News It: Welcome to Derry That Matty Clements Twist in Welcome to Derry Episode 5 Almost Happened in It: Chapter Two Co-showrunner Jason Fuchs spills the beans By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on November 24, 2025 Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Warning! This post contains spoilers for the fifth episode of IT: Welcome to Derry, “29 Neibolt Street.” The latest episode of HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry held more than a few surprises. We see Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt) apparently still alive at the beginning of the episode, something surprising, given the cold open of the series saw him in that car with a far-from-friendly family.   It turns out, however, that Matty is truly dead, and after leading the kids into the sewers to try to rescue another presumed-dead kid, Phil (Jack Molloy Legault) morphs into Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), revealing that Matty in this episode was IT all along. In an interview with Decider, co-showrunner Jason Fuchs revealed that the twist of Matty being IT the whole time was an idea initially hatched for the film, It: Chapter Two. “There was a version of that script where Mike Hanlon—who has obviously been guiding our adult Losers the entire time—eventually takes them down into the sewers, takes them down into IT’s sanctuary, where they find Mike Hanlon’s body,” Fuchs said. “And you realize that the Mike Hanlon we were with the whole journey of It: Chapter Two was a manifestation of IT.” Fuchs, along with Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, ultimately decided not to use that premise for the film, as it veered too far away from Stephen King’s novel. The series, however, gave them more leeway, and the Matty/Pennywise twist worked well at this point in the season. “We decided that, in this season, Pennywise should be a little bit like the shark in Jaws,” Barbara told Entertainment Weekly about Pennywise’s relatively late reveal on the show. “You really want to be strategic. In both movies, it was very important for us to keep the mystery and the fear for this character alive. We find that familiarity is the enemy of that. So it was important for us to delay the pleasure, or the terror, as much as we could.” We’ll get to see what Pennywise gets up to in the three remaining episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry, which release on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max. [end-mark] The post That Matty Clements Twist in <i>Welcome to Derry</i> Episode 5 Almost Happened in <i>It: Chapter Two</i> appeared first on Reactor.