IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 Ending Explained: Rich Santos' Return Changes Everything for Pennywise

Spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8 ahead. The finale doesn’t just end the season; it redraws the rules. The show goes full cosmic-horror-meets-military-thriller, then quietly drops a time-bending idea that makes Pennywise scarier than ever: he isn’t stuck in our timeline. He is all of it, all at once.

Derry turns into a foggy war zone

We pick up right after General Shaw blew one of the pillars in Episode 7. Derry is swallowed by a thick, unnatural fog. At school, Pennywise shows up wearing the principal’s face, calls the kids into the auditorium, and hits them with the Deadlights. The town’s teens — Will Hanlon included — shuffle out like sleepwalkers, cross a frozen river, and head for an ancient tree.

That tree isn’t set dressing. It’s the last boundary of Pennywise’s cage. If he gets past it, IT stops being a Derry problem.

The rescue plan: a dagger, a myth, and a deadline

Lilly, Ronnie, and Marge bolt after the kids. Elsewhere, a rattled Leroy gets a taunting call from Pennywise about his son and runs to Dick Hallorann for help. Dick brings in Rose and Taniel, who lay out the plan: a magical dagger — essentially a stand-in for the missing pillar — has to be buried beneath that tree to rebuild the cage.

Pennywise plays with the future, and time stops — literally

Before the adults reach the lake, the three girls confront Pennywise. He zeroes in on Marge and drops a bomb: she’s destined to become Richie Tozier’s mother. He isn’t just feeding; he’s trying to bend the future.

Right as things are about to go very bad, Dick Hallorann reaches into Pennywise’s head from the van and freezes him long enough to yank Marge out of danger. Will snaps free of the Deadlights, and the teens are hustled toward safety.

The human villains show up wearing uniforms

The U.S. Air Force rolls in and blocks the dagger run. Taniel — the rightful bearer of the dagger — is shot dead before he can get to the tree. The adults are taken hostage. The military’s plan is as ugly as it sounds: they’re prepared to unleash IT if it gives them control.

Leroy slips the dagger to Will and tells him that fear isn’t weakness, it just means the fight matters. Will ducks into the fog with the girls. The blade starts to work on him, the same way it previously warped Lilly.

General Shaw makes the dumbest choice imaginable

Shaw tries to befriend Pennywise like he’s training a tiger. Pennywise remembers Shaw from childhood and kills him on the spot. Message received.

Race to the tree, myth vs. monster

Leroy buys seconds with gunfire. The kids reach the tree, but the dagger is heavier than it looks — it takes more than four terrified kids to set it. Dick senses something impossible: Rich Santos arrives, hand-in-hand with the Indigenous warrior from the Galloo myth. Yes, it’s wild. Yes, it works.

Rich sprints across the ice in slow motion, flips Pennywise the bird, and Pennywise sprouts wings to dive-bomb the kids. Rich makes it. Together, they slam the dagger into the ground.

Pennywise ripples through multiple monstrous forms, then implodes into a tiny bouncing beam of light. He isn’t destroyed — just displaced. Afterward, the kids swear they felt extra hands helping push. It wasn’t random. It was Rich, reaching in from beyond.

• Where we are: Derry, Maine, 1962. Eight-episode Season 1, premiered October 26, 2025, rolled out weekly on HBO and HBO Max. Prequel to the 2017 and 2019 IT films, and stacked with Stephen King nods. Themes: fear, childhood trauma, racial tension, and supernatural horror. IMDb sits at 7.8/10 so far.

The time twist that reframes everything

Back at the standpipe, Marge tells Lilly what Pennywise showed her. He doesn’t experience time like we do. For him, past, present, and future are one map. He even describes his own death as his birth — meaning defeats are just coordinates on a circle, not endpoints. Marge wonders how far he can reach: could he go back and target people before they were even born — parents, grandparents? Lilly, calm and steady, accepts the possibility and keeps moving forward.

27 years later: Mrs. Kersh welcomes Beverly

The finale jumps ahead at Juniper Hill. Ingrid Kersh, older now and quietly painting, hears crying in the corridor. She finds a woman who has died by suicide and, on the floor, a young Beverly Marsh sobbing.

"No one ever really dies in Derry."

That line reframes the Mrs. Kersh scare from IT: Chapter Two (adult Beverly was played by Jessica Chastain). Welcome to Derry makes it part of a larger loop that had Beverly caught in it long before adulthood.

So what did the finale actually tell us?

Pennywise can lose a round and still be waiting ahead of you in time. He is an echo machine for trauma — always there, always looping back. The show even plants future seeds. Pennywise naming Marge as Richie Tozier’s future mom ties this prequel directly to the Losers’ Club (Finn Wolfhard played Richie in the films). And with co-creator Andy Muschietti teasing a three-season plan, don’t be surprised if the series keeps time-hopping backward into earlier Derry cycles we’ve only heard whispered about.

Final thought

The dagger is in the dirt. Derry can breathe — for now. But the thing about something that lives in all times at once? It never really leaves.

IT: Welcome to Derry is streaming in the US on HBO Max.