IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1, Episode 6 drops some more major reveals about Pennywise the Dancing Clown, delving into the character’s backstory as a means of setting up the show’s future. Now that Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise has been fully unleashed after weeks of waiting, all bets are off. The horror and tension are ratcheting up to a whole new level, and things are about to get so much worse for the titular town. But the more we see of the clown, the more we learn about him, too. Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Welcome to Derry Episode 6, “In the Name of the Father.”
The episode builds on the introduction of Mrs. Kersh to Welcome to Derry. Notably, she was a key figure in IT: Chapter Two, as It took on the guise of her, as an old woman, to torment Beverly Marsh. Now we’re learning more of her backstory, again through someone visiting her home, this time Lilly Bainbridge. When Lilly goes to her house, she flicks through old photo albums, which reveal images of Kersh as a girl, accompanied by a man who curiously looks like Pennywise without his clown makeup.
Bob Gray Was The Original Pennywise – And Mrs. Kersh’s Father
If that man looks familiar, it’s because he first appeared in a similar photograph in IT: Chapter Two, once again in Mrs. Kersh’s house. There, he appeared with his daughter in front of a wagon with “Pennywise the Dancing Clown” written upon it, before we later see him putting on clown makeup, all suggesting, but not confirming, a connection. His real name is Bob Gray, which isn’t spoken in the IT movies (nor Welcome to Derry, yet), but instead comes from Stephen King’s book. Bob Gray is one of the aliases by which It refers to itself, and Mrs. Kersh directly says he’s her father (or “fadder”), telling Bev:
“His name was Robert Gray, better known as Bob Gray, better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Although that was not his name, either. But he did love his joke, my fadder.”
Neither the IT book nor movies are explicit in what this means (though in the movie, Kersh says her father was a circus performer). Because the version of Mrs. Kersh in both is simply another form of It, then it feels more like it’s part of the entity taunting Beverly. Still, there has always been speculation and discussion that there was an element of truth in it: that Bob Gray had once been a real person, who performed as a clown named Pennywise, and that It killed him and took on the Pennywise persona, recognizing its value in scaring children.
IT: Welcome to Derry finally connects all of these threads and makes it much more explicit, that the real Kersh’s real father was a man who worked in a carnival as a clown named Pennywise. He was consumed by It, but when the creature returned 27 years later, as seen in the 1935 flashbacks, she still believed he existed. She describes him as “different, perhaps, changed by whatever he’d been through,” but describes what happened to him as being taken over by a shadow, and that he could still “break free.”
This version of Kersh is not It in disguise – the dialogue alone makes it clear, but the shard doesn’t scare her away either – so this tells us what she’s saying is the truth, not a taunt. We can assume that her father was called Bob Gray, since that’s the name she gives in the book, and that, when the carnival rolled into Derry, Maine, in the early 1900s, It found him and starting taking on the Pennywise look and persona.
The reveal in Welcome to Derry is a long time coming. Even before IT: Chapter Two released, director Andy Muschietti teased this connection between Pennywise and Bob Gray, telling Den of Geek: “Everything that relates to Pennywise and Bob Gray is very cryptic… We don’t know exactly what he is, where he comes from, or how Bob Gray is related. Was Bob Gray a real person? Is he incarnated in that thing because Bob Gray played a clown?”
Still, while we’ve had some of the backstory, fans will likely have to wait for more. The flashbacks go to 1935, which is when IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2 will be set, and means that Mrs. Kersh – perhaps going by Miss Gray back then – will likely once again be a character in the story. But even more important than that is Season 3, which will take place in 1908. As the photos show, this was when Kersh was a young girl and still with her father. That means the third season will probably show us exactly who Bob Gray was, and the origins of It becoming Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
New episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry release on Sundays at 9pm on HBO and HBO Max.
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