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IT: Welcome to Derry’s Season Finale Is Chaotic, But Mostly Satisfying
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It: Welcome to Derry
IT: Welcome to Derry’s Season Finale Is Chaotic, But Mostly Satisfying
Plus there’s an appearance by a Very Special Ghost.
By Leah Schnelbach
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Published on December 15, 2025
Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO
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Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO
This week’s season finale of IT: Welcome to Derry, “Winter Fire”, was written by Jason Fuchs and directed once again by Andy Muschietti. The episode manages to wrap a lot of the plot points up into a surprisingly satisfying ending, given how much story they had to get through.
As Brief a Recap as a King Adaptation Will Allow
A sinister grey fog rolls over Derry. Townsfolk, all the ones who were so calm yesterday after the white supremacist hate crime, are thrown into a frenzy, running into shops, slamming doors—even though they’re not sure what these clouds are. The leaves on the trees shrivel and the grass turns brown, but there are no monsters hiding in the fog.
But that’s because the monster is already at the school.
A totally normal sounding announcer tells the kids that classes are cancelled for the day, that upperclassmen are dismissed, but underclassmen should report to the auditorium for an assembly.
Once all the kids are milling about a teacher walks stiffly out and tells them there’s going to be a special performance. The teach transforms into the principal, and then there’s Pennywise, ripping his head off and punting it out the door, throwing the man’s blood-spurting body at the students, and locking them all in as he does his crazed dance and Deadlights them.
As the clouds become thicker, Pennywise trundles away in his circus wagon, almost all the children of Derry floating in a hypnotized line behind him. He’s playing a tuba, and whacking a pedal drum that has a severed hand chained to it.
I love this fuckin’ clown, man.
Margie, Lilly, and Ronnie are up on the Tower when they see the cloud. When they come down, they find “Missing” posters for every kid in town, and understandably freak out—but then they find a poster for Will.
Then, they find the principal’s decapitated corpse at the otherwise-empty school
“I wanna kill that fuckin’ clown,” Margie says.
The kids spot a milk truck, and Margie, who has really blossomed in the last few days of horror, decides she can drive it. And she does! For a while. The kids give chase until a nefarious pothole throws them off the road and Lilly drops the dagger. Lilly then Gollums the fuck out over the dagger, they realize it’s driving her mad, and after some screaming and wrestling they agree to pass it between them so no one loses their mind.
Meanwhile, the adults are having their own problems.
Pennywise calls the Major and puts “Will” on the phone. Leroy isn’t afraid, but he is furious, promising “I’ll rip your fucking heart out!” as the line goes dead.
I think Pennywise may have taunted the wrong adult.
Leroy goes straight to Dick Hallorann’s quarters. Dick is not doing well. The ghosts are everywhere, they won’t stop whispering to him. As Leroy pounds on the door, Dick puts his gun in his mouth. Leroy breaks the door in just in time, and looks around wildly as Dick screams “Shut up! Shut up!” at the ghosts surrounding him. Dick points the gun at Leroy, and says “You got my mind all fucked up,” but he pauses when Leroy breaks down. “Please, please, it’s got Will. I’m begging you to help me find him. I’ll do everything in my power to help you, but help me find my baby.”
Dick, slowly, puts the gun down.
Unfortunately the General and his underlings gets the report that the two men have escaped pretty quickly. Who the hell was supposed to be keeping Hanlon on base, anyway? Wasn’t that a direct order from the General?
We cut to Charlotte at Rose’s, pounding on Leroy’s chest and slapping his face as she learns what’s happened. He promises they’ll get him back, but Rose, initially, thinks it’s a lost cause. Leroy says that Dick can find them, and Rose throws a plan together: if Dick can mentally link with the dagger, as he did before, he can lead them to the children. They just have to do it before IT manages to walk through the bounds of ITs old cage. And then maybe, maybe, the dagger can replace the destroyed pillar and act as a new lock.
They give Dick a tea made with maturin root, and faced with the possibility of shutting the ghosts up, he drinks it in one gulp. It works almost instantly, to the extent that he doesn’t hear whatever Rose is trying to warn him about because time stretches and she becomes unintelligible.
They throw Dick in Taniel’s van, and everyone piles in to find the kids. They strategize as they go, following Dick’s directions, and asking if he could try to get into Pennywise’s mind again.
The kids, meanwhile, have found Pennywise and his wagon, rolling up the now-frozen river, headed right out of his unlocked mystical cage. They try to wake Will up from his Deadlighted sleep, until Pennywise comes down from the circus wagon.
“You’ve decided to join the circus! The fool, the freak, the failure. But… who’s who? It doesn’t matter, there a spot for you all!”
Ronnie wields the dagger and Pennywise backs off, but darts around them cackling and shrieking. He grabs Margie and drags her away from the others.
And here’s where something that should have been obvious to me comes to light. Pennywise looms over her. “Margie Tozier! But not Tozier yet!” he screams.
OH.
Oh.
He waves the future Richie Tozier’s missing poster in her face. “His friends bring me my death! Or is that death a birth???” He babbles about past present and future all being the same to him as Margie freaks out and tries to understand what he’s saying. “Beep, beep, Margie!” he howls, lunges at her, all his teeth out.
