It: Welcome To Derry Episode 2 Reveals An Important Piece Of The Shining Lore

This article contains spoilers for "It: Welcome to Derry" season 1, episode 2, "The Thing in the Dark." 

At the end of the day, it's no massive surprise that "The Shining" character Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) is in town for "It: Welcome to Derry." Stephen King's "It" novel reveals that he spent some time there in his youth and was (very briefly and in a small capacity) involved in some key plot elements that I won't discuss here to avoid potentially spoiling "Welcome to Derry" season 1's endgame.

However, "Welcome to Derry" season 1, episode 2 ("The Thing in the Dark") suggests that its version of Hallorann isn't quite the same guy as he is in the show's source material. For one, the book version of the character is an Army cook. Here, though, Hallorann has switched military branches and serves in the Air Force — and while he seems to be a lowly airman, he's no cook. Instead, he has some serious sway at his military base, where it turns out he's doing some "top secret spy stuff" he's unable to discuss with his buddies.

Now, here's where things get interesting. We know that Hallorann has the Shining, and lo and behold, the episode reveals that he's using it to help the military locate a mysterious buried object. This means that the military and, by proxy, the government are fully aware of the Shining ability, which both "The Shining" and "Doctor Sleep" have painted as a rare and little-known thing only the individuals who have it really know about. What's more, the powers that be have found a way to utilize it. This is a massive revelation that might send shockwaves across what we know of "The Shining" lore — or "It" director Andy Muschietti's take on it, anyway.

In King's "Shining" and "Doctor Sleep" novels, the Shining (also known as the Shine) is portrayed as an ultra-secretive psychic power that allows its hosts a range of psychic abilities, including mind-reading and the ability to remotely communicate with people who share the same power. Unfortunately, it also makes the user susceptible to hostile supernatural forces, such as the evil genius loci of the Overlook Hotel and the psychic vampires of the True Knot. It's all very secretive and mysterious in the best Stephen King style. Unfortunately, all that secrecy also runs the risk of going down the drain if we assume that the government has been taking notes on the Shining since the 1960s. 

Sure, it's entirely possible — and, with the "Welcome to Derry" trailer teasing Pennywise's (Bill Skarsgård) real origin story as a "Glamour" who crashed to Earth aboard a meteor, even likely — that the thing they're seeking turns out to be that meteor, and the mission blows up in the military's collective face in a dramatic fashion. This would allow Hallorann to slip away and strip the Air Force of its sole connection to the paranormal, allowing every King story that comes after this chronologically to retain their status quo without the risk of interference from nosy government/military entities that've been investigating the paranormal for decades. 

Still, since even Stephen King's worst horror story adaptations tend to have at least one supernatural entity running around, the imagination wanders. In the interest of pure speculation, let's imagine what the Stephen King universe would look like in a scenario where the powers that be have been keeping tabs on paranormal events since the events of "Welcome to Derry" season 1.   

Apart from whatever the military is up to with Hallorann in "Welcome to Derry" season 1, the CIA was big into mind control experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the Derry mission is clearly sanctioned by powerful higher-ups, the agency would likely get a whiff of Hallorann eventually. A bona fide psychic ability like the Shining would likely send them (and other government entities) on a decades-long quest to find out everything about this power and others like it. Since the military is already not only buying into Hallorann's psychic abilities but also using them to dig for mystery objects that might turn the tide of the Cold War at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they already seem to be taking supernatural research seriously, too.

Again, there's no reason to assume that Andy Muschietti and company are necessarily in any real danger of tying the entire Stephen King Universe into a big "X-Files" pretzel. There's absolutely no evidence indicating that they don't know what they're doing. Still, should this situation go unaddressed for whatever reason, imagine being a Shining user — or any supernaturally-powered person from King's works, really — in the U.S. a few decades down the line. Since the authorities already have a whiff of the supernatural in the early 1960s, there's no way they haven't done their level best to keep tabs on paranormal operators ever since. Good luck to the True Knot trying to hunt an unwary kid with the Shining in such a world; chances are, an army of Fox Mulders would descend on them the second they park their RV convoy.

"It: Welcome to Derry" season 1 is streaming on HBO Max.