This cycle’s atrocity is committed and no one is safe.

The title of the episode has as many meaning as the episode has villains. For doomed Ingrid, played with regal horror by the legendary Madeleine Stowe, it’s the black spot on her life that can at last be erased. For Hallorann, Hanlon and the other airmen it’s a safe place named with a defiant sense of humour that becomes a charnel house. For the cowardly racists of Derry, it’s a mark on their town they want erased. For Pennywise, it’s a period, the place it all comes to a head. And for the survivors, it’s the mark that will never rub off.

The episode’s bulk is in the fire and Andy Muschietti’s direction gives us pinwheeling chaos as characters run in and out of each other’s stories. We barely see the racists, but we see the consequences of their actions. Firing blind into a burning room full of men, women and children. Locking the doors so innocents die. Shrugging and letting the curdled Norman Rockwell narrative of the town write it off as ‘an electrical fire’. In an episode full of outright gore, two of the most horrific moments are the jovial handwaving away of the atrocity and the ‘good to know ya, pal!’ style sendoff that is all Ingrid’s husband Stan gets. It’s more than he deserves, and the only catharsis we get this episode is Pennywise’s off handed slaughter of one of the murderers It’s incited to terrible action.

But the most horrific moment in the entire episode is a sob. A sudden intake of breath as Marge realises far too late that Rich is going to die so she can live. Matilda Lawler and Arlan S. Cartaya are two breakouts of a young cast made of incredible talents and this scene will break your heart. Rich’s closing speech, the fact the last thing he hears is Marge saying she loves him, the moment where Marge tucks his hand under the blanket taking his dead body away. It’s horrifying and all but locked off on camera. And then the town shrugs and gets back to work. At least the ones who are still alive do.

But that’s when the last knife slides in. The episode opens with the moment Bob Gray, the 1908 clown whose form Pennywise wears, is taken. Bill Skarsgård does jaw dropping work shifting between man and monster, most notably in the scenes with Ingrid. He’s playful, inhuman, capering while soaked in dead people, a not quite convincing enough monster in a man suit. The episode’s opening is Bob’s final moments, a good man tricked into death. The bookend is Pennywise, soaked to the nose in the blood of his victims, hopping down from Will’s fridge to feast even more..

He’s able to do this because of the last villain and the last black spot. James Remar’s Shaw has been a pragmatic, calm presence the entire season but here we discover the truth. The enemy Shaw wants to deploy Pennywise on is American citizens. He talks a plausible, familiar game, but it’s clear who he means. Everyone who isn’t white and God fearing, or ‘correct’. The fact he explains this to a horrified Leroy only doubles down on the horror. He doesn’t say ‘you’re one of the good ones.’ He doesn’t need to. We hear it anyway. We always do from cowardly bigots like him. A black spot in American history, a man standing against common decency and humanity and telling himself he’s the hero, just like they always do.

Verdict: This is a stunning hour of television in every sense. By far the best episode of an excellent season and arguably better than at least one of the movies it serves as the prequel to. Stunning, terrifying work. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart