IT: Welcome to Derry is meticulously exploring the cursed history of its titular town, charting the course of Pennywise’s evil through a new generation of victims in 1962. The series grants audiences a ground-level view of how the cosmic entity’s cycle of terror manifests, turning a quiet life into a nightmare. This exploration of the past is not a one-off story. Showrunners Andy and Barbara Muschietti have been vocal about their ambitious three-season outline for IT: Welcome to Derry. According to their plan, each subsequent season of the show will travel further back in time to depict previous cycles of violence. The series has already seeded the thematic ground for these future installments by referencing key historical events, but the latest episode delivered a chilling promise that as the narrative timeline regresses, the on-screen horror is set to escalate.
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Warning: Spoilers below for IT: Welcome to Derry, Episode 5
The fifth episode of IT: Welcome to Derry reinforces that the Native people of the region have been the true guardians of Pennywise’s secrets for centuries, ever since their ancestors first trapped the entity within Derry’s geographical limits. A scene depicting a private community meeting, attended by the Rose (Kimberly Guerrero), provides the show’s most direct statement about its own future. While discussing the ongoing threat, Rose observes that the current 1962 cycle “has been a lot milder than ’35 and ’08.” This single line of dialogue functions as a direct tease. When the series eventually travels back to the years 1935 and 1908 for its second and third seasons, viewers should expect a far more vicious and widespread manifestation of Pennywise’s evil.
Stephen King’s IT Book Teases the Horrors to Come in Welcome to Derry
The creative roadmap for IT: Welcome to Derry is drawing directly from the darkest annals of its source material, Stephen King’s 1986 novel. The book’s main narrative is famously punctuated by a series of chapters titled “Derry: An Interlude,” which present the historical research compiled by an adult Mike Hanlon. These sections detail the catastrophic events that marked Pennywise’s previous feeding cycles. The series is explicitly positioning two of the most brutal of these events as the centerpieces for its future seasons: the massacre of the Bradley Gang and the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks.
The second season, set in 1935, will likely focus on the bloody end of the Bradley Gang, a group of notorious bank robbers who made the fatal mistake of hiding out in Derry. In the novel, after a string of violent crimes, the townspeople decided to take matters into their own hands. In an act of mob justice fueled by Pennywise’s sinister influence, citizens ambushed the outlaws in broad daylight, gunning them down in the street. Eyewitness accounts from the book describe seeing a clown among the vigilantes, laughing amidst the carnage.
The third season will then jump back to 1908 to depict the Kitchener Ironworks tragedy. This event, one of the most infamous in Derry’s history, saw an inexplicable explosion at the local ironworks during a children’s Easter egg hunt. The blast killed 102 people, 88 of whom were children, marking one of Pennywise’s most devastating single acts of terror. The Kitchener Ironworks has been alluded to in the first IT movie, and the image of an Easter Bunny on fire is part of Welcome to Derry‘s opening sequence.
The confirmation that future seasons will be even more vicious does not diminish the terrors of the current timeline. The fifth episode of Welcome to Derry finally saw the full debut of Pennywise in his iconic clown form, played by Bill Skarsgård, a terrifying arrival that signals a deadly future for the children of 1962. Concurrently, Dick Halloran’s (Chris Chalk) storyline is moving toward its own tragic conclusion, as he helps establish the Black Spot social club in a decommissioned air base building. Readers of the novel know this location is doomed to end in a horrific fire, another atrocity stoked by Pennywise’s influence.
New episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry premiere on HBO every Sunday.
What historical event in Derry’s past are you most interested in seeing brought to the screen? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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