‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 5 Ending Explained: What’s in Dick Hallorann’s Box? How Is It Connected to ‘Doctor Sleep’?
IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 5 ends with a development that should send chills down any hardcore Stephen King fan’s spine. It’s not enough that our heroes finally visited the house on Neibolt Street this week on the HBO hit or that we finally got the big Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) reveal. No, the real nightmare in this week’s IT: Welcome to Derry has to do with Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) and what he’s been keeping locked up in his “lockbox.”
**Spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 5, now streaming on HBO Max**
IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 5 ends with a defeated Dick Hallorann stumbling out of the sewers. Pennywise has won their first big psychic battle by tapping into The Shining and Doctor Sleep character’s deepest, darkest secrets.
Dick is mentally transported to his childhood bathroom. He’s chained to a bathtub, but his grandmother (Lazzelle Gelias) — the woman who, according to The Shining, taught Dick about his powers — is trying to help him. She warns him that “he’s coming for you again.” Dick’s abusive grandfather (Andrew Moodie) then appears with a gun in his waistband and a locked box in his hand.
Later, Dick’s grandpa taunts him, saying he knows about his wife and grandson’s psychic connection. He scoffs at her advice to put all the negative feelings and emotions he feels into the lockbox, noting that power like that should be used. An utterly terrified Dick attempts to resist, but his grandfather (who’s clearly Pennywise in disguise) forces the box open.
When Dick finally emerges from the sewers, he not only appears shellshocked, but can see a zombie-version of Captain Pauly Russo (Rudy Mancuso). Pauly has just died saving Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James).
So what is all this? What was in Dick Hallorann’s box? What does this latest development have to do with lore Stephen King introduced in The Shining‘s sequel, Doctor Sleep? Here’s what you need to know about the end of IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 5…
Photos: HBO
IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 5 Ending Explained: What is in Dick Hallorann’s “Lockbox”? How Is it Connected to Doctor Sleep?
First thing’s first: What exactly is Dick Hallorann’s box? Well, it’s a concept introduced in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep in a scene where the older Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly) teaches young Danny Torrance (Roger Dale Floyd) how to lock all of his negative psychic memories and experiences in a box.
IT: Welcome to Derry‘s own Dick Hallorann, Chris Chalk, described it to DECIDER this way: “Okay, think of this: If you had the ability to see beyond this reality since you were a wee one and you were told, ‘Put it in a box.’ So imagine all of the things we hate about ourselves, or we hate about the people across us, and we just put it down. We just stuff it, we stuff it. It’s really that.”
“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 continued. “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.”
Opening the box doesn’t just change Dick, though. IT: Welcome to Derry executive producer and co-showrunner Jason Fuchs told DECIDER, “The box is very much open and it’s not easy to close.”
“That very last shot you see of Dick, of Chris Chalk, in [Episode] 5 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,” Fuchs said. “There’s a reason he wanted to keep that box shut. His life by the end of Episode 5 has been fully upended in ways that will take him to the breaking point and possibly past in the episodes to come.”
When DECIDER caught up with Captain Pauly Russo himself, Rudy Mancuso, he teased that while we’re not going to see much more of his character, even in zombie/spirit form, we are going to continue to see some gnarly stuff emerging from Dick’s box.
“I definitely know that we’re going to see more,” Mancuso said. “We’re going to dive a little bit deeper into that type of, not necessarily Pauly, but the type of entity that he’s representing.”
Mancuso also revealed that it wasn’t necessarily hard for him to capture Pauly’s eerie energy.
“That day was was strange because we’re fighting against time, as we always do. I had fucking contacts in my eyes. I couldn’t see anything. And I was in the woods. It’s almost like releasing a rabid animal into the woods,” Mancuso said. “I was confused. Equally confused in real life as Pauly was this supernatural state.”
What terrifying specters will emerge from Dick Hallorann’s box next? We’ll have to watch IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 6 next Sunday night to find out…
