🔗 Share this article

The latest installment of It: Welcome to Derry is loaded with fresh details, offering the most vivid glimpse yet at Pennywise portrayed by Bill Skarsgård. Still, with so much baked into one episode, a understated disclosure might have been overlooked completely, and it's a aspect that needs to be discussed.

After Jovan Adepo's character uncovers that Derry is more or less a supernatural containment for an eldritch monster, he promptly gets his family out of town to the air force base on the outskirts. We also learn that Hank Grogan's bus to Shawshank State Prison was ambushed. Later, we see him in the back of Madeleine Stowe's character car. At first, it appears he's taken her hostage as a means of getting out of town. However, once in the woods, the two share an intimate kiss.

Hank claims the bus was attacked (presumably by the sinister clown), allowing him to escape. He then asks Ingrid to find someone who can help him prove he was framed for the murders at the movie theater.

At the end of the episode, Ingrid reaches out to meet with Leroy's mother, who is already intrigued in Hank's situation. It is here that Ingrid looks directly into the camera and reveals her full name.

“Mrs. Hanlon, my name is Ingrid Kersh. You don’t know me, but we have a mutual friend,” she says.

If that surname is recognizable, it’s because a character named the elderly Mrs. Kersh appears in the It novel, as well as both the It miniseries and It: Chapter 2 film. She’s the elderly lady that Beverly Marsh mistakenly visits, who eventually turns out to be one of Pennywise’s many forms. However, Welcome to Derry suggests that the character was a actual individual, not just a illusion created by It. Whether Ingrid is the offspring of this character or the character itself is unconfirmed, but it's quite plausible that Ingrid and Mrs. Kersh one and the same.

In It: Chapter 2, which shares the same continuity as Welcome to Derry, the character portrayed by Joan Gregson has a couple of clues: the way she pronounces the word “father” and the line “nobody in Derry ever really dies,” both of which Ingrid has uttered, respectively, throughout the season, in a similar cadence to the film.

If Mrs. Kersh is indeed an real human and not just a disguise of the entity, it will spell trouble for Ingrid, especially as she attempts to unravel the conspiracy behind the cinema slayings. Of course, we are aware that the entity is to blame for the killings. That means the likelihood is high that she — along with Hank and Charlotte — will likely cross paths with the supernatural force.

In a earlier discussion, Stephen Rider noted how glad he is about the latest story developments and that Hank is being given more depth. "I play Black characters on screen, and a lot of times you don’t get all the meat, you just deliver background information," he says. "For him to have that internal secret --- as actors, we have to create those secrets for ourselves. [...] But he has that."

With only a trio of installments remaining, expect more narrative threads to intersect as the season barrels toward its finale. After the disclosures from the latest episode, the real identity of Ingrid is likely imminent. And if she is indeed the same person, Ingrid will join the long list of doomed characters fated to become linked to the clown for years into the future.