It: Welcome to Derry co-showrunner Jason Fuchs says the epic, emotional season finale is likely the last time we'll see these Losers – and explains how important it was to not only give each character a proper send-off, but to wrap it all up in a way that honors their individual journeys. Get ready to cry... again.
Warning: Massive spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry episode 8 below!
"Important thing we wanted to resolve was the journey of this core group of characters – we're not planning on coming back to these characters," Fuchs, who also wrote the script for episode 8, tells GamesRadar+. "This is, in my mind, the sort of end of Lilly's story, the end of Ronnie's story, the end of this chapter of Dick Halloran's story before he goes on to the Overlook. So it was, how do you bring all these characters who, to some degree, have been in their own storylands the whole season, together and resolve them all in emotionally satisfying ways that feel appropriate to the road they've been on?"
The final episode of It: Welcome to Derry season 1 sees the Losers team up with the adults, resulting in an epic showdown that takes place entirely on an iced-over lake. After Leroy Hanlon receives a call from Pennywise, he immediately jumps into action to save his son. This results in Leroy finding (an understandably reluctant) Dick Hallorann and taking him over to Rose's house, where he's confronted by a distraught Charlotte. After Rose gives him a spiritual hallucinogenic known as the Maturin root (which, yes, is the same root that Mike Hanlon takes in It: Chapter Two before performing the Ritual of Chud), Dick is able to quiet the voices and locate Lilly, Marge, and Ronnie – and the adults pile into Taniel's van and head towards the ice.
It's the ultimate team-up: After fighting off the U.S. Air Force, Rose and Charlotte stand together in the fog, armed with military-grade guns. Both Leroy and Hank fire off rounds at Pennywise. All the while, Lilly, Ronnie, Marge, and a rescued Will race to place the dagger in its rightful spot and send Pennywise back to sleep for another 27 years.
"It was challenging. In some ways, it felt like the Avengers: Endgame of Welcome to Derry season 1, where it's all these characters coming together for one last heroic mission. And that was part of the excitement of the episode too – you're seeing character combinations you hadn't seen before. It was, how do we end these stories in a satisfying way, and also leave a little bit of room for the mystery of what's to come and where this would be going in the future? Which is, to say, the past."
Speaking of Avengers: Endgame and the way Marvel loves a good post-credits scene and a surprise cameo... Welcome to Derry episode 8 does the same, and it's both a treat for fans, and a full-circle connection to both It: Chapter One and It: Chapter Two.
Your hair is winter fire
Ingrid Kersh does not die after Pennywise puts her in the Deadlights. Instead, she's whisked off to Juniper Hill (lest she keep walking around Derry dressed in full clown regalia), and we fast forward some 27 years into the future. Ingrid, now an elderly woman, hears a commotion happening down the hall in another room of the hospital. She enters the room to see a woman hanging from the ceiling by her neck, and two people kneeling on the floor, crying out in grief. One of the people kneeling is none other than Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), and the hanging woman in question is her mother. Creepily, Ingrid tells Bev not to worry... because no one ever really dies in Derry.
"That was a very, very last-minute decision," Fuchs admits. "That scene came about in reshoots. Reshoots are a normal part of any big show or any film, but we were at the tail end of everything. And that was a scene that had been talked about a few times, just generally, like how do we have one more piece of architecture linking us to the films? We certainly had the Rich Tozier missing kids poster that popped up, but what was one other piece of the puzzle that could sort of build a bridge to the films and make it feel like this really takes you in many ways to the doorstep of It: Chapter One?"
The scene accomplishes several things, but most importantly... it makes that scene in It: Chapter Two, where Bev visits the elderly woman, all the more harrowing. We quickly learn that the old woman is really just Pennywise in another form, taunting her about her abusive childhood. Now, we know that Bev had already met that woman some 27 years prior, during the literal moment that her mother committed suicide. Pennywise chooses to manifest as Ingrid, also fully knowing that Ingrid is the daughter of Bob Gray – the real-life human circus performer who It killed before inhabiting his body.
