It: Welcome to Derry: Who is Dick Hallorann and His Connection to the King Universe?
It: Welcome to Derry: In the sprawling, interconnected universe of Stephen King, locations are not just settings; they are living, breathing characters steeped in a history of pain. And the people who pass through them are often nexus points, their lives threading through different tales of terror. The second episode of It: Welcome to Derry, “The Thing in the Dark,” masterfully confirms this narrative logic. It does more than just advance the story of Pennywise; it weaves a crucial thread connecting Derry, Maine, to the cursed Overlook Hotel of Colorado by introducing a figure familiar to any seasoned King fan: Dick Hallorann.
This isn’t merely a clever Easter egg for Constant Readers. The arrival of Hallorann, portrayed with grounded intensity by Chris Chalk, is a foundational piece of world-building. It confirms a terrifying truth: Derry and the Overlook exist on the same malevolent map. And Hallorann, with his unique psychic gift, is the bridge between them.
It: Welcome to Derry: Who is Dick Hallorann and His Connection to the King Universe?
Set in 1962, Welcome to Derry finds a young Dick Hallorann serving as an army cook at the Derry air base. He is assigned to Operation Precept, a clandestine Department of Defense mission led by Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo). Their goal? To excavate a mysterious “weapon” buried deep beneath the town—a device capable of generating crippling, absolute terror.
In a pivotal scene, as soldiers dig in the pouring rain and unearth a car filled with skeletons, Hallorann stands apart. He doesn’t just see the grisly find; he feels the malevolence around it. “I can feel it,” he murmurs, his eyes seeing beyond the physical. This moment is far more than a jump scare setup; it’s the series introducing the concept of “the shine” as a crucial sense organ for perceiving the evil that permeates Derry—an evil the rest of the world willingly ignores.
This portrayal is deeply rooted in King’s original text. In the novel It, Mike Hanlon’s historical interludes briefly mention a young army cook named Dick Hallorann who worked alongside his father, Will Hanlon, and was hailed a hero for saving lives during the tragic Black Spot fire. The series smartly adapts this footnote, placing Hallorann a generation earlier with Leroy, who is Mike Hanlon’s grandfather. This subtle change creates a “genealogy of perception”—a lineage of men, from Leroy to Will to Mike, who are either sensitive to or are keepers of Derry’s dark history, with Hallorann as their spiritual forebear.
More Than a Cameo: Hallorann as a Kingverse Nexus
For audiences, Dick Hallorann is a known quantity. We first met him in The Shining—played by Scatman Crothers in Stanley Kubrick’s film and by Carl Lumbly in Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep—as the wise cook who recognizes young Danny Torrance’s psychic abilities. He is the one who gives it a name: “the shine,” a form of telepathy and premonition that allows him to see the lingering dead and communicate across vast distances.
The connection between Hallorann and the entity of Derry is not an invention of the Muschiettis. Stephen King himself laid this groundwork in the 1980s. By establishing that Hallorann was marked by his time in Derry, King implied that his “shine” was honed, or perhaps awakened, by his encounter with the town’s primordial fear. In Welcome to Derry, we see this in practice: Hallorann’s gift operates as a powerful intuition. He doesn’t need to see Pennywise the Dancing Clown to know that a profound and ancient wrongness saturates the very soil.
By including him, Andy Muschietti transforms Welcome to Derry from a simple prequel into a thematic intersection of the cosmic and the human. If Pennywise embodies fear as a raw, devouring force, then Dick Hallorann represents consciousness—the ability to recognize, acknowledge, and resist it.
Operation Precept and the Science of Terror
The plot of Operation Precept brilliantly merges the supernatural with Cold War paranoia. General Shaw (James Remar) explains to Major Hanlon that the weapon they seek could “win the war before firing a single missile.” This isn’t a nuclear bomb; it’s a tool of psychological warfare, a device to weaponize absolute terror.
This narrative functions as a powerful allegory for humanity’s futile attempt to control and rationalize the irrational. The U.S. military, in its arrogance, believes it can dig up fear, contain it, and turn it against its enemies. But Derry, much like the Overlook Hotel, does not allow itself to be tamed. Hallorann, with his shine, understands this on a visceral level. His warning, “I can feel that we are close,” is not one of excitement, but of dread. He senses they are not unearthing a tool, but poking a sleeping god—and the consequences will be catastrophic.
The Black Spot Fire: Where History and Horror Collide
In King’s novel, Dick Hallorann’s heroism is cemented during the Black Spot fire. The Black Spot was a club for African-American soldiers, which was firebombed by a racist group called The Legion of White Decency. It was there that Hallorann used his shine to navigate the inferno and save several men, including Will Hanlon.
Welcome to Derry has confirmed that the Black Spot fire will be a central event of its first season, tying it directly to one of Pennywise’s cyclical awakenings. Hallorann’s presence at the air base and his involvement with Operation Precept suggest that the fire will be portrayed not just as a historical act of human evil, but as a literal manifestation of Derry’s cycle of fear. The town’s inherent evil—its racism, its secrecy, its hunger—feeds the entity below, and the entity, in turn, amplifies the horror.
In this crucible, Hallorann is the crucial witness. His shine is not portrayed as a mere superpower, but as a form of heightened empathy and awareness in the face of collective, cyclical horror. He sees the truth that others, blinded by prejudice or fear, cannot.
A Prison of Fear: The Tragic Weight of the Shine
Actor Chris Chalk perfectly summarized his character’s arc with a poignant observation: “What Dick fears most is getting trapped, in his mind or in a place where he doesn’t belong. And in this story, both things happen.”
This gets to the heart of the horror in Welcome to Derry. Fear is not just a physical threat from a clown; it is a mental, historical, and inherited prison. The characters are caught in a cycle they cannot escape because it is woven into the fabric of the town itself. Hallorann embodies this tension perfectly: he is a man gifted (or cursed) with the ability to perceive the boundaries of this evil, yet he is powerless to leave the very place where it is most concentrated.
His presence introduces a necessary, if tragic, balance. For the first time in Derry’s long, bloody history, someone with the capacity to truly understand the darkness is present. He is a witness, and in the Kingverse, witnesses are the first, crucial step toward fighting back.
Conclusion: The Living Bridge of the Kingverse
The inclusion of Dick Hallorann in It: Welcome to Derry is a masterstroke with multiple functions:
- It Expands the King Multiverse: It formally unites It, The Shining, and Doctor Sleep under a single cosmic framework, reinforcing the idea of the “Rays” of psychic energy that underpin the entire Dark Tower mythology.
- It Redefines the Scale of Evil: Pennywise is no longer an isolated monster, but one expression of a pervasive cosmic evil that also infects places like the Overlook Hotel and events like the Black Spot fire.
- It Gives Meaning to Legacy: It establishes the origin of the Hanlon family’s crucial role as historians and “rememberers.” By saving Leroy Hanlon, Hallorann sets in motion a chain of memory that will culminate decades later with Mike Hanlon calling the Losers Club home.
Welcome to Derry is proving to be anything but a conventional prequel. By bringing Dick Hallorann to the forefront, Andy Muschietti has built a living bridge between fire and radiance, between the Overlook’s haunted halls and Derry’s cursed sewers. Hallorann’s shine stands as the antithesis to Pennywise’s hunger: where the clown manipulates and feeds on terror, the cook understands and resists it. In a town that thrives on silence and forgetting, Dick Hallorann is the first vital witness, and his story is the key to understanding the true, interconnected terror of the Stephen King universe.
