IT: Welcome to Derry was an ambitious concept from the start, bringing an expanded look at the lore around Pennywise the Clown to television. The HBO series turned out to be much more than that: Showrunners Andy and Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs jumped back in time and explored how many different works from author Stephen King were connected to Pennywise and the story of IT.
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However, in the finale episode of IT: Welcome to Derry, the series takes its already ambitious premise up several notches. Instead of just a prequel story about what happened when Pennywise last woke up (before the events of the IT movies), Welcome to Derry made a stunning reveal that sets the show up for Seasons 2 and 3 (which have not yet been greenlit, as of writing this). Those new seasons would be set in different time periods (respectively) than Season 1, but would still be connected to the larger story of the IT movies.
SPOILERS FOLLOW!
IT: Welcome to Derry Reveals Pennywise’s Omni Awareness Power
In Welcome to Derry Episode 8, “Winter Fire”, Pennywise makes a large-scale attack on Derry through an ominous fog that rolls over the town. Many children are abducted, and the young “losers” race to rescue their friend Will Hanlon, just as Will’s father Leroy (Jovan Adepo), mother Charlotte (Taylour Paige), Dick Halloraan (Chris Chalk), and Native leader Rose (Kimberly Guerrero) lead their own squad to intercept the kids, and use their mystical dagger to seal Pennywise away. The race ends at a deadwood tree that marks the opening of Pennywise’s “cage”; at one point, the villain snatches young Marge Truman (Matilda Lawler) for a little chat and makes a shocking revelation.
Pennywise tells Marge that he’s been after her and her “loser” friends for a reason: Marge, in particular, will one day have a son named Richie, who makes a group of friends that stand up to Pennywise and finally cause his demise. According to the demonic entity, the past, present, and future are all one shared circle for him, and the losers “killing” him are also connected to the moment of his birth. Marge, Will, and co. manage to seal the cage and banish Pennywise for his 27-year slumber. However, after the battle, Marge talks with Lily Bainbridge (Clara Stack) about Pennywise’s ramblings: both girls realise that the entity can theoretically strike again, before they were ever born, to change the events that eventually doom it. And there’s nothing they can do about it.
Can Pennywise Really Time Travel?
There are numerous sci-fi films and TV shows that deal with the idea of time as a circle rather than a linear path as we perceive it. The perception of past, present, and future all at once isn’t technically defined as “time travel”; rather, it is an omni awareness that allows someone (or something) to affect their decision-making in the moment, based on knowledge of what will be. That device was used to powerful effect in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), which played with past, present and future to tell its story about choice vs. destiny.
That is the portrait of Pennywise’s awareness and perception of time that Welcome to Derry has painted. The mystery of how Pennywise’s “death” is also his “birth” is a dangling thread for later seasons to answer (and is also a clear road to possibly bringing the entity back for a new story set after the events of the original IT novel). But as for the time-hopping for Seasons 2 and 3: It’s clear that Pennywise would essentially be using awareness of future events and his death to attack key figures in the past.
“His experience of time is non-linear. How is that and why, that’s a whole exploration that we intend to flesh out during the next two seasons, but that was pretty much [the idea] from the beginning,” Andy Muschietti explained to Deadline. “The pitch to Stephen King was we’re going to tell a story backwards, and it has to do with that hint.”
Muschietti wouldn’t answer one key question, however: Is Pennywise able to actually change the timeline? “Is [IT] going backwards in a linear way, or is he omnipresent, and how does that affect the story that we already know?” Muschietti teased.
IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2 Setting Revealed
According to Muschietti, Season 2 of It: Welcome to Derry would focus specifically on figures like the actual human Pennywise, Bob Gray (Bill Skarsgård), and his daughter Ingrid/Perrywinkle, in the 1930s. Welcome to Derry. Season 1 provided a brief flashback to the night Pennywise killed Bob and took his form, as well as Ingrid’s years of sacrificing children to the entity, believing it to be her father. There’s definitely more story there to tell, and Andy Muschietti knows it.
“We’re going to learn a lot of things about it,” Muschietti said. “We are going to know more about the Bob Gray of things, and we are going to know more about Ingrid, because Ingrid was around in the ’30s. Our second season happened in 1935. I think it’s a pretty tragic character. She’s a very specific, very unique character, because she’s a victim, but she’s a perpetrator too. She’s tricked into thinking that her dad is still there somewhere in the shadows of that monster, and she wants to liberate him, but the only way to see him and try to liberate him is by creating all these baits [and] all this pain, because she knows that he will show up.”
Hearing that, it quickly becomes apparent that the showrunners of IT: Welcome to Derry have the larger vision of the series really mapped out. All of these story threads being teased for Season 2 connect to subplots of Season 1 (like Ingrid’s forbidden affair with black man Hank Grogan and her abusive marriage) that previously felt rushed or dropped, but now seem to have been intentionally paused for later development. We can’t even imagine what Season 3 will be – although Muchietti cryptically teased that “The pitch to Stephen King was we’re going to tell a story backwards, and it has to do with that hint.”
IT: Welcome to Derry is streaming Season 1 on HBO Max. How did you like the show? Let us know in the ComicBook Forum!
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