Stephen King built a connected world long before big Hollywood studios tried to stitch one together. His popular novel-based towns like Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot, and Derry, all sit in the same Maine soil, and the stories he grows from them feed into each other with an energy that feels both familiar and sharp. However, among them, Derry keeps rising to the top because it holds the IT story, and now HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry reaches deeper into that ground and pulls out a link that feels like a jolt.
IT: Welcome To Derry Builds Tight Family Lines
IT: Welcome to Derry, settles into the early sixties, and starts weaving in family lines that fans know well. Teddy Uris steps in first, tied to Stanley’s family. Then Leroy, Charlotte, and young Will Hanlon appear, bringing Mike Hanlon’s lineage into view, while episode 2 of the show adds Chief Clint Bowers, whose bloodline leads straight to Henry Bowers. The show fires out links as if marking a map King drew decades ago.
Dick Hallorann: The Character That Steps In With A Sudden Momentum
The story then takes a turn that no one expected. A quiet man steps into the frame in the military storyline following Leroy. He carries a strange sense of knowing and a name readers know by heart – Dick Hallorann.
Chris Chalk plays him with calm intensity, and the effect lands fast. This is the same Dick who later stands in the kitchens of the Overlook Hotel and the same Dick from The Shining. His shining gift (where he can see more than the men around him and can feel the past and the future pressing against him) is intact, and Welcome to Derry twists that gift into a military tool named Operation Precept, a secret program digging for the force under Derry that the army believes can tilt the Cold War. Dick becomes a guide through buried signals until he uncovers an old Bradley gang car and earns a thin layer of patience from his superiors.
Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) in ‘It – Welcome to Derry’ pic.twitter.com/UPQUHUghtD
— 𝐀𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐛𝐨𝐲 (@asocialboy_) November 24, 2025
Dick Hallorann’s Hidden Derry History Comes Alive
The surprise lies in Dick’s absence from any previous IT adaptation. Yet in King’s novel, he is part of Derry’s history. He helped create The Black Spot, a bar for African-American soldiers that later burned in a racist attack stirred by Pennywise’s influence. Dick used the shining to find Will Hanlon inside that fire and pull him out alive. Will would become Mike’s father, and the cycle of fear and survival would keep turning.
Welcome to Derry folds this history into its story with a clean snap. Dick already knows Leroy Hanlon, and the show hints that the path toward The Black Spot fire is coming. Dick has been in Derry for more than four months, and the pieces of the original tale are sliding into place. When the fire hits in this timeline, it will likely send him away from Derry and toward the Overlook Hotel by the late eighties.
Dick Hallorann 1962/1980#ITWelcomeToDerry pic.twitter.com/KA4xhnRtVy
— Horror Losers (@horrorlosers) December 1, 2025
Dick Hallorann Connects IT & The Shining In A Clean Line
Dick carries decades of story behind him. In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Scatman Crothers plays him as the Overlook’s chef, guiding young Danny Torrance through his powers before meeting a brutal end. In King’s own 1997 miniseries, Melvin Van Peebles restores the version King wanted. In 2019’s Doctor Sleep, Carl Lumbly shows Dick continuing to mentor Danny from beyond death. A planned Hallorann prequel never survived Doctor Sleep’s box office run, but pieces of that idea seem to be finding shelter in Welcome to Derry.
IT: Welcome to Derry, steps into that space and fills it with the version of Hallorann that lines up with King’s original map. It brings his army years into focus, folds in his early encounters with Derry’s evil, and gives his shining an edge that feels raw and dangerous.
The SAME character.
Dick Hallorann was in The Shining, IT & Doctor Sleep
Hallorann worked at Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Helped Danny with his shining in Dr Sleep. In IT, he used his ability to save Mike Hanlon’s father#WelcomeToDerry #HBOMax #ITWelcomeToDerry #pennywise pic.twitter.com/353oqt5hGK
— sagesurge (@sagesurge) November 1, 2025
Fans are reacting because the connection feels substantial. Dick Hallorann is not an extra piece dropped into the prequel but a hinge between stories. His presence ties Derry to the Overlook, IT to The Shining, the Hanlons to the Torrances, and the past to something darker waiting under the town.
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