Tomorrow? Yesterday? It’s all the same for little Pennywise.
Photo: Courtesy of HBO
Spoilers ahead for It: Welcome to Derry through season finale “Winter Fire,” which premiered on HBO on December 14.
As the fog disperses and the dust settles in the season finale of It: Welcome to Derry, the survivors can finally breathe sighs of relief. Pennywise has been defeated — or, at least, defeated enough to go back into hibernation until the late ’80s, when he’ll return to terrorize the Losers Club. But there’s something troubling Marge (Matilda Lawler), who’s had an especially upsetting run-in with the clown. When they meet on the frozen lake, Pennywise reveals that Marge’s future son, Richie Tozier, will be part of the eventual group responsible for the creature’s demise. Or as he puts it, “The seed of your stinking loins and his filthy friends bring me my death.” (He has such a way with words.)
That’s a lot for Marge to take in — imagine finding out you’re predetermined to have a son, and that you have to name him after your dead first love. Beyond the Richie of it all, though, she’s particularly fixated on Pennywise explaining that the past, present, and future are all the same to him, which carries worrying implications. “What if he can go backwards?” Marge asks Lilly (Clara Stack) in one of the episode’s final scenes. “I know it sounds crazy, but what if he tries to go back and kill someone from the time before we were born, like our parents?” And here’s the thing: It does sound crazy. But I’ve watched enough television to know when writers are laying the groundwork for the next season.
And it’s safe to assume there will be a next season, even though HBO has yet to officially announce the show’s renewal. The show’s creators have made it clear they intend for Welcome to Derry to span at least two more seasons set in 1935 and 1908, a plan that Marge’s question seems to be gesturing toward—but what exactly would that look like? On the whole, Welcome to Derry’s first season has left me with more questions than answers, and I’m sure you have your fair share, too, so let’s talk through some of the big ones after that finale.
Wait, Pennywise can time travel now?
It sure sounds that way, doesn’t it? At first, I took Pennywise’s words as a Dr. Manhattan-style “living every moment simultaneously” situation. “Tomorrow? Yesterday? It’s all the same for little Pennywise,” he says. He describes his death as his birth, which makes sense when you remember that when he’s finally destroyed in It: Chapter Two, he’s in teeny-tiny baby mode. But there are multiple possible interpretations of what Pennywise says to Marge, like the idea that he may be living reverse-chronologically, starting with his death at the hands of the adult Losers Club and ending with his creation in the macroverse. Marge’s reading, meanwhile, is that Pennywise can consciously move between time.
Across the book, movies, and 1990 miniseries, time travel has never been identified as one of Pennywise’s special skills, perhaps because that would open a pretty sizable can of worms. And yet here we are! If Pennywise can suddenly decide to scoot back to 1935, his last cycle in Derry, it may be the result of General Shaw’s (James Remar) unbearably stupid decision to melt one of the pillars that keep the creature confined to the town. “It’s not always easy being caged up in one place, one time,” Pennywise tells Marge, suggesting that the pillars are what have kept him locked in 1962 instead of bouncing around timelines willy-nilly.
So shouldn’t the cage being re-formed prevent him from going back in time?
You’d think! When Marge, Lilly, Will (Blake Cameron James), Ronnie (Amanda Christine), and ghost Rich (Arian S. Cartaya) plunge the mystical dagger into the earth, Pennywise is once again trapped in his cage and forced back into his 27-year hibernation. But Welcome to Derry’s creators have said a second season would take place in 1935, so the show intends on going back in time regardless. Given the exposition drop in the season finale, it seems likely that Pennywise’s newfound time-travel powers would be part of that plan.
Doesn’t being able to see the past, present, and future all at once make this a moot point?
Well, yes, now that you mention it. Even if Pennywise can’t literally go back in time — whether that would mean transporting his body into the past, or simply shifting his consciousness back a few decades — he claims to be experiencing all timelines at once. If that’s the case, the concept of “time travel” is irrelevant. The Pennywise of 1962 is also living as the Pennywise of the movies (1989 and 2016) and the Pennywise of future installments of the show (1935 and 1908). That means season two’s Pennywise would have full knowledge of season one’s events even though season one takes place after season two. (I know, my head hurts, too.)
