In the wake of the horrific cinema murders, Lilly (Clara Stack) and Ronnie (Amanda Christie) find themselves on opposite sides of the town’s need to find a culprit. Meanwhile Leory (Jovan Adepo) discovers the truth about both the attack on him and what’s in the locked hangar, and does so with the help of a very surprising crossover character…

This is the good stuff. There is the same structure and tempo as last week, right down to the two supremely gory sequences per episode but it works so much better. That’s because we know these characters now and the gore feels both contextualised and personal. It’s also staged much better than the weirdly janky demon baby sequences of the first episode, with both sequences ratcheting the tension with the Pennywiseian glee. Best of all though, there’s emotional weight to them that just wasn’t there last week. Ronnie’s nightmarish collision with her dead mother wraps memories of a difficult birth and familial guilt around each other and her throat and squeezes. The scene hits a logical end point three times and three times it just gets Worse in the best of ways. Menace piled on menace until the poor children at the core of the scenes break, as they have no choice but to do.

Lilly’s scene plays with this in a different tempo, scampering demonically playful extras and contracting supermarket shelves turning anxiety into a slowly closing bear trap. Both are horrific, both have weight, both feel like they matter in the exact way last week’s descents into hell didn’t. Crucially they both spotlight two of the strongest members of a very strong young cast and Stack and Christie have some excellent work here, both together and separately. Special note too of Matilda Lawler, whose Marge is a beautifully written and acted smart kid who is desperate to fit in. One who at one notable point has yellow light flash over her eyes and seems to have long teeth…

They aren’t alone either. Blake Cameron James steps into the spotlight this week as Leroy’s son Will, Taylour Page also does excellent work as Charlotte, his mother, and the episode’s strongest material is seated with the Hanlon family. Will gives us both a triangulation on Ronnie’s experience in school and a new, sweet-natured viewpoint the show needs. Charlotte meanwhile presents as a community leader, and someone fully prepared to call her husband out on his constant clash between his familial obligations and his duties. There’s real tension to a couple of their scenes and Charlotte’s interaction with local butcher Stanley ‘Cleaver’ Kersh mirrors the perfectly judged tempo of the horror scenes. Stan, played with jovial calm by Larry Day, is welcoming in the exact way Charlotte is braced for him to not be. It’s a nice moment, a breath between horrors, Charlotte realising she isn’t about to have a racist encounter and immediately witnessing Stan wave off the sort of kid on kid violence that defines the town. Horror is everywhere in Derry just never quite where you think. Given Stan shares a surname with one of Pennywise’s most terrifying apparitions from the movies, there may be more to him too.

And speaking of nods to the future of the town, and to King’s other work, that’s the thing this episode does better than anything else. There’s a ton of locations and characters we see for the first time here or meet relatives of and it all helps bake in the sense of this being a town built on evil and unable to see that. But the most pleasant surprise in the series to date is the confirmation of Dick Hallorann as a main character. Played by genre stalwart Chris Chalk, Hallorann is a major character in The Shining and Doctor Sleep and is referenced as having passed through Derry and been instrumental in setting up the Black Spot bar. That doesn’t end well, for anyone, and I suspect we’ll see that event later in the series. But the show folds an extra dimension in, with Hallorann’s ‘shine’ getting him recruited by the Air Force to help locate a weapon that will win the Cold War. One that generates fear, and one that Colonel Shaw (genre stalwart James Remar) thinks Leroy Hanlon is uniquely equipped to control. We don’t know if the weapon is Pennywise itself, but we do know that it’s surrounded by ‘beacons’ and as the episode closes, Leroy is read in on the project and sees Hallorann get his first win. An old car, full of bodies and riddled with bullets. Is it the car we saw in the opening? Or the gangland massacre referenced in the excellent new credit sequence? We don’t know yet, but we will.

Verdict: If the future episodes are half as good as this one then finding out is going to be terrifyingly good fun. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart