Pennywise Battles ‘Doctor Sleep’ in New ‘Welcome to Derry'

Doctor Sleep seemed like an ill-advised endeavor. A sequel to The Shining? Really, Stephen? To be fair, it’s not like it was the first time he had dipped his toe back in that well. King wrote and produced a miniseries adaptation of his novel in 1997 as a kind of course correction, given his disdain for the Stanley Kubrick film. To say it was unsuccessful would be an understatement. I actually rewatched it this year, and I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone thinks, but it certainly ain’t good (and some choices are truly baffling).

But Doctor Sleep was a different beast. The book told the story of an older Danny Torrence who has become an alcoholic drifter. Over the course of the novel, he cleans up his act and gets a job as an orderly at a hospice in New Hampshire, where, thanks to his returning Shine (which had been blunted by his alcohol abuse), he helps elderly patients pass away peacefully. It’s just as emotionally wrenching as it sounds.

Instead of righting the ship in Doctor Sleep, King adds more to the mythos. We’re introduced to the True Knot, a gang of roaming “immortals” who feed off of people’s Shine, the manifestation of which they call Steam. Abra Stone is introduced as a young, incredibly powerful person with the same abilities as Danny, and she’s later revealed to be his half sister (not everything works). We are also told about Danny’s lockboxes, which he is taught to create by Dick Hallorann.

Dick learned the trick from his grandmother. In short, the lockboxes can be created by Shiners as a means of trapping ghosts. Danny uses them to contain some of the same entities that menaced him and his family in the Overlook Hotel. Eventually, he releases Horace Derwent from one of these boxes to help him defeat the True Knot. The novel was adapted by Mike Flanagan while staying mostly faithful (albeit with some changes to make it adhere more closely to Kubrick’s film, a shift that actually softened King’s views on the original film), and the lockboxes play an even more important role in that movie.

It’s all wild, but not nearly as wild as how the lockboxes were introduced this week in IT: Welcome to Derry. After several episodes with very little forward movement, the IT prequel series not only brought Pennywise into the mix but also put the entity back into direct contact with Dick Hallorann. Danny Torrence’s future mentor, here seen in his military days, leads a military squad on a mission into a dilapidated house on Neibolt street, which serves as a home base of sorts for the creature in the book and movies, while also giving it access to Derry’s connected sewer tunnels.

The introduction of the house was a big deal. That said, seeing it subject to a military raid was pretty silly. It goes as well as the audience (or anyone with half a brain) would expect, and even results in one of the lamest scares in the show so far: Pennywise takes the form of a ghostly Uncle Sam to attack two cadets because they’re both afraid of their jobs, I guess? I might have let it slide had the show not gone out of its way minutes earlier to remind us that Pennywise can take the forms of people’s fears, but I digress.

Dick quickly gets separated from his team and finds himself popping out of a strange bathroom and greeted by his grandmother. She warns him that someone is coming to get him, but it isn’t a frightening clown; it’s Hallorann’s grandfather. It’s Dick’s grandmother who showed him how to create the lockboxes he showed Danny, and she did so so he could protect himself against his grandfather’s ghost, as the man would often abuse Dick when he was a child and began haunting him after his death.

Pennywise using the grandfather to get into Dick’s mind was fantastic. It also mirrors a trick Hallorann pulls off in the previous episode, which sees him invading the mind of a Native American man to find the location of a MacGuffin that can contain or hurt Pennywise or something (kicking that can down the road for now). Dick’s grandfather arrives in the strange bathroom and pulls out Dick’s lockbox. Eventually, he forces it open and flashes a clown-like smile, making it clear that IT just turned the man’s own tricks against him.

I loved this sequence, even if it did raise some questions. The show seems to insinuate that Dick has one lockbox. That’s certainly possible. It could be that he only had to use the trick once. In the book (and movie adaptation), Danny has several, as they can only contain individual ghosts (to my memory, it’s never said how many Dick had to make). However, in this show, it seems implied that Dick had multiple entities in his. It could be as simple as that, and may make it easier for an audience to understand, especially since this is the first time they’re even mentioned.

The moment kind of felt like it contained equal parts plot and Easter egg. The box is revealed with great importance and terror, but I genuinely wonder if people who haven’t seen or read Doctor Sleep got that same feeling. In the show, we haven’t learned about Dick’s abusive grandfather. It’s made clear pretty quickly that he’s no good, but if you know what he’s up to, it’s even worse. They will likely go on to explain the box more thoroughly, and it’s safe to assume that, now that it’s been opened, Dick’s grandfather will continue to cause trouble.

This whole scene was what I’ve been waiting for. Too much of this show has been trying to tread new ground by using the same old tricks. The storylines with the children have felt too similar to what we saw kids go through in the films. If you’re going to do something that plays around in Stephen King’s many universes, which he has never been shy about mixing and matching, go big or go home. The lockbox thing may not make a whole lot of sense just yet, and feels kind of silly, but if you’re already shying away from deeper themes, gimme the pulp and gimme the clown.

I still believe that this show was never even supposed to include Pennywise until Bill Skarsgard signed on. Much of the cast was announced in May 2023, the show started filming, and production was halted due to the WGA strike. Skarsgard joined the cast in May 2024, and then the show finished shooting two months later. He could have already been cast, and they wanted to keep it under wraps, but I kind of doubt that. Regardless, he’s so freaking good that I relished any time he was on screen.

We’re finally seeing some of the larger plans for this show. We’re getting tastes of that big crossover energy. No one’s going to accuse it of being high art (which, I would argue, the novel very much is), but this felt like the first time it wasn’t trying to pretend that it was, and that worked for me.