HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry ends its first season with a finale that wants to have it both ways. It wants to be a prequel to the movies we already know, but it also wants to tell us something new. The show has pulled a trick: this isn’t really a prequel at all. It’s a sequel disguised as one, a story about a monster who already knows he’s going to lose and can’t do anything about it.
The setup is simple enough. The military, for reasons that never quite make sense, has been trying to free Pennywise from his underground prison. They melt one of the pillars keeping him caged, and suddenly he’s loose. A thick fog rolls over Derry. Pennywise shows up at the high school, tears off the principal’s head in front of everyone, and hypnotizes an entire gymnasium full of teenagers with his deadlights. Then he loads them onto his circus wagon and parades them across a frozen river. It’s violent and strange, but after two movies of this, you start to wonder if even Pennywise is getting tired of his own act.
The real surprise comes when he catches Marge, the tough one-eyed girl who’s been at the center of the story. He doesn’t just threaten her. He tells her she’s going to be somebody’s mother. Specifically, she’ll be Margaret Tozier, mom to Richie—one of the kids who kills Pennywise in 1989. To drive the point home, he pulls out a missing poster with Finn Wolfhard’s face on it, the actor who played Richie in the movies. “The seed of your stinking loins and his filthy friends bring me my death,” he tells her. “Or is it birth? I get confused. Tomorrow, yesterday? It’s all the same for little Pennywise.”
This is the big idea the show has been building toward: Pennywise exists outside of time. He can see everything that’s ever happened and everything that ever will. He knows exactly which kids are going to destroy him, and he’s trying to kill their parents before they’re even born. It’s a clever twist that reframes everything. But it also raises an obvious question: if he knows everything, why does he keep losing?
The show doesn’t fully answer this, but it suggests something interesting. Think of Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen—a god-like being who can see all of time at once but remains a slave to it. He knows what’s coming but can’t change it. Pennywise seems to be in a similar trap. His perception of time is so scrambled that yesterday and tomorrow blur together. He can see his death, but he can’t tell if it’s his death or his birth. He’s omniscient but confused, powerful but helpless. Every cycle, he tries something different. Every cycle, he fails.
There’s something almost tragic about it. An ancient cosmic horror reduced to playing Terminator, trying to wipe out family trees before they produce the children who will destroy him. And failing. Always failing. The eater of worlds can’t even eat Georgie without setting his own doom in motion. You’d think an all-knowing entity would just hand the paper boat back and avoid the whole mess.
The problem is that the show tells us this idea more than it shows us. When Pennywise reveals Marge’s future to her, he literally unfolds a prop to make sure we understand the connection. It’s the kind of hand-holding that modern franchise entertainment can’t seem to resist. The filmmakers don’t trust their audience to connect the dots, so they draw the lines in bright red marker. It works, but it cheapens the moment. The same goes for the scene where Marge later explains the time-travel concept to Lilly at the standpipe. She might as well be speaking directly to the audience, laying out the premise for seasons two and three.
This heavy-handedness extends to the Stephen King Easter eggs scattered throughout. When Dick Hallorann mentions he’s going to work at a hotel in London—”I mean, much trouble can a hotel be?”—it’s a wink at The Shining that some viewers loved and others found exhausting. The show can’t seem to decide whether it trusts its audience to catch the references or needs to underline them three times. For King fans, these connections are fun. For everyone else, they might feel like inside jokes they’re not quite in on.
The kids at the center of the story—Marge, Lilly, Ronnie, and Will—never become as memorable as the Losers’ Club from the original story. Part of this is the writing. We see them go through horrible things together, but we never really see them be friends. There are no jokes, no moments of ordinary childhood between the scares. The original Losers felt like real kids who happened to face a monster. These kids feel like characters designed to face a monster. The difference matters. Their bond doesn’t feel earned, so when they clutch hands and push the dagger into the earth together, it plays more like a plot requirement than an emotional climax.
Ronnie in particular suffers from this. She spends most of the season screaming and panicking, which is realistic for a child facing a demon clown, but it doesn’t make for a compelling character. The show never gives her much to do beyond react. Will has more depth thanks to his relationship with his father, and Lilly gets a complete arc—from traumatized loner to someone who finally has friends—but Marge carries most of the weight. Even then, she’s more defined by her future (Richie’s mom!) than by who she is in the present.
What does work is Dick Hallorann, played by Chris Chalk. He’s the best thing in the show, bringing weight and sadness to a man haunted by ghosts he can’t shut out. His connection to The Shining gives the story a sense of larger mythology, and his psychic battle with Pennywise—trapping the clown in a vision of his old carnival days, forcing him to remember being “Bob Gray”—is the kind of scene the rest of the finale needed more of. Watching Pennywise sputter “I am a god! An eater of worlds!” while being treated like a sick human is genuinely funny and unsettling. When the ghost of a dead boy named Rich appears to help the kids finish the fight, flipping off Pennywise as he runs past, it’s Hallorann’s belief in something beyond the horror that makes it land.
That moment with Rich—running across the ice, middle finger raised, giving his friends the final push they need—was the emotional highlight for many viewers. It earned that response because Rich was the most likeable kid in the show, and his death actually hurt. His return as a ghost felt like a reward rather than a cheat. The show needed more moments like this, moments that paid off character work instead of just mythology.
