Polly Chalmers kills the Azka spider after breaking the charm that had eased her chronic hand pain. The episode turns apparent relief into a reckoning: Polly rejects the bargain’s hold over her, confronts the creature hidden inside the amulet, and recognizes that Alan Pangborn’s danger is bound up with her own actions.

The charm breaks

In her bedroom, Polly’s hands are hurting again when Leland Gaunt urges her that it is not too late. Instead of continuing to submit to the bargain, she rejects the pride that has helped keep her bound to it, tears the Azka charm from her neck, and breaks it in her clenched hand. The return of pain is real, but less severe than she had feared. The charm’s apparent relief is thus exposed as inseparable from a concealed danger.

When Polly throws the broken charm across the room, it strikes the wall and splits open. A small spider crawls out and heads toward the bathroom. It grows as it moves, from about the size of a beetle to the size of a mouse, revealing that the charm had contained a living creature rather than offering an uncomplicated cure. Polly understands that the spider has been feeding on the poison it drew from her body, so breaking the charm has released a threat she cannot safely ignore.

Polly kills the spider

Polly follows the spider into the bathroom and tries to stop it with a plunger. Her painful hands make the struggle difficult, but she does not retreat. When the creature climbs onto the plunger, she grips it, throws it against the tiled wall, and then uses the tool to impale it on the shower mat. The creature finally goes still.

The scene’s apparent scale then shifts: when Polly looks into the tub again, the spider is no bigger than a fingernail. That final image does not undo the danger she has faced; it makes the horror’s uncertain appearance part of the episode’s effect. Polly’s decisive act is not merely to break the charm, but to persist in killing what emerges from it.

From private danger to urgent action

After the struggle, Polly nearly faints. She forces herself back to awareness by thinking of Alan, then recognizes that he is in terrible danger and that she is the reason. Her attention moves at once from the creature she has killed to the human consequence of her bargain: finding Alan has become the immediate priority.

Polly initially considers going to the Castle Rock Sheriff's Office, but a remembered warning from Aunt Evvie turns her away from that plan. She believes Alan is somewhere else and that going to the office would make it too late. The episode therefore ends not with rest or relief, but with Polly setting out to reach him. Destroying the charm breaks its immediate hold; it does not erase the consequences of Gaunt’s manipulation.

Significance

The spider’s release makes the charm’s cost physically present: what seemed to ease Polly’s pain had also concealed a dangerous parasite. The reversal links bodily relief to hidden harm without suggesting that Polly’s pain was imaginary; when the charm breaks, her hands hurt again, but less than she expected. Her choice to break it is an act of resistance, and killing the spider completes that choice through direct action.

The episode also reconnects Polly’s private bargain to the wider danger surrounding Alan. She does not treat the spider’s death as the end of the matter: recognition that Alan may be in danger immediately redirects her toward him. The decisive change is therefore both personal and relational—Polly rejects the charm’s power, then accepts responsibility for what her involvement may have put at risk.