This It: Welcome to Derry Episode 2 review covers “The Thing in the Dark”: the episode is strongest whenever it stays with Derry’s kids and the adults failing them, and weakest whenever it cuts to the military’s buried fear-weapon subplot, which still plays like a different, lesser show stitched on.
Spoiler warning: full plot details for “The Thing in the Dark” follow. We haven’t watched this episode first-hand — this review is built on Wikipedia’s episode summary and multiple critics’ published accounts of what happens in it.
The Thing in the Dark: What Happens
Hank Grogan is still taking the blame for the theater attack from the premiere, even as Colonel Fuller tells Leroy that the man who confessed, Masters, won’t name anyone else involved. At school, Charlotte tries to stop a group of kids from beating a younger boy and finds every adult around her looking away.
Lilly, back in class after the premiere’s trauma, starts hallucinating — including a vision of being born from her dead mother’s body — and Police Chief Clint Bowers pressures her into recanting her account of what really happened, threatening to have her committed to Juniper Hill unless she names Hank as the attacker. She does. Hank is arrested.
Leroy, meanwhile, tracks down Masters and learns the “attack” was staged by General Shaw as a loyalty test. Shaw then lets Leroy in on the real program: Operation Precept, a Cold War effort to find and weaponize something buried under Derry that generates pure, debilitating fear in anyone near it — with help from a young airman named Dick Hallorann, whose psychic “gifts” the base is trying to use before he’s learned to control them. The episode ends on the dig site’s biggest find yet: a car full of skeletons (full episode summary).
Why the Human Horror Still Works
The best material in “The Thing in the Dark” has nothing to do with buried weapons. It’s Charlotte watching a mob of children beat a kid half their size while every adult on that playground keeps walking, and it’s Bowers using a psychiatric hospital as leverage against a traumatized teenage girl until she lies under oath.
That’s the actual argument Stephen King’s It has always made — that Derry’s real monster is the adults who decide not to see what’s in front of them — and this episode is the first time the show has built a scene around that idea instead of just gesturing at it.
Ronnie’s hallucination of being pulled from her dead mother is the episode’s ugliest, most effective image for exactly that reason — it’s a kid’s private horror that no adult in the scene registers at all. Vulture’s Louis Peitzman called it the show’s “first true act of mad genius,” and it’s hard to argue: it doesn’t need Pennywise, a cave, or a conspiracy to land. It just needs a kid nobody is protecting.
Why Operation Precept Almost Sinks It
Set that against Shaw’s big reveal, and the seams show. Operation Precept — fear as a weapon, a Cold War program, a buried “beacon,” a car full of skeletons — is exactly the kind of plot mechanics King’s novel never bothered with, because the book’s horror was never really about a thing to be found and exploited. It was about a town that lets its own children get hurt. Bolting a military conspiracy onto that theme doesn’t deepen it; it gives the show something to explain instead of something to feel.
IGN’s Tom Jorgensen flagged the same imbalance, writing that the “outlandish developments at the air base” point the conspiracy plot in directions that aren’t “all-that-convincing,” even as he praised the episode’s imagery and tension everywhere else. The frustrating part is that the show clearly knows how to build dread out of nothing — it just keeps interrupting itself to explain a weapons program instead.
Dick Hallorann and the Stephen King Universe Payoff
The one place Operation Precept earns its screen time is Dick Hallorann. Watching a young Hallorann get pushed by a commanding officer to use psychic abilities he hasn’t learned to control yet is a real, specific piece of King-universe connective tissue — decades before he’s the steady, grounded presence readers (and The Shining moviegoers) meet at the Overlook.
Co-showrunner Jason Fuchs has said directly that this isn’t the Hallorann from The Shining yet: “He doesn’t have control over his abilities yet.” That’s the adaptation work a comics and genre site actually cares about — not just horror set pieces, but how a character’s whole future gets built one uncomfortable scene at a time.
How Critics Scored It
No single outlet agrees on a number, but the shape of the reaction is consistent: strong praise for the episode’s character work, real reservations about the military subplot. Comic Book Co doesn’t apply its own numeric scale — these are the critics’ own published scores, not ours. Same-night household viewership also dropped sharply from the premiere, down to 0.155 million for this November 2, 2026 episode — a reminder that HBO’s own weekly numbers don’t always track with how an episode actually plays.
| Outlet | Critic | Score / Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Vulture | Louis Peitzman | 4/5 |
| AV Club | William Hughes | B+ |
| IGN | Tom Jorgensen | 6/10 |
| Collider | Shawn Van Horn | 7/10 |
More It: Welcome to Derry Coverage
See the full It: Welcome to Derry episode schedule for every remaining release date, our review of the Halloween special, “A Story of Derry”, and everything confirmed so far about the Season 2 renewal set in 1935.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did It: Welcome to Derry Episode 2 air yet?
Yes. “The Thing in the Dark” premiered November 2, 2026 on HBO and HBO Max.
What is Operation Precept in It: Welcome to Derry?
A secret Cold War military program searching for a buried source of overwhelming fear under Derry, which the Army hopes to weaponize. Episode 2 reveals airman Dick Hallorann’s psychic abilities are being used, against his control, to help locate it.
Is It: Welcome to Derry’s Dick Hallorann connected to The Shining?
Yes — he’s the same character who later works at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, shown here decades earlier as a young airman who hasn’t yet learned to control his abilities.
What happens to Lilly in It: Welcome to Derry Episode 2?
Police Chief Bowers pressures her into falsely naming Hank Grogan as her attacker by threatening to have her committed to Juniper Hill, and she’s sent back to the hospital after another hallucination.
When does It: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 come out?
“Now You See It” premieres November 9, 2026 on HBO and HBO Max, per the show’s full episode schedule.
