In It: Welcome to Derry's season finale—titled "Winter Fire"—Pennywise was vanquished, but only after it was revealed that the entity experiences time differently from humans. To "It," all of time is happening simultaneously: past, present, and future.
Pennywise knows it dies decades from when this series takes place, but suggests that its death may, in fact, be its birth (and what led to the creature travelling back through time to kill the ancestors of The Losers' Club).
Talking to Deadline (via FearHQ.com) about introducing the idea that, after being foiled in 1962, 1989, and 2016, Pennywise will next travel back to 1935, filmmaker Andy Muschietti explained that the idea was very much inspired by Stephen King's IT novel.
"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," he said. "The pitch to Stephen King was we’re going to tell a story backwards, and it has to do with that hint."
This begs the question of whether an omnipresent Pennywise can change the story we know and perhaps even be revealed as having survived the events of IT: Chapter Two. Teasing how these revelations set up the planned, but not confirmed, Season 2 and Season 3, Muschietti noted, "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. Our second season happens in 1935, in theory. 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," Muschietti added.
In a separate conversation with Entertainment Weekly, It: Welcome to Derry showrunner Jason Fuchs said the revelation that Marge is Richie Tozier's mother "ties in with the mystery that Andy has been hinting at, which is why we're telling this story in reverse."
"The seeds of that are sewn in that specific moment when It reveals to Marge and to the audience that it knows exactly where this story is going, which raises questions certainly about where our story is going."
As Pennywise continues travelling further back, it's hard to shake the feeling that the monster will eventually find a way to free itself from its fate and live again in the present. What that will mean for the IT franchise moving forward remains to be seen, but Warner Bros. Discovery clearly sees the value in Bill Skarsgård's now-iconic clown.
Check out a new video detailing the actor's transformation into Pennywise below.