IT: Welcome To Derry season 1 episode 2 ending explained: What did Dick Hallorann’s team discover at the excavation site in Derry?

The horror and history of IT: Welcome To Derry season 1 episode 2, titled The Thing in the Dark, runs deeper than any sewer tunnel the Muschiettis could have dreamed up. Co-created by Andy and Barbara Muschietti with Jason Fuchs, the IT prequel continues its sinister excavation of Derry’s past — not only of monsters, but of the people and systems that birthed them.

The HBO Max series expands Stephen King’s mythos to explore the town before the Losers Club, when racism, repression, and Cold War hysteria quietly sustained the same evil that would one day take the form of a clown. After the shocking massacre at the Capitol Theatre in the premiere episode, IT: Welcome To Derry season 1 episode 2 slows down just enough to reveal that Pennywise isn’t the only thing feeding on fear. The U.S. military is literally trying to weaponize it.

The excavation and the “Weapon of Fear”: What did Dick Hallorann’s team discover?

By the time the credits roll on IT: Welcome To Derry season 1 episode 2, the show delivers its most unnerving reveal yet. Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), the gifted Airman with psychic “shine” abilities familiar to The Shining fans, leads a covert military dig beneath the Derry Air Base. Colonel Fuller and General Shaw (James Remar) have taken Hallorann’s visions seriously — though for very different reasons.

“This isn’t folklore, General. Something that was buried in Derry a long time ago is stirring. I can feel it,” Hallorann insists during the tense excavation briefing.

Shaw’s response is chilling in its hubris:

“Then let’s dig it up and see if it can be useful.”

To the military brass, Hallorann’s shine isn’t a miracle, it’s a potential weapon locator. Shaw calls the buried entity “a weapon that generates debilitating fear in anyone who comes near it,” claiming it could become the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War. What’s terrifying is that he’s not entirely wrong. Fans of the IT universe understand that Derry’s ancient evil, Pennywise, already feeds on fear to maintain its power. Shaw’s misguided mission to contain or harness that energy only ensures that it will spread.

When the team finally unearths the object Hallorann sensed, it’s not a bomb, but a grotesque relic of human cruelty: a mud-soaked car riddled with bullet holes, inside which sit four decomposing skeletons. One corpse clutches a shotgun, frozen in the act of self-defense. The soldiers stare in stunned silence as the camera lingers on the bodies, their distorted faces trapped in expressions of pure terror.

“Is this what you were looking for?” one of the Airmen mutters. Shaw doesn’t answer, because the real discovery isn’t the car, but the force that left those corpses behind. The excavation has cracked open Derry’s foundation, releasing something that was never meant to be disturbed. Thematically, this moment crystallizes what IT: Welcome To Derry season 1 episode 2 is doing so well, turning fear into a literal weapon. Shaw’s desire to “control fear before it controls us” mirrors the Cold War ideology that birthed nuclear brinkmanship. In Derry, that ideology finds a supernatural echo: Pennywise himself. Both thrive on paranoia. Both infect entire systems. Both turn human suffering into power.

If the military thinks it’s about to bottle up Pennywise, they’re not unearthing a weapon, they’re waking a god.

Recap of IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1 Episode 2: A terrifying descent into Derry’s past

While the military digs deeper into Derry’s ground, the townspeople dig their own graves above it. The episode opens on the community’s disturbingly casual reaction to the Capitol Theatre killings. Principal Dunleavy’s tone-deaf assembly about “staying safe” feels like an echo of the town’s long tradition of denial. Lilly (Clara Stack), still haunted by what she witnessed, becomes Derry’s latest scapegoat — her truth dismissed as delusion, her trauma ignored.

Her friend Ronnie (Amanda Christie), meanwhile, faces her own nightmare. Her father Hank (Stephen Rider), the theater’s Black projectionist, is wrongfully accused of the crime. Chief Clint Bowers (Peter Outerbridge) all but admits that the investigation is political. In one of the episode’s most unsettling exchanges, he tells Lilly, “It’s either him or you, sweetheart.” Terrified of being institutionalized again, Lilly lies — condemning Hank in the process.

Elsewhere, Major Leroy (Jovan Adepo) begins to grasp why he was sent to Derry. After surviving a brutal “test,” Shaw reveals that Leroy’s amygdala — the part of the brain that processes fear — doesn’t function. In Shaw’s words, “You can’t be broken by what breaks other men.”

This makes Leroy the perfect candidate to interact with the entity they’re seeking underground — an ominous clue that connects the Air Base storyline directly to Pennywise’s origin. Amid this darkness, the show gives brief, hopeful reprieves. Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James), Derry’s newest resident, finds kinship with Ronnie in detention. It’s a reminder that innocence still flickers in Derry, even if evil looms all around it.

With its blend of Cold War paranoia, racial injustice, and supernatural dread, IT: Welcome To Derry season 1 episode 2 isn’t just expanding Stephen King’s lore — it’s recontextualizing it. The excavation site and the “weapon of fear” symbolize humanity’s endless capacity to repeat its worst mistakes, to try to control what it should never touch.

New episodes of IT: Welcome To Derry premiere Sundays at 9 pm ET on HBO Max, with episode 3 expected to delve even deeper into the horror lurking beneath America’s most haunted town.