It: Welcome to Derry’s Late-Game Twist Rewrites It: Chapter Two

File this under smart, sneaky retcons: the IT prequel show just slipped in a late addition that reframes one of It: Chapter Two's nastiest moments. And it happened because of a reshoot nobody planned for.

The last-minute Beverly cameo

Co-showrunner Jason Fuchs says the Season 1 finale of 'IT: Welcome to Derry' got a brand-new scene at the buzzer: a flash-forward to 1988 where a young Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis) sits in a hospital room after her mother dies by suicide. An elderly woman, Ingrid Kersh, visits and drops the line: 'No one ever really dies in Derry.'

If that name is pinging your nerves, it should. In Chapter Two, Pennywise hunts adult Beverly while wearing the skin of Mrs. Kersh. This scene tells us Beverly actually met a real Mrs. Kersh on the worst day of her childhood. It is a very mean clown.

Fuchs told GamesRadar+ the idea came late-late in the process during reshoots (which, yes, are standard on big shows), purely to build one more concrete bridge to the films after smaller nods like the Richie Tozier missing poster.

'That was a very, very last-minute decision... We were at the tail end of everything. We had talked about how to have one more piece of architecture linking us to the films... something that could build a bridge and take you to the doorstep of It: Chapter One.'

Why it changes Chapter Two

Before this reveal, the Mrs. Kersh sequence in Chapter Two read as Pennywise poking Beverly's terror tied to her abusive father. Now it lands as something sharper: It is clawing at a sealed memory of the exact day her mother died, and it is doing it with the face of the stranger who approached her in that moment. Fuchs said as much: the cameo resets the context so the attack hits a very specific, buried trauma Beverly might not even consciously remember. That is colder, and much more personal.

Pennywise and time, according to the creators

Andy and Barbara Muschietti aren't done with the clown, and they are not playing by straight-line rules. The finale nods hard at Pennywise existing outside normal time. Andy told Variety that this was baked in from pitch one:

'Our first pitch to Stephen King was to tell the story backwards. I can't say too much about the logic behind it, but it has to do with how Pennywise experiences time in a non-linear way. We sort of hinted at it at the end of the season.'

They are planning to jump even further back next, to 1935 — 27 years before Season 1 — to tackle the Bradley Gang massacre from the novel. That 27-year cycle keeps ticking, but if time is wobbly for It, the show can bend the usual prequel rules.

So what are the stakes if we know It survives?

Fuchs has been blunt about the prequel problem: the monster lives. The solution is to mess with the timeline and plant mysteries that pay off across decades. That Richie poster was a hint that past, present, and future are tangled on purpose. If Pennywise is unmoored from time, the usual 'prequels can't change anything' limitation might not apply here — at least not in the way you expect.

Bottom line

One late scene turns a good scare in Chapter Two into a viciously targeted one, and it doubles as a mission statement for the show: connections that actually matter, not just easter eggs. If the time-hopping plan sticks, Pennywise could be more unpredictable — and more dangerous — than ever.

• Show: IT: Welcome to Derry (prequel to the films)
• Creators: Jason Fuchs, Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti
• Based on: 'It' by Stephen King
• Key cast: Bill Skarsgard, Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, James Remar, Stephen Rider, Clara Stack, Amanda Christine, Mikkal Karim-Fidler
• Season 1: 8 episodes
• Scores: Rotten Tomatoes 80%, IMDb 7.9/10
• Where to watch (US): Max

Does this new context change how you read Beverly's arc — and the Losers' win? And what do you want to see when the show jumps to 1935 and the Bradley Gang? Sound off.