In addition to an all-seeing, all-knowing ability making actual time travel unnecessary, I worry that it also makes Pennywise too powerful in a way that undermines narrative tension. How are you supposed to fight back against someone who knows all your next moves before they happen?
So this is all new to the show, then?
Okay, not exactly. The being that we know as It, or Pennywise, comes from the macroverse, where creatures exist outside of time and space. That hasn’t manifested in him being in all places at the same time, however. At least not on Earth, where he’s been subject to the limitations of temporal existence — like, for example, being forced to pop up and then go back to sleep in those 27-year cycles.
Still, some have theorized that Pennywise’s individual reality has always been non-linear, and there’s plenty of precedent for non-linear time in Stephen King’s work, most notably the Dark Tower series. (I won’t spoil the ending, but… if you know, you know.) And, of course, the book It is told in a non-linear format, with the adult Losers mentally shifting back to their childhoods. That’s more a reflection of their memories coming back than “time travel,” but the association is there. The point is that Welcome to Derry isn’t pulling this concept out of thin air, even if the particulars of Pennywise’s power here feel new.
Was Pennywise consciously targeting the ancestors of the Losers Club?
Maybe? Marge seems to think so, telling Lilly that the reason Pennywise wanted to kill her was to prevent her son from defeating him in the future. But isn’t that a little overly complicated? Pennywise kills and eats kids by nature — I’m not sure how much planning goes into it. If his goal on the first season of Welcome to Derry was targeting Losers Club parents, he certainly wasn’t doing a great job of it. The only two who apply are Marge and Will (future father of Mike Hanlon), though perhaps he was confused when he killed Teddy Uris. (It’s Teddy’s brother who goes on to father Stan.)
If the theory is that Pennywise is only now able to see through time because the cage was lifted, then taking out his eventual killers’ ancestors might be a new hobby. But again, there was existing speculation about this skill, and there have been hints of it on the show. Consider episode four, where he tells Will, “You’ll burn, too,” a likely reference to Will’s eventual death in a fire along with Mike’s mother.
Will season two be about Pennywise picking off the future parents of the season one kids?
Probably. Marge worrying out loud about Pennywise coming for their parents is obviously planting a seed for the clown’s next move. Marge’s mom and dad would be obvious targets, as would Teddy’s father since he’s, more to the point, Stan’s grandfather. In fact, don’t be surprised if the series finds a way to work in several familiar families with history in Derry: the Denbroughs, the Marshes, and the Kaspbraks, among other possibilities.
Of course, the season can’t just be about that. For one thing, there wouldn’t be much suspense, as killing any Losers Club ancestors would retcon the movies out of existence, something I doubt Welcome to Derry has any interest in doing. For another, there are more 1935-set stories to be told. The big one is the tale of the Bradley Gang, whose bullet hole-ridden car was recovered at the end of the second episode. The massacre of George and Al Bradley and their accomplices is what ends Pennywise’s 1935 killing cycle, so season two would presumably build to the shootout in the same way that season one built to the Black Spot fire.
Can the show convincingly pull off 1935?
I have such doubts. Between the dialogue and the overall aesthetics, the series didn’t do a great job of making the first season feel like the early ‘60s, and it’s unlikely 1935 would be any easier to portray authentically. Nevertheless, for the time being, Welcome to Derry seems insistent on remaining a period piece. Which brings me to my final question…
Will Welcome to Derry ever time travel to the present?
The creators have talked about a three-season plan going backwards in time, but what if they decided to go in a different direction? Pennywise is killed for good in 2016 — bullied to death by the adult Losers, you hate to see it — which makes it challenging to imagine storytelling opportunities that take place after that. Challenging is not impossible, though! In Stephen King’s novel, the title creature reveals itself as a giant spider, its truest form that isn’t the crazy-making deadlights. And she’s a lady-spider, as evidenced by the fact that she’s laid a bunch of eggs beneath Derry. Ben Hanscom tries to stomp all of them, but it’s possible he missed one, right?
It’s true that the eggs weren’t featured in It: Chapter Two, so including the offspring of Pennywise would be a bit of a reach. The good news is that Welcome to Derry has already proven itself to be enthusiastic about this kind of narrative stretching. Assuming whatever creature birthed from a spider egg was also a shapeshifter would even allow the show to bring back everyone’s favorite dancing clown in a modern-day context without too much hand-waving. Sounds win-win to me!
