Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t watched IT: Welcome to Derry’s fifth episode on HBO or via HBO Max subscription, so be warned!
We’re now past the halfway point for IT: Welcome to Derry, so Bill Skarsgärd’s fashionably late arrival as Pennywise was a very welcome treat, even if some fans out there may not have liked waiting quite so long for it. The clown-painted entity showed up in the most fitting of places, and in the most fittingly named episode. But like some of the characters in this ep, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Given that a substantial amount of the runtime went into setting up the military’s mission and the human-puppet plan that Pennywise used to get the kids in the sewer, this particular installment was seemingly not nearly as peppered with easter eggs and callbacks to Stephen King’s works as those that came before. Yet one specific connection to Andy Muschietti’s own Chapter 2 may be the most baffling one yet!
Check Out All The Other IT: Welcome To Derry Easter Eggs We Found
The 29 Niebolt St. Mission
The house on Niebolt St. was a key location in Stephen King’s novel where some truly freaky moments went down, but the filmmakers expanded its importance for the big screen, with both films’ climaxes involving the house and the well it was built on top of. As revealed in “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function,” the house’s access to IT’s lair is only one reason it’s important.
The sewers also connect all the tunnels running below the town, which the native children used to go around and bury the star shards keeping IT contained. As we all already know, nothing good happens inside Derry’s sewers, and it’s hard to call this mission a success. But more on that below.
Derry’s Tap Water Issues
Okay, so I don’t know if this is 100% related, but given a reveal that comes later in the episode, I going to confidently believe it to be so.
During the meeting that went down before Rose knew what happened to Taniel, elder statesman Joe shared this tidbit about how one of IT’s behavioral patterns plagues the town even the cycles of evil aren’t happening.
One encouraging sign is, obviously we know the creature sheds. Its discharge, you might call it, has tainted Derry’s groundwater since the town’s founding.
I don’t really want to think about what that creature would be shedding, and how it would go about revealing itself within the town’s water supply, because ew. However, this does perhaps provide context to the scene in IT: Chapter Two when Bev turns her nose at the tea she’s served in Mrs. Kersh’s apartment. In the novel, Bev was horrifyingly served a cup full of sewer shit. Since the movie didn’t note that specifically, I’d like to think the tea was made with IT’s discharge-water. Maybe “like” is a strong word…
The Bus To Shawshank State Prison
After getting verbally referenced in prior episodes (and after being shown in the series’ trailers), the bus to Shawshank finally makes its foreboding arrival. Shawshank is, of course, the location of one of King’s most celebrated non-horror stories and adaptations — Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption — and also comes up in other sections of Stephen King’s bibliography.
Had the bus not overturned, leading to Hank Grogan’s escape, he potentially could have crossed paths with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” characters Andy Dufresne and Red, with Andy not making his grand escape until 1975. And where did he come out? A sewer pipe. It’s all connected, people!
The Government Apparently Has Ways Of Bringing Derry Memories Back
Technically not an easter egg so much as a surprising reveal that seems to counter what we’ve been told thus far. While King fans don’t necessarily have the largest number of test subjects to go from, the idea has plainly been that IT’s effect on Derry’s children is such that they forget everything about him and surrounding events after leaving town, and only start to get those memories back after returning.
Shaw revealed that he got his memories back due to some kind of government experiment. He wasn’t specific, but to me it sounded like he was used in the LSD-loaded operation dubbed MKUltra, and that he regained his memories through some kind of psychotropic therapy. Also, because you’d have to be trippin’ on some serious shit to think you can take down IT.
Madeleine Stowe’s Ingrid Is Apparently THAT “Mrs. Kersh”
With a lovely smile and sympathy shown for Lilly, Madeleine Stowe’s Ingrid hadn’t made much of a story impact before Episode 5, and it all makes sense for why we didn’t know very much about her. Lilly’s housecall revealed that Ingrid is married to Stan Kersh the Butcher, and the name “Mrs. Kersh” is far more important to Stephen King fans than “Ingrid.”
In the novel, miniseries and IT: Chapter Two, Beverly visits her childhood home, only to realize that it’s currently being inhabited by a “Mrs. Kersh.” In all versions, the sweet older woman is revealed to be one of IT’s personas, this time feeding on Bev’s memories and fear of what might have become of her awful father. In the process, she talks about her “foddah” Bob Grey, who’s envisioned as the human iteration of Pennywise.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think that Mrs. Kersh was ever substantially proven to be a real person, and she wasn’t presented as being any more based in reality than the leper who chased Eddie. So what in the world does this reveal mean? We know Bob Grey’s story will come up again in this series, but I did not expect the show to spin Mrs. Kersh from a haunting ghoul into flesh and blood. Mr. Kersh already gives me the creeps, but I don’t want to think about Stowe’s smiles being entirely nefarious.
Grampa Hallorann And Dick’s Mental Lockbox
Dick Hallorann’s history was touched upon in The Shining, but it wasn’t until the sequel Doctor Sleep where Stephen King explored the character’s childhood, where he shared the shine ability with his grandmother, much to the violent discontent of his grandfather. In that novel, readers learned about how Dick was taught to keep his most important memories and thoughts secured within a mental lockbox that no amount of verbal and physical abuse could unlock.
So it makes perfect sense for IT to surface within Dick’s brain as his belt-swinging gramps, who’s able to get past the lock without a whole lot of struggling, much to Dick’s chagrin and agony. We know that he can see dead people know after he saw the cloudy-eyed Russo, but what else did unlocking that box set free?
Pennywise Gets His Glorious Shapeshifting Entrance
Bully on everyone who thought it was safe to put trust into the previous missing kid who showed back up out of nowhere without taking a bath, because that stinky ass child turned out to be Pennywise in penny-disguise all along, the jerk. Having lured all the kids down in the tunnels at the same time as Shaw’s squad, Pennywise finally emerged from the shadows. Or in this case, from within the body of a smelly kid. (R.I.P. Matty.)
It was a very cool reveal, with Matty-turned-clown twirling around and singing a haunting ditty as his body flipped inside out, wrapping in a very “Ta-daaaaa” way. I loved the sheer panic on Matilda Lawler’s face as Marge, which was reminicent of Eddie’s hysterical reactions in IT: Chapter One. (Which this theory can speak to.)
Unfortunately, though we can assume that IT’s Uncle Sam ghoul took out those two soldiers, Pennywise itself didn’t get to do very much after that tuneful arrival. Most of the kids got away without issue, with Lilly the only one to stumble and get left behind. But she thankfully ended up right behind the spot where Rose’s star shard was dropped as Taniel ran away from gunshots.
The shard stopped Pennywise in his gaping-mouthed tracks, and even though Lilly remained freaked the hell out, the threat was forced to twitchingly retreat back into the darkness, unable to cross the boundary made by the shard. That one instance makes Shaw’s containment plan seem feasible, but Rose knows way more than he does about all of this.
Join us in tracking all the easter eggs in next week’s episode when it hits HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, November 30, at 9:00 p.m. ET.