"It also changes the context of that scene in It: Chapter Two, because now you're understanding, 'Oh, wait, the reason that It takes that guise in Chapter Two is not just about tormenting Beverly as it relates to her traumatic relationship with her dad.' It's actually scratching a very deeply repressed piece of trauma in the back of her brain, which is Mrs. Kersh is the person she met the day she suffered the most traumatic event of her young life to that point, which was the suicide, obviously, of her mom."
Beep beep, Margie
Beverly Marsh isn't the only modern-day Losers Club member to make a surprise appearance in Welcome to Derry season 1 – and yes, it still counts as a cameo... despite it being a missing kids poster. Fans have been theorizing that Marge Truman is the mother of Richie Tozier since the first time she stepped out onto our screens... and episode 8 proves them right.
In the middle of the episode, when Lilly, Ronnie, and Marge walk out onto the ice and face Pennywise, the torment begins. After managing to protect themselves with that cosmic dagger, Marge suddenly finds herself all alone in the fog with everyone's favorite dancing clown. In the most dramatic way possible (because It loves nothing more than to put on a show), Pennywise greets her by her eventual married name: Tozier. He shows her Richie's missing poster from It: Chapter One and explains that it's her son and the rest of the Losers Club who eventually bring about his death. He attempts to remedy this by killing Marge – but thankfully, the dagger being nearby temporarily stuns him again.
"The idea started with the very earliest conversations between myself and the Muschiettis about how do we create linkages between the group of characters in this show and the films, and how do we try to create some linkages that are not immediately obvious," Fuchs explains to GR+. "I pitched the idea to Andy, 'Is it possible we have a character who is the mother of one of our Losers, so we don't have a dead giveaway of a last name? And that you don't find out that reveal until later in the season, and it becomes something that the viewer can sort of begin to piece together – that was the first idea."
Viewers pieced it together pretty quickly after episode 7, when Rich Santos dies in the Black Spot Fire. Rich, who loved Marge since the moment he first saw her, sacrifices his own life to save her by putting her in an air-tight container that would protect her from smoke inhalation – which is what Rich inevitably dies of. This is where it clicked: Marge, as a sweet way to honor her first love, would go on to name her son Richie in his memory. It's also impossible (at least for me) not to think about the moment where Rich kisses the lid of the box, kissing Marge goodbye forever, without bursting into tears. He dies with his eyes wide open, and it's maybe the cruelest part of the entire season.
"We just knew that there was going to be a love story that explained why Richie Tozier is named Rich Tozier, and that it would be infused with something really emotional and tragic," he continues. "And so that was sort of the sequence of events. And so now we knew, we had Richie's mom, we knew we had a character who would feel a little bit like Richie Tozier: comedic, smart, good impressionist, all the things that you know, you know and love about Richie... glasses." (It's worth noting that fans even went so far as to put clips of Marge's mannerisms next to Richie's from It: Chapter One in order to prove that they were undoubtedly related.)
"We knew that character needed to be among the most lovable characters we'd ever met in the context of this universe.. And little by little, Ricardo Santos was conceived," he continues. "It was a tragic death, but there was no Richie without that moment. And really, there's so much of the book that is about coming of age and first loves and first loss that it felt very thematically in sync with what we wanted to show, to have two unlikely characters sort of fall for each other and then have this very sweet boy make the ultimate sacrifice."
But Rich Santos did not die in vain, nor was he tucked away never to be seen again. At the end of episode 8, Rich returns in what is not only the best part of the entire season, but one of my favorite TV moments of the last 10 years.
Towards the end of the finale, Lilly, Marge, Ronnie, and Will manage to get the dagger over to its rightful resting spot so they can plunge it into the ground and send Pennywise back to sleep for another 27 years. However, it requires a lot more strength than they could've ever imagined, and Pennywise is only moments away from catching up to them and leading them to their deaths. What happens next, is, in the words of Dick Hallorann, "a motherfucking miracle."
"It is maybe, in some ways, the most hopeful moment of the season," Fuchs says (and I vehemently agree). "That even in death, this character we've all fallen in love with is able to still help his friends, the people he cares about the most, push back the darkness, and find the light. It seemed wrong not to have Rich involved in that moment. All season, we've seen the way he sacrifices for his friends, the way he's there for his friends. He's a pretty extraordinary companion, and he'd want to be there. He'd want more than anything to be there to help them."
