IT: Welcome to Derry Finale Brings the Movies Full Circle
Final episode reawakens It, hinges on a magical dagger to re-lock its cage, and sets up crossovers with the films that will span the trilogy of seasons.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the IT: Welcome to Derry finale.
By the eighth and final episode, General Shaw's decision to remove and incinerate one of the Shokopiwah people's magical caging pillars reawakens It from its three-decade slumber and creates an opening for the creature to escape Derry. The development crystallizes the season’s central tension: can the youths and their allies seal It away before it can bend time to its will?
To counter this, Lilly, Ronnie, and Marge retrieve a dagger formed from the same cosmic rock as the pillar; the dagger can re-lock the cage if planted at the right spot on the river's deadwood. But the dagger is a fragment of the comet It arrived on, meaning It wants to return home, and the farther the dagger is moved from Neibolt House, the more it harms those who carry it.
On the frozen river, Lilly, Ronnie, and Marge confront It as It uses its Deadlights to seize Will. The arrival of the military along the shore escalates the danger as Taniel is killed and Leroy is wounded. Shaw orders his men to retrieve Dick, freeing It from a momentary mental hold. The creature then bites Shaw in a brutal, emblematic moment that underscores who truly controls the battlefield.
Dick Hallorann uses his Shine abilities to momentarily take over It's mind, buying the kids precious seconds. Yet the adults' advance on the river continues to complicate their effort as the dagger's power presses against their resolve. A trio of help arrives in the form of the Indigenous spirit Morningstar Angeline and the ghost of Rich, who appears as a young boy named after Richie Tozier. With Rich’s spectral assist, the four kids—Will, Lilly, Ronnie and Marge—plant the dagger in the deadwood's roots and re-lock the cage, forcing It back into one of its 27-year hibernation periods.
Following the battle, It’s message to Marge hinges on time itself. It hints that the past, present, and future are all the same in its perspective, a line echoed by Marge to Lilly as they consider what it could mean for the Losers Club’s future. The scene suggests the show will push deeper into the franchise’s time-warped mythology and how It might attempt to alter events before the Losers were born.
The finale closes with a flash-forward to October 1988. Ingrid Kersh—played in the ’60s by Madeleine Stowe and in the ’80s by Joan Gregson—resides in Juniper Hill Asylum as she nears the end of her life. In a chilling bridge to the film universe, the elderly Bev Marsh appears on the asylum’s corridor, and Ingrid’s line—“No one who dies here ever really dies”—fragments the barrier between the series and the cinema universe as Bev recognizes the connecting thread that will carry into 2016’s It: Chapter Two.
In the framing narrative, the series is conceived as a three-season story arc anchored in 1962, 1935 and 1908. The finale’s beats imply the story will move across generations, with It pursuing the possibility of changing a timeline that culminates in 2016. The episode thus acts as both a conclusion and a connective tissue to Muschietti’s feature films, signaling a deliberate expansion of the IT universe beyond its present season.
