It: Welcome to Derry showrunner says one of the cruelest moments in episode 5 was originally supposed to be in It: Chapter Two: "It felt like an interesting idea that was wrong"

It: Welcome to Derry co-showrunner Jason Fuchs says one of the most diabolical moments in episode 5 was a scrapped idea from It: Chapter Two.

Warning: Massive spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry episode 5 below!

"It posing as Matty Clements, it hit all those marks for us. It's cruel, it's unexpected, it's incredibly canny in terms of using Matty to get the kids into the tunnels and throw them into Leroy and the team's path," Fuchs tells GamesRadar+. "But I haven't talked to anyone else about this in terms of the genesis of that specific choice. That actually was something I played around with on It: Chapter Two."

"When I was working on that, I came in and did some production work on and one of the things that I played around with on that was, if you remember that film, Mike Hanlon, as per the book, is still in Derry. He invites our characters back, Ritual of Chüd, they go down into the cistern. All that stuff happens, as it does in the film. Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen Chapter Two. I had a version of that script where they got down into the cistern and they found a starved, bedraggled, hostage Mike Hanlon and realized that the Mike played by Isaiah Mustafa that they'd encountered the entire film was an It manifestation."

This is more or less exactly what happens with Matty in Welcome to Derry episode 5. Lily, Ronnie, Rich, and Will, who are desperate to prove the existence of Pennywise to any person in a position of power who will believe them, are suddenly visited by Matty Clements... who is somehow alive after being killed by It in the first 10 minutes of episode 1. Matty tells his friends that he's been staying alive in the sewers, and that one of their murdered friends, Phil, is actually still alive down there, too. Believing in him wholeheartedly, the group (with the addition of Marge, who finally believes that Ronnie's dad is innocent), follows Matty into the sewers in hopes of finding Phil.

It's possible that something similar could've worked in It: Chapter Two, which sees Mike bring the Losers Club back to Derry 27 years later to defeat Pennywise once and for all, but Fuchs (and myself, for that matter) didn't think it would've done any justice to the character of grown-up Mike Hanlon, who becomes a librarian dedicated to researching the sordid history of Derry, Maine. In the It novel, Mike's extensive research can be found in the index. It's this research that served as the basis for Welcome to Derry.

"It felt like an interesting idea that was wrong because it didn't do justice to Mike. And so we abandoned it. And I didn't really think of it again. Until we started building this show. And it was an early idea of, 'What if we use that trick here? What if It was a little stronger here? Is there a way that that might make sense?' And then when it came to how it was going to contrive to have the kids get thrown into jeopardy in the sewers and throw them into the path of the military and have those plot lines converge... that was the moment. I remember being on the phone with [Brad Caleb Kane] and pitching it to him, and we just went, 'Oh yeah, this is exactly it.'"

Lauren Milici is a Senior Entertainment Writer for GamesRadar+ based in New York City. She previously reported on breaking news for The Independent's Indy100 and created TV and film listicles for Ranker. Her work has been published in Fandom, Nerdist, Paste Magazine, Vulture, PopSugar, Fangoria, and more.

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