Right before Pennywise transforms into a bat-like creature and flaps his way over to the Losers, Dick sees something off in the distance. The Indigenous warrior from the Galloo myth (who appeared to him earlier) has returned, but this time she's holding a little boy's hand. Rich lets go and sprints across the ice, flipping off a temporarily stunned Pennywise and rushing to help his friends. In those final moments, Rich makes it in time and grabs a hold of the dagger alongside them... effectively pushing it into the ground and making Pennywise deteriorate.
"We've established that Dick can see the dead," he explains. "We've established that the dead can't physically impact him, but that once he makes contact with them, they will be fixated on him. And it will be disturbing to the point of him being unable to live a life. But the idea that the dead can physically impact the corporeal world is a brand new idea. And so, when he says, I'm seeing a miracle, he means it. He didn't know this was possible. And although we don't get into the para-physics of how it's possible thematically, I think it suggests that love is every bit as powerful for us as any of the supernatural things we've seen in this show."
"... And for Rich to be the delivery vehicle for that moment, for Dick to believe in that moment in something greater than himself. Something greater than the rules of the world as he knows them. Because what Rich is doing in that moment breaks the rules."
"And that it is the sheer power of Rich's love for his friends and, of course, their love for him that allows him to pierce that veil between the living and the dead and help save the day. It was a joy to write that beat and a joy to see Arian running across that fake ice, flipping Pennywise off. Sometimes you gotta just tell evil to fuck off, and that's what Rich is doing in that moment."
"How much trouble can a hotel be?"
And where does that leave Dick? Well, there was a general assumption, mainly from the casual viewer, that Dick Hallorann would set out for his tenure at the Overlook Hotel immediately after Welcome to Derry ended. King superfans, however, spent time trying to calculate Dick's age in Welcome to Derry versus his age in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and his age in the novel in order to determine where Dick was off to next.
Towards the end of the episode, Dick tells Leroy that he's off to be a chef at a resort in London (and earnestly asks, "How much trouble can a hotel be?"). The Overlook Hotel is famously located in Colorado... so when does he meet the Torrance family? Well, in the Tabitha King novel, Pearl, (which is canon to the overall King universe), Dick is the head chef at a resort in Key West, Florida. Key West is his last stop before he heads on over to the Overlook hotel for the winter.
In the Kubrick film, Dick is 70 during his time at the Overlook, but the novel puts him at 59. According to Fuchs, Dick Hallorann is around 43 in Welcome to Derry... which means, either way, he has a ways to go before he becomes the character we love and recognize the most.
"I had written that both ways," Fuchs reveals. "I had a version of that scene that said I'm off to Colorado, then we had a version of that scene that said, I'm off to Key West. And I had a version of that scene that said, I'm off to London. Ultimately, the reason we went with [London] is because it felt like Dick Halloran had completed a specific journey in his life, but it didn't feel to us from an age perspective or even a character perspective, that the man we are saying goodbye to at the end of episode 8 is the man who's gonna turn up at the Overlook in The Shining."
"It felt like there was still story, there was still stuff that he's going to go through – adventures and demons to face between the end of our show and the beginning of The Shining. And so even putting him, you know, in Key West to suggest that this is the stop before The Shining... he's not there yet. I think there are many other adventures for him to go on between now and the beginning of The Shining."
Some fans (including myself) have wondered whether Dick shares the same fate as the Kubrick movie, or if he survives the Torrance family and dies in the 1990s (though this would be much later in the Muschiettiverse as the timeline is shifted) like in the King novel. Fuchs also says he has a "very specific idea" of what happens to Dick Hallorann next, but prefers to keep it a mystery: "I think, in a lot of elements of this show, the scariest thing we can do is not explain everything."
It: Welcome to Derry season 1 is streaming in its entirety on HBO Max. For more, check out our It: Welcome to Derry release schedule, or, check out our guide to all of the upcoming Stephen King movies and shows you need to know about.