The finale’s biggest problem is that nobody else important dies. A whole gymnasium of kids gets hypnotized and floated across a frozen river, then dropped onto ice, and they all wake up fine. Not a single broken bone. Not a single drowning. The military shoots people throughout the episode, but when the dagger gets planted and Pennywise gets banished, they just… stop. The van full of adults slams its brakes on a frozen river and somehow doesn’t slide into the children. The show wants the spectacle of danger without the cost of it.
This has always been part of the IT formula—kids fight, kids win, kids forget—but it’s starting to feel thin. The first episode promised brutality, killing multiple children in graphic fashion. By the finale, that edge has been sanded down to something almost family-friendly. Pennywise, for all his menace, doesn’t actually kill anyone we care about after the pilot. He’s been demystified, turned into a villain who loses every encounter. A monster who only loses isn’t scary. He’s just an obstacle.
We know Pennywise can’t die in 1962 because he has to come back in 1989. We know the important characters will survive because their children need to exist. The stakes aren’t stakes anymore. They’re formalities. Pennywise has become like Sephiroth in the Final Fantasy VII remakes—a legendary villain reduced to taking repeated losses across multiple entries, his menace diluted by the simple fact that we’ve seen him beaten too many times.
The show tries to solve this problem by suggesting future seasons will follow Pennywise further back in time, watching him target the ancestors of his killers in 1935, then 1908. It’s an interesting idea that could keep the series going for years. But it also risks making the Stephen King universe feel smaller than it should. If every character in Derry has to be somebody’s grandmother or great-uncle, the randomness that made the original story scary starts to disappear. Part of what made Pennywise terrifying was that he could take anyone. Now it seems like he’s only interested in certain family trees.
The decision to connect everything to the Losers’ Club feels less like storytelling than like the show pitching HBO on renewal. The “Chapter One” title card at the end—echoing what the first IT film did when a sequel wasn’t guaranteed—reads as both confidence and desperation. The Muschiettis clearly have a plan. Whether that plan serves the story or just the franchise remains to be seen.
There’s also the question of what this does to our understanding of the original movies. If Pennywise has been targeting the Losers’ ancestors all along, why didn’t he try harder? Why toy with Georgie when he could have just killed Bill’s great-grandmother a century earlier? The show suggests that his scrambled time perception makes strategic thinking difficult, but that explanation only goes so far. At some point, the logic starts to strain.
The post-credits scene ties everything to the movies even tighter. We see Beverly Marsh as a child, watching her mother commit suicide at a mental hospital. An old woman looks on—Ingrid, who will become the creepy “Mrs. Kersh” that Beverly meets in IT Chapter Two. “Oh, dear. Don’t be sad,” she tells the girl. “You know what they say about Derry. No one who dies here ever really dies.” It’s another connection, another thread pulling the show closer to what we’ve already seen. Sophia Lillis returning as young Beverly is a nice touch, though it also highlights how much the finale relies on callbacks rather than standing on its own.
The King connections are genuinely fun if you’re paying attention. The Maturin root tea, the hints about the cosmic turtle, Dick’s ominous line about hotels—these details reward people who’ve done their homework. But the show can’t stop underlining them. It doesn’t trust its audience to make connections on their own, so it makes them for us, loudly.
There’s something almost sad about it. Pennywise is supposed to be an ancient evil, a god-like creature from beyond the stars. But the show has turned him into something more pathetic: a monster who knows his own ending and can’t change it. Every time he kills, he’s already lost. Every child he terrorizes is already avenged by children not yet born. He’s trapped not in a cage of magic pillars but in the structure of a franchise that needs him to keep failing so the story can continue.
The same might be said of the show itself. Welcome to Derry is well-made television. It looks good, it has strong performances, and it takes its mythology seriously. Bill Skarsgård remains magnetic as Pennywise, clearly having the time of his life even when the material doesn’t serve him. The production design captures 1962 Derry with real care. Individual sequences—the Black Spot massacre, the opening theater slaughter, Pennywise drifting through fog on the frozen river—deliver genuine horror.
But the show is also trapped by what came before. It can’t let anyone important die because the movies need them alive. It can’t let Pennywise win because we already know he doesn’t. It can’t surprise us because it’s too busy connecting itself to things we’ve already seen. The writing stumbles when it needs to soar, setting up dramatic beats that never pay off. The tea ceremony that’s supposed to have dangerous consequences goes perfectly. The dagger that’s supposed to drive people insane just makes Lilly a little paranoid. Things that feel like they should matter don’t.
Chris Chalk deserves better material. The young actresses playing Marge and Lilly deserve scenes that let them be kids instead of just survivors. Bill Skarsgård deserves a version of Pennywise that can actually threaten someone without us knowing he’ll fail. Maybe future seasons will find a way to break free. Maybe going further back in time will let the show tell stories that don’t feel predetermined. Maybe some of those ancestors will actually die, and we’ll feel the weight of it.
For now, though, Welcome to Derry is a show at war with itself. It wants to expand the IT universe while staying loyal to it. It wants to scare us while reassuring us that everyone will be fine. It wants to be new while constantly reminding us of what’s old. The first episode showed us a monster who could kill anyone. The finale showed us a monster who can’t kill anyone who matters.
The fog rolls in, the clown dances, and we wait for the next cycle. We know Pennywise will target more ancestors. We know he’ll fail. We know the Losers’ Club will eventually be born and eventually destroy him. The only question is whether the journey there will be worth taking, or whether we’ll just be watching a god-like being lose over and over again, trapped in an endless loop of his own making.
In Derry, no one who dies ever really dies. The same, apparently, goes for franchises.
