It: Welcome To Derry's Finale Spoilers, Last Minute Rewrites & Biggest Challenges Broken Down By Barbara Muschietti [Exclusive]

Warning: This post (obviously) contains SPOILERS for It: Welcome to Derry‘s finale. “Pennywise unleashed” could best describe last night’s It: Welcome to Derry. The season-one finale found the It entity on a feeding frenzy, turning a gym full of students into a take-out meal. In a desperate last hurrah, the remaining Losers Club members – Mike, Lilly, Ronnie, Marge and a ghostly Rich – rallied together to plunge a mystical dagger at the base of an old tree, effectively reinforcing the supernatural boundaries that have kept Pennywise imprisoned for decades. The victory delivered a few bombshells. Indeed, as many suspected, Marge will one day become the mother of Richie, a Loser featured later in the It films. Leroy and Charlotte remained in Derry in case the malevolent creature ever reemerged. Most notably, however, was that time flows differently for Pennywise, explaining why he’s not done with Derry quite yet.

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Executive producer Barbara Muschietti spoke to ComicBook about an unhinged Pennywise, the return of Rich, surprise cameos, future Derry bloodlines and the next generation of the Losers Club.

ComicBook: The finale opens with Pennywise attacking a school full of students. He has never staged such a massive assault on so many people at once. Was this sequence to punctuate that this is the IT entity uncaged?

Barbara Muschietti: The thing with eight hours of content is you keep on raising the bar a little higher and higher. Throughout the show, we have had some amazing moments of fear and tenderness and pure emotion. But we had to go out with a bang. That was very clear. To have Pennywise operate on that scale was just what the doctor ordered. It was fun and we were able to do it. A lot of times, it comes down to budget. This time, we saved money for the finale, so we had to give our audience a big finale. The final episode is now quite a bit shorter than it used to be, which it needed to be, but it still needed to be sprawling.

It’s movie quality.

We don’t know how to do TV. When I say that, I always feel horrible. I am not criticizing TV itself. It’s making a comment the spending on TV and the short schedules given to directors. From the moment we sold this show in 2020, we knew that this needed to be of scale and we were going to fight for that scale. We had this incredible partner in HBO, who allowed us to have this scale. It is one of the reasons this show is a success… It is like movies.

Going into this final episode, how much back-and-forth did it require to figure out the way these heroes were going to defeat Pennywise?

A lot. And we didn’t have it when we started shooting. Then, when this strike happened, we had to reconfigure a lot of it. It evolved until pretty much at the last minute. Also, Andy [Muschietti] is a perpetual improver. He’s always finding a way to make it better… all the way until that morning. We have an incredible group of actors that understand that and understand that after rehearsal, things may change. In a rehearsal, Andy will understand fully if the scene works or not and there are so many aspects to that. There’s a constant evolution to when Andy is shooting, and he rewrites a lot.

What were some of the earlier drafts?

There were some crazy ones that I now laugh about. It’s always like that. There’s no bad ideas. There are crazy ideas. They aren’t bad. One shouldn’t stop oneself from putting an idea out there. There were tons of ideas.

Dick’s abilities almost broke him in this hour. Did he come out of this ordeal stronger and moving in the direction we will know him as in other Stephen King works?

Absolutely. When we meet Dick at the beginning of this season, he is a man that is struggling with this ability. He is clearly not accepting them and is very reluctant about using them, and being forced to do all this. We had this backstory of Hallorann in which he was a troubled young man, constantly fighting this burning thing he had inside. In this season, he is instrumental in influencing the stakes of the Pennywise situation. He’s also fighting an incredible villain. I don’t know if he has ever confronted anyone as powerful as It ever again. We will see.

The process he has to go through forces him to reckon with these abilities. Once they are there, it’s just a question of him understanding how he is going to live with them. We see him, at a point in the episode, where it’s so hard for him, but he just doesn’t want to be here anymore. He manages to survive it. It is an arc that all the characters with the shine go through. We see it more clearly in Doctor Sleep with Danny, but it’s definitely part of the process these characters have to go through. It’s a great power to possess… but at what cost to the human being?