And then he freezes.
Stops dead, right above her.
She scrambles away.
The kids all fall to the ice and begin to wake up. The New Old Losers embrace Will, just in time for the adults to reach them. They load them into the van and Taniel tells the rest of the children to run to the North shore. He and the Major set out to bury the dagger in the blasted tree that marks the edge of IT’s cage.
But then.
General Shaw and his men appear on the shore, and both Taniel and the Major are shot. The Major holds Taniel while he bleeds out from a neck wound, and they’re surrounded, the General ordering another soldier to go get Halloran.
The General himself? He spots Pennywise, still as death on the ice, and decides it’s a fabulous idea to walk on over there and say hello.
We go inside ITs mind, where Pennywise is woken up inside the wagon by the other circus folk. They’re all calling him Robert Crane. “Who else might you be, Peter Rabbit?” When Pennywise tells the boss that he’s a “god” the boss smacks him and tells him he must have hit his head harder than he thought. Pennywise is very confused.
Will has reached his dad, and the Major gives his son the dagger. When Will protests that he can’t get the dagger to the tree because he’s too scared, the Major replies, “You don’t have to be me. Just be you. I love you. I love YOU.”
The kids wrestle the dagger to the tree as it fights with them every step of the way.
The General is standing directly in front of Pennywise now. “All these years wondering if you were real…whatever Halloran’s done to you, we’re gonna fix it.”
Wow. Just… wow.
Inside ITs mind, the cracks start to show. IT is able to peel Dick’s mask off and reveal the terrified man inside, just as in the outside world, we see him being thrown onto the ice by one of the soldiers.
Pennywise wakes up. The General tells him he’s free to go. Pennywise recognizes in the General the smell of the terrified boy at the circus, transforms into the old monster and screams “NOW YOU SEE IT!” as the General yells at him to stand down, and then Pennywise eats his head.
As the screams drift over the ice, the adults try to convince the soldiers that maybe they have a bigger enemy. As Pennywise slow motion runs past them toward the kids, giggling, they use the distraction to launch themselves at the soldiers and wrestle their guns away.
Major Hanlon goes after IT and shoots him, which succeeds in knocking him down at least, but then IT deadlights him. The kids can’t force the dagger into the base of the tree—it’s simply too strong for them. The adults, watching, start to break down in despair.
Until…
Dick sees the Necani on the ice. And she’s brought… Rich??? Rich’s ghost???
“What do you see?” Rose asks.
“A mutherfuckin miracle,” Dick breathes.
The ghost runs across the ice, gleefully flicking IT off as he passes, and helps the kids shove the dagger in the rest of the way. As the dagger finally goes into the base of the tree, beams of light from all the pillars shoot up into the sky.
IT molts through a series of forms. “Lively crowd,” IT mutters, before turning into light and shooting back down toward the sewers.
Leroy wakes up, Rose collapses sobbing next to Taniel’s body, and sings to him, and the kids embrace each other and agree that they all felt another pair of hands helping them.
Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO
We cut to Rich’s funeral. Margie gives a brief eulogy about how even though they weren’t friends for very long, some people “build houses in your heart”. She leaves a pair of drumsticks on his casket. Walking down Main Street after the funeral, she sees one of his balsa flyers in a tree—one of them made it! Lilly visits her father’s grave for the first time in a long time, and tells him that she’s made some new friends. And Dick sees Rich’s spirit standing with his parents by the graveside, plucks up his courage, and sits beside them to tell them what he sees. It seems to help.
“Who are you, sir?” Rich’s father asks.
“I’m still working on that,” Dick replies.
Back at the tower later, Margie tells Lilly about what Pennywise said to her—that she’d have a son that would kill IT. She worries that if time is truly meaningless to IT, IT could go back and kill their parents so they’d never exist at all.
Lilly meets this worry with some stellar philosophy: “It’ll be someone else’s fight, then.”
The Hanlons are packing their house up. Charlotte and Leroy share an actual kiss, and he actually smiles after her as she goes up to get Will, and the two of them seem better than they have all season. These two crazy kids might just make it, if they steer clear of evil space clowns. Dick Hallorann slouches into the doorway, giving Leroy an only slightly sarcastic salute.
The former Major is getting an honorable discharge as long as he keeps his mouth shut about…everything… and Dick is going to London to try out as a cook at his friend’s fancy hotel. “How much trouble can a hotel be?” he asks, and I groan, but who am I kidding, I’ve been waiting all season for a joke like that. The two men hug, and Dick asks Leroy to stay in touch let him know how Charlotte and Will are. He reluctantly admits that maybe he does care—just don’t tell anybody.
As they pack cars over at Rose’s place, Charlotte tells Hank Grogan how to meet with Rose’s people at the border, so it seems like at least one family is getting a happy ending. Mostly.
Rose invites Leroy and Charlotte to join the circle of people who watch over IT and protect Derry. She’s selling the farm—it’s too much without Taniel—and she thinks they’re the perfect people to take it over from her.
