IT: Welcome to Derry Episodes 6-8: Release Dates, How to Watch, and What’s Lurking Ahead
Welcome to Derry finally delivers—episode 5 unleashes Pennywise the Dancing Clown, as kids and the military collide with competing agendas while he bends the town to his will.
Episode 5 of IT: Welcome to Derry finally let Pennywise step out of the shadows, and yeah, it got ugly fast. The kids have a plan. The military has a plan. Pennywise is playing both like a fiddle and turning the town into its personal fear park. If you felt Episode 5 was a lot, buckle up — Episodes 6 through 8 are where all those threads pull tight.
Quick refresher: Episode 5 blew the doors off
The show dove deep into Major Halloran’s head, and Pennywise yanked out every rotten memory he’s tried to bury. Major Hanlon, meanwhile, nearly killed his own son under Pennywise’s influence — a nasty, unsettling beat that says a lot about how far the Clown is pushing people. And Matty? Matty turned out to be a trap from Pennywise, not a person — a lure that literally surrounded the kids with floating bodies. Subtle, this show is not.
If you’re trying to keep the military subplot straight: there are a lot of majors (Halloran, Hanlon, and Leroy), and the show is very clearly hinting that the brass are about to make the worst possible choices for the Cold War, Derry, and their own families.
When the next episodes drop
- Episode 6: In the Name of the Father — Sunday, November 30, 2025 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max
- Episode 7: The Black Spot — Sunday, December 7, 2025 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max
- Episode 8: Winter Fire (season finale) — Sunday, December 14, 2025 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max
Episode 6: In the Name of the Father
The Episode 6 trailer leans into a piece of King lore the show has only teased so far: Pennywise’s human face, Bob Gray. In the book, Pennywise calls itself Bob Gray when it meets Georgie Denbrough. Whether Bob Gray is a real person or just another skin It wears has always been part of the myth — and the show is now poking at that nerve on purpose.
Early footage and promo art show Bill Skarsgard as Bob Gray — older, balding, crisp suit and tie — in a black-and-white photo dated 1908 from Cumberland County, Maine. That picture shows up in Lilly’s old photo album, which strongly suggests Bob Gray was an actual man tied to Derry’s past. If he existed, the running theory is ugly: It devoured him and kept the face.
The Episode 6 synopsis points to everything closing in on the kids: Dick is crushed by darker visions and figures out the Black Spot is at the center of Charolette’s plan; Will butts heads with his parents; Marge pushes back on the Patty Cakes; and Lilly’s mental health is slipping. On top of that, the kids just got nabbed by Major Hanlon, which could mean Lilly gets sent away to an institution and Will gets grounded into oblivion. Not great timing, since Lilly has found a weapon — the one the Keepers hinted at — and the question now is whether it actually works.
The racial tension that Pennywise keeps stoking is getting louder (Episode 5 literally showed a prison guard smirking while a white man nearly shot a Black man), and the story is shifting hard onto Dick Halloran. He has to lean on his Shine as the threat called the Black Spot rolls toward Derry like a storm front.
Episode 7: The Black Spot
All roads lead here. The Black Spot is a nightclub built by Black servicemen at a nearby military base in the early 1960s. They took a decommissioned station in the woods and turned it into a refuge from the racism that followed them everywhere else. If you know King’s lore, you know what’s coming: a hate-fueled fire, orchestrated by the Maine Legion of White Decency — masked vigilantes cut from the same cloth as the KKK — that becomes one of the worst tragedies in Derry history.
Major Dick Halloran is at the center of this chapter. The show has already teased the catastrophe: Will saw a vision of his father burning near the woods, with a single red balloon floating above it like a signature. King’s The Shining even describes a giant bird snatching someone in the chaos — the kind of surreal, nightmarish detail that tells you Pennywise is feeding.
Speaking of family fallout, Major Leroy has been itching to get out of Derry, and this might be his moment — except the kids are determined to keep Will in the fight long enough to try to put Pennywise down. Halloran will use his Shine to uncover another key artifact. Fans are betting that it ties to Maturin the Turtle — King’s Macroverse counterweight to It — especially with how many turtle nods the show has dropped.
And it’s not just the military and the kids in the blast radius. The ancient force behind Pennywise is stirring, and the indigenous community — Rose and the Keepers, who actually know how to contain this thing — are going to get caught in the middle. Expect real losses.
Episode 8: Winter Fire (finale)
After the Black Spot, the military’s genius idea to weaponize Pennywise for the Cold War is almost guaranteed to backfire in spectacular fashion. A heavy cloud rolls in, the town gets pulled into the Deadlights, and Derry pays for every bad decision made in the name of power.
The finale sounds like everyone-versus-It: the kids, the soldiers, the Keepers — anyone left standing pools what they know to take a swing at Pennywise. Expect brutal, bloody mayhem. Maybe we get a sliver of hope at the end, the way the films did. Either way, this lays the track for Pennywise’s next feeding cycle in the 1980s — the time period of It and It Chapter Two.
Bottom line
The Clown is out, the town is bait, and the show is finally stepping into the larger mythology it’s been teasing since Episode 1. If you’ve been waiting for the cosmic weirdness, it’s here. IT: Welcome to Derry is streaming on HBO Max.