The One Decision That Sealed General Shaw’s Fate in IT: Welcome to Derry

Spoiler alert: major spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1, including the finale and post-credits scene.

IT: Welcome to Derry spends its first season making a pretty blunt point: the town’s nightmares aren’t just Pennywise doing Pennywise things. They’re also what happens when the people in charge choose denial, control, and violence over the truth. The finale drives that home by putting General Shaw front and center — and then showing how catastrophically wrong a man with a badge and a plan can be.

General Shaw’s big swing, bigger faceplant

Shaw spends the season treating Derry’s disappearances, unrest, and paranoia like problems to manage, not clues to something older and uglier rotting the town from the inside. He wants order. He wants control. And he thinks he can bend whatever is stalking Derry to his will.

So he makes the call: destroy an ancient stone pillar tied to Pennywise’s power. In his mind, that shuts the whole thing down. In reality, it does the exact opposite. Taking out the pillar frees Pennywise. Shaw’s hardline response — the crackdowns, the fear tactics — doesn’t starve the monster. It feeds it.

The payoff is brutal. Pennywise takes the shape of the thing that scared Shaw as a kid, thanks him for unleashing what he can really do, and then bites his head clean off. That’s the finale’s thesis in one nasty punchline: you can’t manage an ancient evil like a public nuisance. You just end up serving it.

Ingrid’s endgame: alive, but not really okay

Ingrid quietly has the season’s saddest arc. She’s one of the only people who actually sees the pattern everyone else pretends isn’t there, which puts her directly at odds with Shaw’s whole worldview. By the end, she learns a truth that wrecks her: Pennywise is not her father. The impact of that revelation exposes her to the Deadlights, and she slips into a trance — alive, but basically locked inside herself.

In the post-credits scene, she’s at Juniper Hill Asylum, mumbling about wolves and how they ate her father. After years spent unwittingly feeding Pennywise, she’s now strapped down and fading into the walls of Derry’s most infamous institution.

Then the show jumps to October 1988. An older Ingrid hears screaming down the hall. She finds Elfrida Marsh hanging from the ceiling. In the corner: a middle-aged man and a little girl we recognize as young Beverly. Mrs. Kersh leans in to comfort Beverly and says:

"nobody really dies in Derry"

Beverly looks up. Ingrid answers with a crooked, unsettling smile. It’s a chilling beat the show leaves deliberately unresolved. Ingrid survives, technically. But like so many in Derry, the price of survival looks like silence, dismissal, or a mind that doesn’t come back.

So, about Season 2

There’s no official renewal yet for IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2, but the door is wide open. The prequel was built to span different eras, and Season 1 ends with plenty of threads dangling — including the glaring fact that Pennywise is very much not defeated, and the machinery that shields it is still intact.

On the plan front, director Andy Muschietti told Variety they envision a three-season arc. He and Barbara Muschietti also went on the Argentine YouTube channel Radio TU and dropped a neat behind-the-scenes wrinkle: the story moves backward in time. Season 1 lived in 1962. If they get the green light, here’s how they’ve mapped it out:

• Season 2: 1935
• Season 3: 1908

Point being, the show isn’t boxed into repeating itself. It’s structured to dig deeper into Derry’s history, not just rinse and repeat clown attacks.

The takeaway

Season 1’s finale argues that Derry’s real engine is fear — not just the fear Pennywise feeds on, but the fear that pushes people in power to choose control over honesty. It’s messy, it’s mean, and it sets up a lot of runway if HBO decides to keep going.

IT: Welcome to Derry is now streaming on HBO.