The Way Pennywise the Clown Experiences Time in IT: WECOME TO DERRY Is Absolutely Fascinating

HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry pulls a really cool and interesting misdirect. By the time the Season 1 finale rolls around, the show makes it clear that Pennywise is doing something far more cosmic time traveling. He’s watching time all at once and acting on what he already knows.

At a glance, the finale, “Winter Fire,” seems to push the idea that the clown is actively meddling with the timeline. Pennywise, played once again by Bill Skarsgård, tells Marge Truman, portrayed by Matilda Lawler, that her future child will be part of his downfall. 

It’s a chilling and personal scene and Pennywise sneers, “The seed of your stinking loins and his filthy friends bring me my death.” That child, of course, is Richie Tozier, later played by Finn Wolfhard in 2017’s It and Bill Hader in 2019’s It: Chapter Two.

It’s easy to assume the series has been setting up a horror-flavored time travel saga. Marge herself voices the same fear when she asks Lilly Bainbridge, played by Clara Stack, “What if [It] can go backwards?” 

She’s clearly shaken and continues saying: “I know it sounds crazy, but what if he tries to go back and kill someone from the time before we were born, like our parents?” Given that the creators have already mapped out future seasons set in 1935 and 1908, the theory doesn’t sound far-fetched.

But It: Welcome to Derry isn’t really about changing history. It’s about understanding how Pennywise exists within it.

The series is a prequel to the two modern films, but it doesn’t retread Stephen King’s 1986 novel. Instead, it expands on the book’s interludes, fragments of Derry’s dark past that hint at older cycles of violence. That creative freedom has allowed co-creators Jason Fuchs, Andy Muschietti, and Barbara Muschietti to dig deeper into the nature of It itself.

Andy Muschietti has said the show is built around three questions: “What is It? What does It want? And why is It in this plane of existence?” Season 1 spends a lot of time circling that last question. 

We learn that the entity crash-landed on Earth centuries ago and was contained by Indigenous people using shards from the object that brought it here. Those shards anchored Pennywise to Derry, binding his physical form to a specific place.

But the being behind the clown isn’t limited to flesh and teeth. It’s true existence is rooted in the Todash Space, the realm between universes in Stephen King’s larger macroverse. In the novel, when the Losers Club confront It’s “true form,” the spider they see is only a shape their minds can process. 

The actual entity exists beyond time and human comprehension. When It is defeated, the connection to the physical world is severed. The entity still exists. It just can’t hunt on Earth anymore.

That distinction is key to understanding the time question. Pennywise isn’t traveling backward to fix a mistake. He already knows how the story ends. For him, time isn’t a line. It’s a single, massive moment. Past, present, and future blur together.

This is spelled out directly in “Winter Fire” when Pennywise says, “Tomorrow, yesterday, it's all the same for little Pennywise. But it's not always easy, no. Being caged up in one place, one time.” 

That line suggests his awareness of the entire timeline is real, but limited by the prison that keeps him in Derry. The shards don’t just trap him geographically. They may also fence him into a specific stretch of history, from the moment he was bound to the moment he was defeated.

That idea helps explain moments like Pennywise’s fixation on Will Hanlon, played by Blake Cameron James, and his earlier warning that Will will “burn too,” a clear reference to the future Black Spot fire. Pennywise doesn’t cause these events by traveling to them. He knows they’re coming and nudges things along, choosing victims and actions based on that knowledge.

So when Pennywise targets ancestors of the Losers Club, it isn’t about rewriting fate. It’s about retaliation, fear, and maybe a last grasp at control. He sees the continuum. He understands where it leads. But he’s still trapped inside it.

By the end of Season 1, It: Welcome to Derry makes it clear that its villain isn’t a time traveler in the traditional sense. He’s an eternal observer, acting within a cage of place and era, fully aware of his own end and furious about it. 

That makes Pennywise scarier than any time-hopping monster. He knows what’s coming, and he can’t stop it. He can only scream into the timeline and drag as many souls down with him as possible.