Pennywise’s Time Travel Twist In It: Welcome To Derry Hints At His Biggest Weakness In Season 2

Published Aug 21, 2026, 10:45 PM EDT

Dhruv is a Lead Writer in Screen Rant's New TV division. He has been consistently contributing to the website for over two years and has written thousands of articles covering streaming trends, movie/TV analysis, and pop culture breakdowns.
Before Screen Rant, he was a Senior Writer for The Cinemaholic, covering everything from anime to television, from reality TV to movies.
After high school, he was on his way to become a Civil Engineer. However, he soon realized that writing was his true calling. As a result, he took a leap and never looked back.

Sign in to your ScreenRant account

Even before It: Welcome to Derry, Pennywise ranked among the scariest on-screen horror monsters of all time. The IT movies had already established parts of his lore that made him look incredibly terrifying. However, It: Welcome to Derry has now added a layer of terror to the character's mythology by revealing how even his perception of time is not the same as humans.

In its early moments, HBO's It: Welcome to Derry almost came off as a Stranger Things remake when it focused on the misadventures of a young cast who set out to find their missing friend. Before episode 1's credits started rolling, though, the show shattered all expectations by killing off all the established "main" characters.

This alone proved the show was taking a no-holds-barred approach with its portrayal of Pennywise. As It: Welcome to Derry season 1 progressed, Pennywise showed intriguing new abilities and even revealed a terrifying truth about his perception of time. Interestingly, though, as scary as It: Welcome to Derry's timeline twist may seem, it actually exposes Pennywise's biggest weakness.

Pennywise’s Time Perception Twist In It: Welcome To Derry Explained

In It: Welcome to Derry season 1's finale, Pennywise reveals that, unlike humans, he experiences the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all the same for him. His awareness of time seems to span across every feeding cycle since his arrival on Earth to his eventual defeat in 2016.

Given his awareness of the future as well, he knows who kills him and how they managed to do so. Using his non-linear perception of time, he even taunts Marge in It: Welcome to Derry by showing her a missing poster of her future son, Rich Tozier, and suggesting that he is targeting a previous generation of the Losers' Club to ensure the future one does not get the chance to kill him.

This revelation makes Pennywise even scarier because it suggests that defeating him in one timeline will not be enough. He is omnipresent across all timelines up till 2016. Even if one generation manages to overpower him, he can always target a preceding one and attempt to change the circumstances that led to his downfall.

However, a closer look at this timeline twist reveals that if the IT franchise's timeline is deterministic, Pennywise's perception of time is actually a weakness instead of a strength.

If IT’s Timeline Is Deterministic, Pennywise Is Doomed To Fail In An Endless Loop

It: Welcome to Derry season 2's premise has already been revealed. The new installment will jump 27 years back from Season 1, placing the story in the middle of the Great Depression and unfolding primarily in 1935. It will walk through a new feeding cycle for Pennywise, where the cosmic monster will trigger the events of the brutal Bradley Gang massacre.

After season 1's ending, it seems evident that Pennywise will now attempt to wipe out a new previous generation of the Losers' Club. He will do this to ensure that he manages to survive the 1962 and 2016 timelines instead of being defeated by the children of the Losers' Club in the future.

Pennywise seems to have an advantage here. However, if the IT universe is deterministic, his future is already written in stone. His attempts to kill Marge in 1962 and her ancestors during the 1935 Bradley Gang massacre should already be a part of history.

Since he sees the past, the present, and the future all at once, he himself is probably aware of how actions in 1962, 1935, and 1908 are already part of the locked timeline that inevitably leads to its 2016 defeat.

While It: Welcome to Derry has not explored the larger implications of the Pennywise twist, it seems like the clown is trapped inside a fixed temporal existence bounded between its arrival and destruction. In a pre-determined timeline, the closer Pennywise gets to altering the past, the more it reinforces the events that cause its eventual demise.

An Established Multiverse Can Be Pennywise’s Only Escape In It: Welcome To Derry

Stephen King's Dark Tower books serve more or less as anchors for his entire horror universe, which even connects to IT. The Dark Tower books introduce a full-fledged multiverse where infinite parallel worlds are separated by boundaries called Thinny. If It: Welcome to Derry attempts to break into this large concept of introducing multiverses, it could give Pennywise a way out.

Instead of changing the original pre-determined timeline, Pennywise could then attempt to fork a new timeline. In this new timeline, he could alter the events of the past to ensure that he survives in 2016 and continues to exist till the end of time. While this would bring a complex sci-fi spin to It: Welcome to Derry's story, it could potentially make the entire Stephen King universe a lot more compelling.

It: Welcome to Derry

7/10

It: Welcome to Derry serves as a prequel to the 2017 film It, exploring the sinister history of Derry, Maine. Set in 1962, the series follows a family that relocates to the town amidst unsettling occurrences and the mysterious disappearance of a young boy.