But the Hanlons think maybe they need to get out of Derry while they can.
Ronnie and Will sit on a bench a few yards away from the house. They talk about how they might forget each other when they leave, and go back and forth on whether that’s a good thing. But then Ronnie grabs Will and finally kisses him.
That complicates things.
Once everyone’s in the car, Charlotte suddenly raises the idea of taking Rose’s offer. “Maybe the next damn fool mission needs to be together,” she says to Leroy. As the two of them tease each other about who’ll take care of the sheep, Will leaps out of the car and immediately begins a letter to Ronnie. Maybe if he writes to her all the time she won’t forget?
But when we see a carefree Ronnie in the car with her dad and grandmother, two lollipops in her mouth, well, it seems like forgetting might be inevitable, and young love or no, it might be for the best.
We cut to Juniper Hill. Ingrid is straitjacketed, screaming about wolves at the two orderlies who are attending her. They drop the needle on her favorite old-time record and she calms down. We fade out and back in to the same music playing in October 1988, as a much older Ingrid paints a clown on a canvas—still in the asylum. There’s screaming down the hall, and Ingrid shuffles over to find Alvin and Beverly Marsh, sobbing on the floor at the feet of Elfrida Marsh, who has, apparently, hanged herself.
Alvin, ever the charmer, shoves Bev away, and she locks eyes with Ingrid, who tells her not to worry. “You know what they say about Derry. No one who dies here ever really dies.” Ingrid’s eyes widen in glee as Bev’s widen in horror.
As the end titles come up, the words IT: Welcome to Derry—Chapter One appear, which I’m guessing is their super fun way of telling us to expect another season.
Do We All Float?
Credit: HBO
This was kind of what I expected from the finale. There’s a lot of action and rushing so everyone can converge on a single point. Also, while Bill Skarsgård is impeccable in the role, IT has to work on your deepest, weirdest fears. Just seeing him out and about undercuts the terror.
Having said that I still think they wrapped all the plot points up well, maneuvering everyone around to set up the rest of the story without showing the strings too often.
The visual of the wagon rolling along through fog and ice, hypnotized children floating behind, was gorgeous. And as much as I’ve mentioned the diminishing returns of “IT runs at you really fast” I’ve never gotten sick of the Deadlights. I think the effect is so beautiful it actually captures how entrancing it would be.
I feel ridiculous for not realizing that Richie was Margie’s future kid! But now it all makes sense.
What I think the episode did extremely well was bring the relationship between Leroy Hanlon and Dick Hallorann to a perfect close. The scene between them is incredible—the two are in different worlds, emotionally. Dick, coiled into himself, eyes flickering constantly to take in every ghostly threat, as Leroy finally cracks open and sobs, realizing he may have sealed his child’s doom by bringing him to Derry. The two performances play off each other perfectly, and really underline the idea that these two men inhabit different worlds. Dick’s visions force him to be half in the spirit world at all times, and he simply has no real care for the world of the living. Until, finally, he does. It’s been lovely to watch him become the man we meet in The Shining. And Leroy finally throws off any loyalty he has to the U.S. military, and faces the fact that he needs to reprioritize everything if he wants his family to make it.
#JustKingThings
Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO
I’ve been telling people that the show is fixing a lot of what I didn’t like in IT: Chapter II, and I’m pleased to say that it mostly has. By centering the story on the Grogans, the Hanlons, and Hallorann, it showed a different side of Derry. It created enough context for the hate crime at the Black Spot that it feels like part of Derry’s terrible history, influenced by the evil of IT, but largely the work of white supremacists. It also adds more nuance and depth to the fictional Shokopiwah, fixing one of Stephen King’s clumsier attempts at inclusivity. It shows us the cycle of horror, how it carries forward into the Losers Club that will form in the 1980s, but it also shows us that people have been fighting IT the entire time.
Turtles all the Way Down
The tea Rose gives to Dick is Maturin root, presumably named for the mystical cosmic turtle who is trying to help humanity fight IT.
Mike Hanlon’s Photo Album
Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO
We learn that Margie is Richie’s future mom! Most of you probably already guessed that! Where have I been! And we see the future missing poster with Finn Wolfhard’s face.
Later, we fully meet Bev Marsh, played by Sophia Lillis. Is she coming back for another season of this show? How will that work, given that people grow and age?
Ridiculous Alien Spider, or Generationally Terrifying Clown?
Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO
As I said, the Deadlights are excellent. The concept of the kids being trapped in the auditorium with Pennywise is great. All the moments when we’re trapped in ITs mind as it gets increasingly furious about how people are treating IT is hilarious. And the transformations as it chases the children are fun.
Where I think I wanted more was in ITs confrontation with the General. After all the horror that man caused, I wanted IT to linger over eating him, and I wanted the camera to linger with IT.
And, again, the threat of IT is always scarier than seeing IT. Spending so much time one the ice with IT as the rest of the plot roiled around kind of undercut the fear for me.[end-mark]
The post <em>IT: Welcome to Derry</em>’s Season Finale Is Chaotic, But Mostly Satisfying appeared first on Reactor.
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