In the most recent episode of It: Welcome to Derry, we saw various characters—heavily armed Air Force guys, a member of the local Indigenous community wielding an alien dagger, and a group of awkward young teens—slip into the sewers under 29 Neibolt Street in search of you-know-who. We know they’re chasing an entity that delights in taking the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown; at this point in Welcome to Derry‘s storyline, however, nobody’s quite certain what they’re looking for. They just know it’s got mind-control powers and is propelled by pure evil.
One of those Air Force guys happens to be Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), who’s been singled out by the military for this unconventional mission thanks to his psychic powers. Stephen King fans are already very familiar with this character, especially because of Scatman Crothers’ enduring performance as an older Hallorann in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of The Shining. In Welcome to Derry, we’ve gotten to know the younger Hallorann. He’s cockier and a bit more tightly wound, and he’s learned to keep the scarier aspects of his gifts under control—to a point.
As episode five, “29 Neibolt Street,” reveals, It worms into Hallorann’s mind to exploit his memories of his abusive grandfather. Hallorann and his grandmother, who also had psychic powers, cower as his grandfather looms over them, cruelly taunting them. Then, the worst thing Hallorann can imagine happens: the elderly man, who’s really Pennywise in disguise, opens the box and frees all the horrors Hallorann’s been very carefully tucking away.
In the vision, the mental creation appears as a real box, filled with an orange glow just like Pennywise’s deadlight eyes.
When a dazed Hallorann emerges from the sewer at the end of the episode, he sees Pauly (Rudy Mancuso), a soldier who was killed moments earlier in the tunnel. He should not be up and walking, but he is—and Hallorann can quite clearly see him.
Welcome to Derry hasn’t yet given much context around Hallorann’s mental lockbox beyond just showing it to us—and making sure we understand that opening it was a very bad thing. Clearly, it’s something Hallorann is going to have to work through if he wants to be a functional person again. But the box exists in previous material introduced about the character, notably King’s Shining sequel Doctor Sleep.
In the 2019 Mike Flanagan movie version, Carl Lumbly plays a ghostly version of the character who appears to Danny Torrance (not long after the events at the Overlook) with some helpful advice. About… mental boxes. You can find Doctor Sleep on Netflix now to watch the scene in full, but it includes a callback to Hallorann’s famous line from The Shining about how the dark things that Danny can perceive with his “shining” powers can’t physically hurt him. They’re like “pictures in a book.”
The old man also tells Danny that dark things will flock to him because of his abilities. There’s nothing he can do to stop them from coming. “My grandfather, he was a mean son of a bitch,” he explains. “When he died, I danced… but he kept on coming back.”
Hallorann pulls out a small box and says that his grandmother taught him a trick. “I want you to know this box inside and out,” he tells the boy; earlier in the movie, we’d seen that Danny is still being haunted by the creepy ghost from room 237. “You’re gonna build one just like it in your mind. One even more special. So next time that bitch comes around, you’ll be ready.”
He’ll be ready to trap the ghost and all its adjacent negativity and bad vibes in his mental box, in other words. It’s a great idea, and perhaps this version of Hallorann didn’t have to deal with what our guy in Welcome to Derry is going through now. What’s going to happen with all the clingy spirits who come calling now?
Speaking to Decider, Chalk and It: Welcome to Derry co-showrunner Jason Fuchs shared a little more insight into Hallorann’s trauma.
“All the terror that he has ever seen, he just slipped it in the box, slipped it in the box, slipped it in the box,” Chalk explained about his character. “So the moment you unleash that, it’s not going to come out as gently as Dick put it in and it’s not happy about being shoved in a box. These are not entities that want to be trapped. And so when they can break free, they do, and it changes Dick forever.”
Added Fuchs, “That very last shot you see of Dick, of Chris Chalk, in [episode five] of him seeing dead Pauly in front of him on the bank of the river, that is going to take Dick to some extremely dark places, to a place he’s tried to get away from. There’s a reason he wanted to keep that box shut. His life by the end of episode five has been fully upended in ways that will take him to the breaking point and possibly past [it] in the episodes to come.”
New episodes of It: Welcome to Derry arrive Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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