It: Welcome to Derry creators explore wild Pennywise theory as future of season two is unclear

Warning: This article contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry.

It: Welcome to Derry showrunners Andy and Barbara Muschietti have shared what viewers might look forward to if the show gets renewed for two more seasons.

The series, which is available on HBO Max, is inspired by Stephen King’s 1986 novel and premiered on October 26 with new episodes released weekly.

This supernatural horror acts as a prequel to the 2017 film It and its sequel, 2019’s It Chapter Two.

Both films featured Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, with Andy Muschietti as director.

Skarsgård made a return as Pennywise in the fifth episode of Welcome to Derry, pleasing fans, although his return was not guaranteed.

The series concluded with its eighth episode on Monday, December 15, and avid followers are eager to learn if the narrative will continue.

The Muschiettis have a clear vision for the timeline of the second season if the show proceeds.

Though there hasn’t been an official announcement regarding the show’s future, the sibling duo behind the series has outlined their intriguing plans for what might come.

Andy mentioned to Variety: “Our big story arc involves three seasons, mainly based on the three critical cycles of Pennywise, which are 1962, 1935, and 1908.”

The finale of Welcome to Derry disclosed that Marge (played by Matilda Lawler) will ultimately become the mother of It protagonist Richie Tozier.

This forms a closed loop, suggesting that Richie’s future role in overcoming Pennywise is foreseen long before his birth.

Thus, if Richie and the Losers manage to defeat Pennywise in the future, and Marge’s generation can thwart him in the present (1962), then the ancestors of the Losers are likely the next targets.

In an interview with Deadline, Andy explained this idea was drawn directly from King’s original work.

The author implies that It perceives time differently from humans—a concept the Muschiettis are eager to expand upon in upcoming seasons.

“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 said. “The pitch to Stephen King was we’re going to tell a story backwards, and it has to do with that hint.”

The creators anticipate that the audience will be curious about how exactly this concept will unfold.

“Is he going backwards in a linear way, or is he omnipresent, and how does that affect the story that we already know?” Andy said regarding the questions that future episodes aim to answer.

There’s more to explore regarding Bob and Ingrid Gray, the original human identity that It adopts to become Pennywise, and his daughter, respectively.

“There’s so much. We’re going to learn a lot of things about it. 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,” Andy added.

“Our second season happens in 1935, in theory,” he explained. “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.”

All eight episodes of It: Welcome to Derry are available for streaming on HBO Max.