IT: Welcome to Derry answers a lot of questions about Pennywise the Dancing Clown, but not everything is neatly explained. The IT movie prequel doesn’t fully introduce Bill Skarsgård’s clown until halfway through, but the whole show expands on the entity’s mythology from the movies and Stephen King’s lore. This includes learning why It took on the form of Pennywise from Bob Gray, and before that, the creature’s arrival on Earth and how it was effectively trapped in Derry by the shards from the cage that it arrived in.
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Those shards are then crucial to IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1’s ending, as the barrier they form around the town of Derry is broken as part of a military plan to free the creature. There’s a desperate bid to get the shard back in place so that this can be reformed, which, of course, is successful, with It remaining confined to the town and forced back into its sleep cycle. But what’s particularly curious is that It was able to wake up at all.
Can Pennywise Wake Up When It Wants & Why Does It Sleep For 27 Years?
After the burning of The Black Spot, which was the augury, or last big event where it feeds before going back to sleep, Pennywise did enter its sleep cycle, but then quickly woke up when it felt that one of the pillars had been removed. This is a new addition to canon, and not something taken from King’s books. Indeed, the shards as a whole were invented for the TV series, but the book reveals that It’s only wants or purposes are to eat and then to sleep and dream.
Still, it seems unlikely that this is a case of It being completely able to wake up at will. The sleep cycle is like hibernation, so it’s not impossible for It to wake up when absolutely necessary, for example if it was under extreme threat or, as in Welcome to Derry, its connection to the shards means it felt the pillar being removed and that jolted it awake, because it was a rare opportunity to escape from Derry.
This also means the question of why It sleeps for 27 years isn’t fully answered, but is more simply part of its cosmic nature, and that’s how long its rest cycle needs to be after feeding. In the book, this isn’t quite as fully fixed a time frame, as King writes it comes back “…Every twenty-seven years or so. Sometimes it comes a little sooner, sometimes a little later.” It does, however, feel a little stranger that the movies and now show stick to quite a rigid 27-year cycle and that nothing else ever forces or tempts the entity to awaken, especially when in the case of the Welcome to Derry finale, it’s essentially banished back to its slumber.
The 27 years isn’t fully explained, but it does make sense from a narrative point-of-view. One of the core themes of It, and now Welcome to Derry, is generational trauma, and that time gap does allow for the people it’s attacked as children to age and have kids of their own, and for new generations of Derry residents to exist for it to feast upon.
All episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry are available to stream on HBO Max.
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