The four remaining youngsters get a helping hand from a fallen friend, namely Rich. How did you land on bringing him back after he tragically perished in episode seven?

He had to come back. Andy always jokes that he wants people to cry, but I also want people to laugh. For us, in the two It movies and Mama and The Flash, we want people to walk away feeling good. I can’t define it better than that. I do not need a downer. I don’t want to give people an excuse to be sadder. I want our audience to feel good. Grief is something that will happen to all of us at some point. It will touch us all. The fact that in this show we are able to give a little bit of a hope, not in a religious way, but in energy of the universe… we are all out there. Especially in Derry, nobody ever really dies.

One of the more whimsical moments featured a deceased Rich running towards his friends and giving Pennywise the middle finger…

Those are moments we live for. These are moments Andy brings because he’s a kid.

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise in IT Welcome to Derry

Can you break down the last stand against Pennywise? What were some of the important beats that needed to be hit?

Time and the perception of time. That was important because that’s where we understand that Pennywise doesn’t live in time the way we do. There may be a different understanding of what we have already seen. We had a chat with Damon Lindelof in 2020. It was a completely innocent chat and we were having a good-old time. We were talking about this show and he said to us, “Oh, that’s why I don’t do prequels because I always know how it ends.” It clicked. It’s like, “We have to subvert that.” That was one of the points of that final moment in the eyes, was to give a glimpse that time for Pennywise may not be the same for us. That gives us a lot of places to go.

Whether it was physically, emotionally or visually, what was the most challenging sequence to pull off in the episode?

The ice. The ice was brutal because it was so disorienting. We had the privilege of working with our AD, Joanna Moore, whose brain works in a different way. We were able to pull off the geography of the ice. It was insane with that number of characters coming from different places. I would get lost all the time. I trust my brother with my life, but many times I would be like, “Oh my God. How are we going to edit this” in the sense of how are we going to explain people’s geography? At the same time, we constantly had this family on the stage. We shot all of this on a stage. It was beautiful because it felt like we were shooting the end. We were all together and it was wonderful. So many tears.

Audiences got treated to an unexpected cameo with the It films’ Beverly Marsh. Was that due to actress Sophia Lillis’ availability? How did that serve the narrative?

It was something Andy thought about last minute. We were going to Toronto in April for some tiny, very regular pickups. Andy goes, “I need something to tie the films to this. I want this show to be tied to the movies with more than just Marge and Richie. Our cameraman mentioned to Andy, “I just worked with Joan Gregson and she looks great.” Joan Gregson played Mrs. Kersh, who we shot with for that infamous amazing scene. He told us, “I just shot with her. She’s doing great.” We realized, “That’s amazing,” because we shot with her when she was 85.

Andy came up with this connection of seeing Mrs. Kersh as Beverly had seen her, and having Beverly being a young girl, right before we meet the Losers in 1989. That’s why Beverly has long hair. It’s before she becomes a Loser. I called Sophia and she said, “Of course I will do it.” She’s in New York, so we flew her in. Joan and Sophia pulled off this incredible scene that ties everything up. I feel incredibly lucky because Joan Gregson, who was so amazing during the shoot, passed two months later. We will be forever thankful. She had an incredible time doing it. She kept saying how great it was to be back on set.

The plan is for Welcome to Derry to span over at least three seasons. The next season takes place even further in the past, in 1935. In what ways does this current chapter set the stage for what is to come next, if at all, or do you view it as a self-contained arc?

No, no, no. It is not a confined arc. This season gives us the ability to do what we would like to do in seasons two and three, which is definitely to explore the bloodlines of the ancestors. But, also, see where the descendants are at. Pennywise doesn’t experience time in a conventional way, so we can do that. We would love to explore that.

One of the Losers even hypothesized Pennywise could kill their ancestors in the past and effectively erase their bloodline.

I wish it was as simple as that. We are not doing the Butterfly Effect. It’s more intense than that.