IT: Welcome to Derry ruins pickles like IT ruined clowns

If you thought it was tough to eat during IT: Welcome to Derry‘s gory first episode, the show’s second installment says, “Hold my pickle jar.”

That’s because episode 2, titled “The Thing in the Dark,” continues IT: Welcome to Derry‘s scare parade with a sequence that does for pickles what Stephen King‘s IT did for clowns. Namely, it ruins them entirely.

IT: Welcome to Derry turns pickles into nightmares.

Clara Stack in “IT: Welcome to Derry.”
Credit: Brooke Palmer / HBO

The series laid the groundwork for its pickle-centric scare back in episode 1, when Lilly (Clara Stack) revealed her traumatic backstory to Matty (Miles Ekhardt). Her father died in a freak accident at the pickle plant he worked at, climbing into the factory’s machinery in order to retrieve Lilly’s lost mood ring. Turns out, the machinery was still on, putting a grisly end to his life.

Lilly’s father’s death sparked an urban legend that his body parts have turned up in pickle jars all around Maine. It also haunts Lilly at school, where bullies leave jars of pickles in her locker. The potent combination of family tragedy and psychological torment at school makes Lilly’s relationship with pickles the perfect kind of fear for Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) to exploit. And boy, does he ever.

“The Thing in the Dark” sees Lilly’s routine grocery turn into a waking nightmare. The aisles shift around her, trapping her in a maze of creepy customers and whispers that she’s crazy. Later, the announcements on the loud speaker directly call her out for having “lost [her] marbles,” and she sees her dead friends from episode 1 plastered on cereal boxes as mascots.

That buildup is unsettling enough as it is, but it all culminates in something far worse for Lilly: a trip to the pickle aisle. Boxed in by shelves of pickles, Lilly sees parts of her father within the jars. His head, sliced into thirds, taunts her, while his fingers almost blend in with the pickles. When the jars all burst off the shelves, her father’s body parts coalesce into a tentacled pickle monster, slick with brine. It’s as if the Kraken decided to become a pickle mascot. You think you can do better than the Vlasic stork? You can’t! Back to the ocean with you!

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Now, the logical bit of my brain knows that there are no corpses in pickle jars. But the rest of my brain, the part that watched IT: Welcome to Derry and kept yelling “Why?” during this scene, is now hesitant to even think of pickles. After all, the scene elicited the kind of reaction about pickles that I had after just seeing Pennywise for the first time: a resounding “absolutely not.” You really think I’m going to willingly bite into a whole pickle when I just saw swollen fingers and toes floating around in brine? No way!

Is IT: Welcome to Derry‘s pickle scene in Stephen King’s book?

No! While IT: Welcome to Derry is inspired by Mike Hanlon’s historical interludes in Stephen King’s IT, much of it has been made up whole cloth. Think of it as IT fan fiction.

Lilly is one of the show-only elements of IT: Welcome to Derry, which means that we don’t actually have King to blame for the pickle Kraken from hell. Instead, that’s all on series developers Andy and Barbara Muschietti, showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, and episode writer Austin Guzman. Thanks for the nightmares, team. As punishment, I hope you can never chomp down on a pickle again!

IT: Welcome to Derry airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO (with episode 2 airing at 3 a.m. ET/12 a.m. PT on Friday, Oct. 31 for Halloween). The show is available to stream on HBO Max.