evil spirit was cast down from the darkest reaches of the night sky, imprisoned within a falling star. Upon striking Earth, the star shattered, releasing the spirit. It wandered the woods for countless years until the emergence of our ancestors. The star had been its prison, and the stone of which it was composed still held power. Our wisest elders fashioned a weapon from a shard of this star to protect us from the spirit, which we named the Galloo. We kept the dagger close and avoided the Western Wood. The legend of the Galloo was passed down through generations. We coexisted by steering clear of its domain and never hunting in its territory—until the settlers arrived.”

Predictably, the European settlers disregarded the indigenous wisdom and ventured into the Galloo’s domain, inadvertently becoming fodder for the creature, enabling it to expand its reach beyond the forest. The tribe, previously referred to as the Shokopiwah in Chapter Two and now called the Sqoteawapskot in HBO’s official podcast, decided to leave their land for survival. A young girl named Necani, played by Kiawentiio, the daughter of war chief Sesqui, enacted a daring plan with a few other children—perhaps the first iteration of the Losers’ Club—to return and craft more magical daggers. However, when Sesqui led a search party to reclaim them, they encountered the Galloo, which took the terrifying forms of a zombified moose and decomposing settlers, effectively disbanding the group.

In Sesqui’s final moments, the monster took the form of a priest from whose chest burst a stabby, gore-streaked baby in Jesus’s crown of thorns. (Yet another birthing-adjacent terror.) Necani avenged her mother by returning to It’s inner sanctum and breaking off enough star-shards to craft 13 sacred talismans which, carefully buried around the Western Wood, would contain the creature. This border, it goes without saying, goes on to encapsulate Derry.

Now, back to the beginning of the episode, directed by Andrew Bernstein and written by Helen Shang. Lilly, Ronnie, Will, and Rich bring their graveyard photos to the cops. Rich gets the funniest line delivery of the episode with, “We have one where this thing looks like the monster version of Teddy, which was incredibly scary.” The ghosts are no longer visible, and while the clown in the distance is still there, Chief Bowers & Co. think it’s a statue and threateningly order the kids to butt out. Lilly meets with the Juniper Hill housekeeper Ingrid, who promised last week to believe anything she hears from her little buddy. Ingrid confirms there was a spate of child deaths in Derry in the 1930s, and though she hasn’t heard of anything like what the gang is now experiencing, she encourages Lilly to keep investigating.

Over coffee at the Hanlon home, Rose unsuccessfully tries to get a little intel from Charlotte about the Air Force’s alleged pipeline project. Asked about the string of disappearances, Rose won’t get into it directly, but says it’s “never a bad idea to keep the people you love close.” Charlotte discovers Will’s cemetery photos, gets part of the story from him—namely, that he cares for Ronnie—and tells her son he’s only confined to school and the house till she figures out “what’s going on around here.”

Fishing in the woods with his son, Leroy runs back to the car for a new lure just as a fish—a clownfish?—gets Will’s attention. The boy’s abruptly seized by a scorched arm and pulled underwater, where the charred image of his father growls, “You’ll burn too!” A shell shocked Will tells Leroy it looked “like that picture of you after the war when you went down in that plane.” Will has bloody marks on his arms, and both father and son see a single red balloon wafting along. So far we’ve gotten super strong kid performances from Amanda Christine (Ronnie), Clara Stack (Lilly), and now Blake Cameron James, giving Will even more depth this week. Using his telescope in his bedroom, he’ll spy the clown’s silhouette—still no full look at Pennywise after four weeks—peeping up at him. Leroy runs into the street in defense mode, finding nothing but another red balloon. Hanlon’s inability to feel fear is being put to the test.

Charlotte goes down to the police station to ask Chief Bowers if Hank Grogan might be innocent, if there’s still a killer on the prowl. Bowers is his customarily dickish self and won’t let her speak to Hank. Charlotte heads to the Grogan home to speak with his mother, Louella. “I was active in the movement down South, did my bit helping other colored folks who got forced into false confessions,” Charlotte shares, securing a letter authorizing her to visit Hank. She gets stonewalled by the cops for a second time, but meets an officer’s condescension with a badass promise to show him “all the scary shit I can do with a telephone.” She informs him, with total surety, “If you don’t let me see Hank Grogan right now, by tomorrow morning I’ll have MLK, JFK, RFK, and a whole bunch of other FKs breathing down your neck. Along with a bus full of freedom riders after another, from here to the turnpike, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ in the streets.” It works.

