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It: Welcome to Derry capped its first season with last night’s finale, which might not have reached the wild heights of “29 Neibolt Street,” featuring the first big Pennywise scenes, or even last week’s fiery, agonizing “The Black Spot.”
But the HBO show’s big finale still had shocks, reveals, and Easter eggs to spare. Here are the biggest takeaways from “Winter Fire.”
At the end of “The Black Spot,” we learned that General Shaw (James Remar) wasn’t trying to end the Cold War or prevent nuclear war by capturing and weaponizing the evil lurking in Derry. Instead, his pet plan, “Operation Precept,” aimed to unleash a fear epidemic across America, using Pennywise’s (Bill Skarsgård) special powers of terror to bring any and all nonconformists into line: rebels, dissidents, free-thinkers, civil rights supporters, feminists, people who don’t think children should be offered up to an alien monster, etc.
To accomplish this, Shaw destroyed one of the star fragments, or pillars, that was keeping Pennywise fenced in. The taste of freedom awakened the clown just as he was preparing to sink into hibernation at the end of episode seven. In “Winter Fire,” we see an ominous billow of freezing smoke—Stephen King didn’t write this, but he does love a malevolent mist—blanketing Derry and its surrounding landscape.
The military’s role in this atmospheric change isn’t made explicitly clear (Shaw and company are tracking it, though it seems to be emanating from the entity), but it’s certainly part of Pennywise’s grand encore. His first stop? Derry High School, where he boogies onstage to rip the head off the principal and turn his Deadlights on all the kids who’ve assembled in the auditorium. A fun little Carrie White moment for him.
Of course, “Operation Precept” goes off the rails before the episode’s end. But it sure begins with a bang.
Welcome to Derry dropped some key details about the sacred dagger—guarded by Rose (Kimberly Guerrero), her nephew Taniel (Joshua Odjick), and the rest of Derry’s Indigenous community—in the finale. We learned the dagger can be swapped in for the pillar Shaw destroyed; that makes sense, seeing as how it’s made from the same star fragment. If it can be buried in the correct place, it will fill the missing piece needed to re-lock Pennywise’s cage.
However, the dagger has to be placed within a certain distance of the other pillars; otherwise, it’ll be too out of range to create the circuit of Pennywise-containing power. If Pennywise can shuffle his oversized shoes past a certain ancient tree on the edge of town, there’ll be no containing him, forever and ever, with a smile and a ribbon in my hair.
On top of that, the dagger also starts having an effect on the kids—especially Lilly (Clara Stack), who’s been carrying it around since her near-miss with Pennywise in the Derry sewer. We’ve already seen how it glows when evil is near, but now we know it also infuses whoever’s had the most contact with it with Gollum-esque paranoia.
Once Ronnie (Amanda Christine) and Margie (Matilda Lawler) realize the dagger is influencing Lilly’s already fragile mental state, they convince her to let them help shoulder the burden. Very Samwise Gamgee of them. Later, the friends all join forces to help Will (Blake Cameron James) bring it to its burial place; as it turns out, the dagger is also self-aware and sends out mind-warping panic signals the further it’s taken from its “home” beneath the house on Neibolt Street.
Let us first give praise to Margie, who started out in Welcome to Derry mostly defined by her desperate need to be popular—then elevated herself to being a total badass. She survived the Black Spot fire, spontaneously decided to steal a milk truck (despite not knowing how to drive), swore like a sailor (“I want to kill that fucking clown”), and rocked an eyepatch like nobody’s business.
So imagine our delight when Pennywise tells her that she’ll one day be Margaret Tozier and have a son, Richie—the goofball Losers Club kid we all know from It and It Chapter Two, who wears thick black-rimmed glasses just like his mom does in Welcome to Derry. His name, we now realize, is a touching tribute to someone Margie once loved and lost.
Just in case we don’t get it, Pennywise holds up a “missing” flyer for future Richie, featuring Finn Wolfhard’s likeness from the It movies. Stranger Things who?
This comes back around at the very end of the finale, when Margie explains to Lilly what Pennywise revealed about her future.
