The kids get evidence, but it doesn’t matter. Leroy and Charlotte Hanlon clash over how to live in town. Will meets It, Marge has the worst possible day and so does Lilly and Hallorann finds out the origin of the creature in the worst of ways.

One of the first shots we see this episode is a graceful crane that follows the kids on their bikes as they cycle through town to the Police Station. At one point we’re directly over them as they bike over a bridge. It’s a beautiful day, sunny, quiet and when you look, you realise every single adult on the street turns and watches them as they go. You want to think it’s just the polite curiosity of a small town. It’s not. We see that in this shot and we see it again when the kids show the police their photos and the two groups of people see very different things. The entire town is permeated with evil. We map a lot of that evil this week.

A major part of that exploration is the Hanlon family. Jovan Adepo and Taylour Page are two of the strongest members of a strong cast and they both get some serious work to do this week. Page’s Charlotte realises the evil she thought she’d dodged last week is actually a way to engage with the town that she understands. Racism, banal, idiotic and meaningless as it is, is a handle she know how to turn and she goes into bat for Ronnie’s dad. In a fair world, it would work. We know this isn’t a fair world and so does she. She does so anyway.

Jovan Adepo’s Leroy engages with the more esoteric nature of the evil. One of the show’s most refreshing elements is that Leroy listens and understands. When his son is menaced by the creature in one of this week’s increasingly traditional two horror sequences, he reacts with love not scepticism and then rage when he realises he’s complicit in waking something terrible up. Blake Cameron James gets some great stuff to do as well, almost drowned by an apparition of his dad’s radioactive, burning corpse emerging from a downed plane but it’s Adepo who lands the button of the scene. A grown man, a career soldier, staring in horror as a red balloon that should not be there floats off down the river. It’s a neat motif, repeated towards the end of the episode in a moment that moves us out into systemic evil. Pennywise, or something like it, is watching Will from the street and when he panics and reacts, his dad rushes outside. Leroy Hanlon, career soldier, holding a golf club looking for a fight as his neighbours’ lights come on is a chilling, almost offhand moment even before you see the balloon once again. But when you put it next to that opening shot, and next to his clashes with Charlotte and Shaw you see how the town is starting to cut this fearless man off from everyone who he draws strength from.

The Hanlons aren’t the only ones being marinated in their own terror this week. Back at school, Lily is fresh meat for the bullies in her class, and that banal, mundane evil is expressed through poor Marge. Matilda Lawler’s troubled best friend gets another brief flash of yellow Pennywise-esque light this week, and it precedes a horrific moment where she perceives her eyes becoming infected with parasites and extruding into stalks. We see, from her point of view, her cut the stalks out on a shop tool. Then we see Lilly, having wrestled the chisel Marge has gouged an eye out with, kneeling over her friend, covered in blood.

And then we see the other kids rush in and see it too.

Marge, wounded possibly forever. Lilly, written off as a violent maniac by everyone other than the asylum housekeeper played by Madeline Stowe who makes a prominent return this week. There is something off about her character, both in the unsettling way she’s shot and in her careful anonymity. It feels like her belief in Lily is almost too good to be true, and that in turn makes us realise just how little trust there is in this town. Kindness feels insidious. Derry’s fundamental tension, racism, misogyny and seething rage all making up the overly cheery landscape the kids drag themselves over.  All of this showing how It’s evil has permeated the town, like an oily film in the air no one can see but everyone is changed by.

That idea reaches its zenith in the third act here, and again the show’s regimented format (two horrific sequences, three plots an episode) pays off. The third one this week sees Chris Chalk’s Halloran put in the position of using his powers in the worst possible way, to psychically assault Taniel (Joshua Odjick) Rose’s nephew. The image of a black man in uniform forcing his will onto a Native American has that curdled sense of evil baked into every frame. Halloran knows it too, apologising before ripping the information from Taniel’s mind in a manner that feels so sincere but that is untrustworthy all by itself. Because in Derry, everything is.

That shifting foundation leads to an extended lore dump which tells us not only how this started, but where that all pervasive presence comes from. Fans of the book will be familiar with a lot of this, but the manner we see it laid out is hauntingly effective. Halloran effectively hacks a memory Taniel has of a story every local child is taught. We see It arrive, we see it menace the local tribe and we see a signal means of control, a dagger made from the ‘star’ It fell in. The story unfolds as we see colonizers arrive, ignore the local’s warnings and give It the strength it needs to run riot. What follows is another curdled fairytale, a princess seeking more star metal to make weapons from, a mother killed by a horrific distended priest and a final definitive answer for what and where the Beacons are. An answer that starts with Halloran, grinning in a manner that evokes Pennywise as he rips what he needs from Taniel’s mind. An answer that finishes with the Neibolt Street house we know is so important to It from the original story…

Verdict: This is a phenomenal episode of television, using the all-pervasive nature of evil to show us just how broken and doomed this town is. It’s phenomenally acted, carefully shot and brilliantly written, each element working to tell us what the citizens of Derry can’t; that this is a game and they aren’t players, they’re pieces. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart