Welcome to Derry’s Scariest Twist Makes A Stephen King Tragedy So Much Worse

While It: Welcome to Derry episode 6 revealed more of Dick Halloran’s backstory, this also made the Stephen King character’s arc far more tragic than ever before. From It: Welcome to Derry’s opening scene onward, it was obvious that the show would not merely be a playful prequel to the It movies featuring fun nods to other Stephen King stories.

While It: Welcome to Derry’s King callbacks are plentiful and clever, the show’s tone is unapologetically dark, brutal, and grim. From killing off its apparent heroes in the pilot’s shocking ending to Marge’s brutal fate in episode 4, It: Welcome to Derry reliably grows darker with every new episode.

Episode 6, “In The Name of the Father,” is no exception. The bulk of the episode follows Lily as she investigates her friend Ingrid, who turns out to be Mrs. Kersh from the It movies and novel. The seemingly sweet nurse from Juniper Hills Asylum has really been working for Pennywise, as she believes the clown is her estranged father.

It: Welcome to Derry Reveals Dick Halloran’s Tragic Backstory

While the revelation of Ingrid Kersh’s backstory and identity was the biggest twist in “In The Name of the Father,” it wasn’t the episode’s most explosive moment. That came afterward, when a militia of heavily armed, violent white supremacists arrived at the Black Spot.

Earlier in the episode, Will’s mother, Charlotte, revealed that she had hidden Ronnie’s father, Hank, in the Black Spot to ensure that the escaped prisoner wasn’t lynched. Although Hank was innocent of the murders that the racist townspeople claimed he committed, his affair with a white woman meant he couldn’t provide an alibi to prove his innocence.

Sadly for Hank, the woman he had an affair with was none other than It: Welcome to Derry’s Mrs. Kersh, an acolyte of Pennywise who was all too eager to give away Hank’s location to the local sheriff. He then passed this information on to a violent mob of racist thugs who arrived at the Black Spot, baying for blood.

While this storyline was tragic for everyone, especially Hank and his daughter, Ronnie, “In The Name of the Father” managed to make another Stephen King character’s arc feel brutally sad in the process. The Shining’s Dick Halloran has played a substantial role in It: Welcome to Derry season 1, mostly helping the military locate Pennywise with his psychic gift.

However, Halloran’s powers come at a price. After encountering the killer clown in It: Welcome to Derry’s Neibolt House assault, Halloran spends most of “In The Name of the Father” trying to hide from the visions of dead people that he endures. This gives him debilitating PTSD, which almost ruins his relationship with Leroy.

It: Welcome to Derry’s Dick Halloran Plot Makes The Shining So Much Worse

Jack Nicholson looking crazy as Jack in The Shining

Halloran explains to Leroy that, during his childhood, his grandmother convinced him to use his psychic powers to lock away all the scary, threatening ghosts he encountered throughout his youth. He kept these psychic disturbances in a lock box deep in his mind, but Pennywise gleefully reached in and emptied the box in episode 5, “29 Neibolt Street.”

Since Leroy still doesn’t understand the supernatural nature of the threat facing Dick, he tries to insist that Dick should simply try to work with the monsters in his mind to take down Pennywise. However, Dick is so disturbed by the visions of dead people all around him that he can do little beyond drinking himself into a stupor.

This makes Dick Halloran’s abrupt, infamously pointless death in The Shining seem so much crueler, since viewers now know that the character survives the terrible traumas of It: Welcome to Derry only to get an axe planted in his chest decades later for no reason. This death was already sudden and jarring, but the It prequel makes it devastating.

It: Welcome to Derry’s Black Spot Plot Makes Dick Halloran’s Story Tragic

Bill Skarsgard's Pennywise grins in It Welcome to Derry episode 5

Furthermore, the fact that viewers already know Dick Halloran survives the massacre at the Black Spot makes his death even worse. Dick is guaranteed to live through It: Welcome to Derry season 1, as he canonically needs to be killed by Jack Torrance for no real reason years later.

As much as It: Welcome to Derry expands Stephen King’s shared universe, the show is unlikely to alter such a famous fate. However, Dick’s struggles with his shine are what lead him to get wasted before he arrives at the Black Spot, meaning he was entirely unprepared for the militia’s descent onto the venue.

Dick’s shine gives him some level of unexplained extrasensory perception that often allows him to sense bad things before they happen. This is how, in The Shining, he knows to warn Danny that his father will not make it through their winter in the Overlook Hotel. As such, the massacre is something Dick might have ordinarily foreseen.

Since Dick was in a self-induced state of near-unconsciousness, he wasn’t sober enough to see the threat of the racist militia. As such, the Stephen King character likely spent the rest of his life wracked by guilt over the events of It: Welcome to Derry episode 6’s ending.