Why Do The Deadlights Target Ingrid & Will In IT: Welcome To Derry Ep. 7? Here’s The Shocking Answer
It: Welcome to Derry reveals why Ingrid Kersh and Will Hanlon become targets of the Deadlights in Episode 7 as Pennywise shifts toward a new cycle of violence
Why Do The Deadlights Target Ingrid & Will In IT: Welcome To Derry (Photo Credit –X)
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In IT: Welcome to Derry, the trouble for the show’s protagonists starts long before the flames swallow The Black Spot, and the feeling in episode 7 turns only heavier with every moment. The white-skinned vigilantes charge in, burn the place to the ground, and the night becomes the kind of blood-soaked moment the Shokopiwah tribe calls the augury. Pennywise should be settling into its long sleep after a feast like that, yet the show twists the knife with two more victims touched by the Deadlights.
Ingrid Kersh and young Will Hanlon cross paths with something older than Derry, something that carries the same bright orange-yellow glow King described back in 1986.
The Deadlights Explained & Why It Matters In Episode 7
Those lights come from the Macroverse, a dimension that birthed the ancient thing Derry hides beneath its streets. Pennywise might dance and grin, but the Deadlights are its true shape, the pulsing energy that no human mind can understand. They pop up across King’s universe, from The Dark Tower to Insomnia to Later. They leave dents in the people who see them, the way Beverly Marsh, Richie Tozier, and even Audra Denbrough discovered in stories before this one.
Ingrid’s fate starts to seal itself long before the Deadlights crack open her mind. She tells Lilly that Bob Gray was her father, and she holds on to that belief with the kind of devotion that blinds a person. She followed the circus, wanted to perform, and most importantly, wanted love from a man who never really existed.
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When Pennywise shows her Bob’s face in 1935, she falls under its pull. While working at Juniper Hill, she feeds it victims, convinced she is helping the man she once adored. She even calls in the anonymous tip about Hank Grogan hiding at The Black Spot, hoping the fear and violence will fill Pennywise with enough strength to look at her the way her father once did, or the way she thought he did.
The turn comes when Pennywise tells Ingrid that it is going into hibernation. The idea of being abandoned again cuts through whatever spell held her in place. She screams at the clown and strips away the last illusion, saying the truth she avoided for years – the fact that it is not her father.
Pennywise, as a result, answers with the Deadlights, after which her eyes fog and her body lifts, and something inside her snaps. By the time she is loaded into that ambulance, awake and staring at the children like they are fresh prey, she is no longer Ingrid Kersh. She is a mind cracked wide open, drifting somewhere between here and whatever place those lights come from. The Deadlights do not just stun a person; they warp them and keep pieces of them.
Will Hanlon is unfortunately pulled in next. Pennywise should be asleep for 27 years, yet the military’s interference rips the cycle open. Dick Hallorann uncovers one of the 13 pillars that keep the entity bound, and the government destroys it. General Shaw once hinted at plans to use the being during the Cold War, but the truth is uglier. They want it free, and now with the pillar gone, Pennywise wakes early, hungry and angry.
Fresh from forced awakening, Will subsequently becomes the first target for Pennywise. It reaches him in the family kitchen, and the Deadlights roll out again, flooding him with the same lethal glow Ingrid saw. Fans know Will survives because Mike Hanlon eventually enters the story, yet the damage may be more serious than anyone expects. It is because a brush with the Deadlights never leaves clean edges.
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In Welcome to Derry, Ingrid and Will are chosen because they sit in the path of two different storms. Ingrid becomes the child Pennywise can manipulate, the believer, the one desperate enough to serve. Will becomes the first heartbeat Pennywise hears when the military tears it back into the world.
