IT: WELCOME TO DERRY Creators Talk About About the Finale Cameo That Rewrites IT Lore

HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry has spent its first season digging deep into the cursed town’s past, and by the time the finale rolled around, the series delivered a big surprise that fans of It and It: Chapter Two immediately locked in on.

Their is a cameo that no one saw coming, and it connected timelines and characters in a way that reshapes how one unsettling scene from the films now plays.

As a direct prequel to It and It: Chapter Two, the series has always been positioned to overlap with familiar faces beyond Pennywise. Earlier episodes peeled back the history of Bob Gray before he became the dancing clown, including his daughter Ingrid.

After her father’s death at Pennywise’s hands, Ingrid stayed in Derry, took a job at Juniper Hill Asylum, married the local butcher, and became Ingrid Kersh. In the show’s 1962 timeline, she’s played by Madeleine Stowe.

That last name rang alarm bells for fans when it surfaced in Episode 5. Kersh, as in Mrs. Kersh, the deeply unsettling old woman Beverly Marsh encounters in It: Chapter Two, portrayed by Joan Gregson. The finale confirmed the connection in a devestating way.

The final episode, titled “Winter Fire,” shows Ingrid’s tragic endgame. After deliberately seeking out Pennywise and committing terrible acts to draw him out, she finally accepts the truth that the creature isn’t her father anymore. A run-in with the Deadlights seals her fate, and Ingrid becomes a permanent resident at Juniper Hill.

Then the show jumps forward 26 years. At the asylum, Ingrid Kersh crosses paths with a young Beverly Marsh, whose mother has just died while institutionalized there. Sophia Lillis, reprises her role from the It films. The two lock eyes, and it recontextualizes everything that comes later.

Speaking with Variety, Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, who co-created It: Welcome to Derry with Jason Fuchs, explained that the idea came together late in the process. Andy directed “Winter Fire,” which was written by Fuchs, and the scene was added during reshoots.

“I had an idea for a four-scene epilogue, but it was a little too ambitious, so we condensed it to one scene with just one of the Losers [Club]. We always joke that Sophia Lillis always looks the same.

“She looked 14 when she was 14 and now that she’s 24, she still looks 14, so we could bring her back without having to de-age her,” Andy said. “We also brought back the actress who plays the elderly Ingrid Kersh, Joan Gregson, in It Chapter 2.

“We wanted to show that those characters had met before, so in the flash-forward, we have Kersh still committed at Juniper Hill, the same place where Beverly’s mom was committed. It seemed like the perfect connection.”

Barbara Muschietti noted that Gregson passed away a few months later at age 91.

Fuchs broke down why that final look between Ingrid and Beverly matters so much in the larger mythology.

“What I love about that scene is that it does change your understanding of Beverly’s encounter with It’s manifestation of Mrs. Kersh in It Chapter 2,” Fuchs explained.

“I was lucky enough to work on that scene and, at the time, I imagined that It was taking the guise of Pennywise’s daughter in order to prey on Beverly’s traumatic relationship with her own father. It did not, then, occur to me that Beverly Marsh had ever met the real Mrs. Kersh.”

With the prequel now filling in the gaps, that interpretation shifts in a chilling way. “But now, you go back and rewatch that scene, and you realize It was up to something else. It knows that Beverly actually met Mrs. Kersh at least once and it was on the worst day of her life, the day her mother committed suicide.

“So, when It takes that form, it’s also a way of tapping into a long-buried memory that’s intertwined with the most horrific moment, to that point, of Beverly’s young life. And that’s the day, the moment, we get to see at the end of our season.”

It’s a small scene that carries massive implications, tying Welcome to Derry directly into the emotional core of the films and proving the series isn’t just expanding lore for the sake of it. It’s reshaping how we see moments we thought we already understood.

You can watch all of It: Welcome to Derry season one now on HBO and HBO Max.