Charlotte promises Hank he can move to home arrest after being locked up without due process. She asks where he really was on the night of the theater massacre, noting the answer could clear his name. He reluctantly tells her he was with a married white woman, a relationship that “just happened.” He morosely explains his predicament: “If anybody finds out, I won’t be headed to no Shawshank. They’ll just find the nearest tree, not to mention what her husband’ll do to her. Now, if there’s a way out without anyone getting hurt, I’ll take it.” 

Back home, Leroy tells Charlotte not to go looking for trouble; we learn she’s been arrested for her activism before. “There’s gonna be trouble anywhere we go,” she says. “That’s the country you swore your life to defend. I’m just making it worth defending.” 

In our military plot, Hallorann and his fellow Black airmen have finally secured a place of their own, a decommissioned “requisition shed.” It’s messy and spiderweb-strewn, but they start planning ways to provide some music, a bar, and a kitchen. (Remember, when we meet Dick in The Shining, he’s the Overlook’s head chef.) An ominous look comes over Hallorann before they’re cleaning up and knocking back some brewskis. Dick’s shine flares again when he goes outside, leading to a second vision of his grandmother. “Mind me now: you watch yourself, you hear?” she warns. “Keep that lid on tight.” Something’s not right since his mind was transported to It’s lair. Leroy shows up and asks Dick what Operation Precept is really about, if “a machine that fucks with your head” went missing or something. “I don’t know!” Dick shouts. “I don’t know what the hell it is. Hell, I’m not sure I wanna know.” At his wit’s end, Hanlon bursts into General Shaw’s office and demands to know what they’re chasing. He’s taken to watch Dick mentally interrogate poor Taniel. After the vision, Taniel tells Hallorann to “follow the tunnels under the old well and you’ll find the pillars.” We’re headed back to Neibolt Street, folks.

At the standpipe, Will, the king of science, tells his friends about his encounter with the monster and points out how adrenaline and cortisol—“the fear hormones”—are coveted by certain predators. “No, no, no, you’re saying it wants to eat us?!” Rich asks. Lilly’s got a strategy: swipe some of her “mommy’s little helpers,” the pills Mrs. Bainbridge takes to help her “fears and troubles melt away like magic.” The squad’s pharmaceutically equipped against the ancient evil.

In science class at Derry High, a teacher drones on about 20,000 species of worms on Earth, “each one unique, each with its own purpose in the great swirling apparatus of our planet’s function.” (And there’s our incredibly mysterious episode title.) We see a snail’s eyes go nuts after being infected, and notably learn the parasite “not only alters the snail physically, but also hijacks its brain and alters its behavior.” Margie looks on in disgust, but focuses on her new mission: convincing Lilly a jock likes her so the Pattycakes can orchestrate an embarrassing, possibly Carrie-esque incident in front of everyone.

In the restroom, just as a guilty Margie is about to confess to Lilly, the girl who recently worried about looking like “a bug-eyed freak” sees one eyeball bulge in the mirror, leaking blood. Suddenly our little double agent’s eyes are protruding out like the infected snail’s. Margie stumbles screaming into the hall, then the woodshop. She graphically rams a chisel into one of her stalk-eyes, trying to cut it off. When this doesn’t do the trick, she HORRIFYINGLY fires up a bandsaw and rakes her eyes across it. This is one of the gnarliest things ever put to film. Lilly pins down the frantic Margie to stop her from doing more damage. Their screams draw a flock of kids to the classroom just in time for it to appear that Lilly, covered in Margie’s blood, is mauling her best friend since first grade.

QUESTION CORNER

• Will Margie’s supernatural trauma get her to ditch the Pattycakes and become the fifth member of our 1962 Losers’ Club?
• One magic dagger is probably palatable as a future MacGuffin, but 13 of these talismans were buried. Are we about to be rounding a bunch of these up for three seasons?
• Why are these kids riding their bikes in the middle of the street in broad daylight?

STEPHEN KING TRIVIA CORNER

• The Running Man, the fourth SK movie of 2025, is in theaters this weekend, and Glen Powell’s Ben Richards ends up in Derry, Maine.
• We got multiple hits on turtle watch this week: at least one of the sacred pillars was buried inside a turtle shell, and Bert the Turtle returned in a school film showing kids the fool-proof nuclear bomb defense of ducking and covering.
• Andrew Bernstein, who helmed the last two episodes, directed three eps of HBO’s The Outsider adaptation in 2020.
• Straight from the book, here’s part of the smoke-hole vision of It crashing to Earth (they even got those flashing “blue bullwhips” onscreen):

• And an excerpt of our introduction to “requisition shed” (if you know the real name, you know):

Zach Dionne is a Mainer writing in Tennessee; he makes Stephen King things on Patreon.