It: Welcome to Derry Seasons 2 and 3 Could Backfire for One Crucial Reason

I wanted to go back to Derry. Not to live there, obviously, but you know what I mean. Corrupt town, missing kids, cosmic clown lurking in the sewers... it still feels like a familiar horror hangout. 'It: Welcome to Derry' gave me that, even if some episodes wobbled and yes, I could have done without the demon bat-baby early on. The show took big swings, killed multiple kids right out of the gate, and didn’t declaw the terror. But now that the season’s wrapped and the door is wide open for Seasons 2 and 3, I’m worried the series is about to drown itself in lore.

Season 1: The good, the shaky, and the stuff that already complicates the movies

As a season, it was uneven but ambitious. The character work landed, the CGI-heavy nightmare imagery had bite, and I loved the way it grappled with uglier strands baked into Derry: racism, abuse, and how parents’ sins seep into their kids’ lives. Chris Chalk’s Dick Hallorann was a great addition. The standout for me, though, was Matilda Lawler’s Marge Truman. She’s compelling as a kid who does not resemble the Ms. Tozier we’re supposed to meet later... and I genuinely want to see how she becomes that person.

What threw me was how hard the finale tied itself into the Muschiettis’ films. The show isn’t interested in being a self-contained riff like HBO’s 'Watchmen.' It clearly wants to stitch itself to the movies. That decision might be a problem as things expand, because some of what the show introduces doesn’t line up with what the films eventually do (or don’t) address.

Where Seasons 2 and 3 are headed

The finale lays out the plan. Pennywise basically tells us how it experiences time: not like we do. It’s an ancient, cosmic thing that lives non-linearly, as if the past, present, and future are stacked. It knows who kills it down the line and suggests a workaround: go earlier, target the ancestors, change the board.

So Season 2 jumps back to 1935. A potential third season would hop to 1908. That direction didn’t come out of nowhere; Andy and Barbara Muschietti pitched this approach to Stephen King, and it looks like it will define the rest of their run with the franchise.

Why more seasons might break the spell

• Lore creep: King’s It is already wobbly if you stare too hard at the metaphysics. Adding more rules and relics risks turning the sewer water to mud. The show has already introduced the pillars, artifacts supposedly built from the thing’s crashed-space-debris arrival and used to bind It to Derry. Those pillars are a huge deal on the show... and not a factor in the films’ final showdown. That’s not a nitpick; it’s a structural contradiction.
• Retcon roulette: The series is based on the Muschiettis’ movies, not the book, but it still omits film elements and adds show-only pieces that the films never reference. The more seasons we get, the more that gap widens.
• Power scaling weirdness: If Dick Hallorann can freeze an eldritch clown with the help of a certain herb, where does that power go later? Does It forget its bag of tricks? Get weaker? Or do future characters just... not use tools we already know exist?
• Prequel stakes problem: If Pennywise spends seasons hunting the bloodlines of the Losers’ Club, we already know how that ends. We’ve seen who kills It and when. That can turn into Losers’ Club whack-a-mole: a lot of near-misses with no real chance to change fate.
• Time-loop headaches: Fans are already chewing on whether Marge hearing about her future son, Richie, is the thing that causes her to have and name Richie. That’s a classic bootstrap paradox. This stuff can be fun in small doses but it gets messy fast.
• Historical disaster overload: I’m fascinated by the Bradley Gang massacre and the Kitchener Ironworks explosion (the Easter egg hunt that ends in mass child death is gnarly), but stack too many event chapters and the human-scale horror starts to feel like a tour of attractions.
• The turtle and beyond: King’s universe encourages expansion, but not everything belongs onscreen. I do not need Maturin the Turtle spelled out, and I definitely don’t need a deep dive into the Todash realm. Keep some mystery.

The core fear

I love this story most when it stays intimate: a monster that reflects a town’s rot, and a tight circle of kids facing it because no one else will. The first season, for all its bumps, still tapped into that. But you can explain a mythos to death. If Seasons 2 and 3 keep piling on new mechanics, artifacts, and timelines, every earlier beat risks feeling smaller, softer, or inconsistent.

So will I watch more? Of course. Am I nervous? Absolutely.

HBO looks likely to lock in a second season, with a third already being eyed. The creative team has more story to tell, more characters to add, and clearly more lore to unpack. I just hope they don’t chase scale at the expense of the story’s heartbeat.

If they can make 1935 sing and 1908 feel essential, I’m in. If not, we might end up with a cosmic clown who is a lot less scary because we know way too much about how the sausage gets made.