Here’s what Pennywise told her: “I’m gonna have a son, and he and his friends kill [Pennywise] in the future. That’s why he wanted to kill me.”
And there’s more: “He said to him the past, present, and future are all the same, and that his death was actually his birth. What if he does see time differently? What if he can go backwards? What if he tries to go back and kill someone from before the time we were born, like our parents?”
It’s a lot for young teens to ponder, as well as a TV show wrapping up its season finale. Margie and Lilly uneasily agree if such a thing ever happens, “it’ll be someone else’s fight.”
The show’s worst villains finally meet head-to-head, some 50 years after their first encounter. Shaw’s spent decades “wondering if you were real or just a little boy’s nightmare. Look at you: you’re both!”
The good vibes end abruptly once Pennywise, who was in a frozen state thanks to some Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) mind-invading, snaps back. Shaw tells him, triumphantly, “You’re free!” Operation Precept, ahoy!
The gruesome clown is just about to saunter away—all hail Skarsgård’s physicality in this episode, by the way, with some of the creepiest skipping and crawling you will ever see—when he suddenly stops.
“I know you,” Pennywise declares. “I never forget a smell.”
Time for some payback for a little boy who very narrowly escaped Pennywise’s clutches in the Derry woods back in 1908. And also, time for some catharsis for the Welcome to Derry audience, who surely cheered in unison when Pennywise took a big old chomp out of Shaw’s horrible brain.
Rich (Arian S. Cartaya)—hero, romantic, and a shockingly good drummer—perished in the Black Spot fire. But he reappeared in ghostly form, guided by Pennywise-slain Indigenous warrior Sesqui (Morningstar Angeline), to help Margie, Lilly, Ronnie, and Will bury the dagger and clamp the irons back on the killer clown.
Hallorann watches the spectral Rich emerge and proclaims it “a motherfuckin’ miracle”—a moment made even sweeter when Rich gives a flailing Pennywise the finger as he hurries past. His friends can’t see him, but they sense his presence, making their victory over the entity even sweeter still.
With renewed control over his formidable sixth sense, Dick Hallorann is looking forward to fresh beginnings. His time being exploited by the Air Force is over for good. His next stop, he tells Leroy (Jovan Adepo), is London.
“Got an old buddy back there who owns a hotel. Wants to give me a shot cooking in the restaurant.”
A hotel, you say? When Leroy lets his friend know he should not hesitate to reach out if he runs into any trouble, Hallorann brushes it off.
“I think I’ll manage. I mean, how much trouble can a hotel be?”
Yes, yes, it’s fan service. But we’ll allow it. How could we not?
As Welcome to Derry reaches the end of its final episode, a title card pops up letting us know this is It: Welcome to Derry… Chapter One.
Co-creator Andy Muschietti has said in the past that he envisions three seasons for the show charting Pennywise’s rampage through the ages, so expect HBO to drop some renewal news soon.
The reason for the episode title becomes very clear with a big cameo in its very final moments, when Welcome to Derry leaps ahead 26 years. It seems that after her harrowing Pennywise encounter, Ingrid Kersh (Madeleine Stowe in the 1962 scenes) became a permanent resident of her former workplace, Juniper Hill Asylum.
Twenty-six years, huh? Check the calendar: it’s about time for Pennywise to return. And in 1988, elderly Ingrid is played by… Joan Gregson, who portrayed a supernaturally twisted version of the character in It Chapter Two, which takes place in 2016.
In her big-screen scene, “Mrs. Kersh,” who is actually a form of Pennywise, greets (and then terrifies) the adult Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) when Bev pays a visit to her old apartment.
In Welcome to Derry‘s 1988 sequence, a fellow Juniper Hill patient has just taken her own life. Ingrid strolls down the hall to check on the commotion. The family members sobbing at their loss include teenage Beverly Marsh—noted for having hair that’s like “winter fire.” She’s played by It movie actress Sophia Lillis.
“You know what they say about Derry,” Ingrid says unprompted, recycling the same line she told a horrified Lilly way back in 1962. “No one who dies here ever really dies!”
You can watch all of It: Welcome to Derry on HBO and HBO Max now.
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