Why It: Welcome to Derry’s Finale Is the Avengers: Endgame of Season 1 — and the Hopeful Moment That Tells Evil to Get Lost

Spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry episode 8 ahead. The season 1 finale goes big, goes emotional, and, per the guy who wrote it, probably closes the book on this version of the Losers. If you cried earlier this season, get tissues. You are not done.

So... this is goodbye

Co-showrunner Jason Fuchs, who also wrote the finale, told me the goal was simple but brutal: finish what these characters started and then let them go.

"The important thing we wanted to resolve was the journey of this core group of characters - we are not planning on coming back to these characters. This is, in my mind, the end of Lilly's story, the end of Ronnie's story, the end of this chapter of Dick Halloran's story before he goes on to the Overlook."

That meant pulling everyone out of their little corners and smashing them together for one last run. Fuchs even compared it to an Endgame-style pileup of faces you have not seen share scenes before, while still leaving a few doors cracked for future mysteries... which, in Welcome to Derry logic, usually means the past.

The ice-lake war

The finale stages the entire showdown on a frozen lake, with both generations finally teaming up. After Pennywise calls Leroy Hanlon, Leroy barrels into rescue mode, tracks down a very reluctant Dick Hallorann, and drags him to Rose's place, where Charlotte is understandably wrecked. Rose doses Dick with the Maturin root, the same spiritual hallucinogenic Mike Hanlon uses before the Ritual of Chud in It: Chapter Two. It hushes the noise in Dick's head long enough for him to locate Lilly, Marge, and Ronnie. Everyone piles into Taniel's van and heads for the ice.

From there it is chaos in the fog. After fending off the U.S. Air Force, yes really, Rose and Charlotte take point with military-grade guns. Leroy and Hank unload on Pennywise when they get the chance. Meanwhile, Lilly, Ronnie, Marge, and a rescued Will sprint to plant the cosmic dagger in its rightful spot and put It back down for 27 years. Easier said than done.

A tag that rewires the movies

Stick around for the episode 8 tag, because the show swings for a full-circle connection to both It movies. Ingrid Kersh, who It blasted with the Deadlights, does not die. She gets shipped to Juniper Hill instead. Cut to roughly 27 years later: Ingrid is now elderly, hears a commotion in a hospital hallway, and finds a woman hanging from the ceiling while two people sob on the floor. One of them is Beverly Marsh, played by Sophia Lillis. The woman who died is Bev's mother. Ingrid intones, creepily: nobody really dies in Derry.

Fuchs says that scene was a last-minute reshoot, deliberately added as another bridge to the films beyond the Rich Tozier missing-kid poster that popped up earlier. The effect is nasty and smart: it reframes Bev's Mrs. Kersh encounter in It: Chapter Two. That old woman is It, sure, but now we know Bev met Ingrid decades earlier at the exact moment her mother died. It impersonates Ingrid to jab at a buried trauma Bev has tried to forget. And in a bit of deliciously weird lore, Ingrid is the daughter of Bob Gray, the human circus performer It killed before wearing his face. Yes, that is a thing.

Marge Truman, meet the Toziers

The other payoff fans have been whispering about lands right on the ice. Pennywise greets Marge by a name she has not used yet: Tozier. He shows her Richie Tozier's missing poster from It: Chapter One and tells her that her son and his friends will eventually kill him. He tries to fix that future by killing her on the spot, but the dagger stuns him long enough for her to survive.

Fuchs says the team set this up from the jump as a quiet link to the films: make one of our new kids a future Loser's parent without tipping it with a last name. The pieces clicked into place after episode 7, when Rich Santos died in the Black Spot Fire. Rich had been in love with Marge since he first saw her. He saves her by sealing her in an air-tight container to keep out smoke, then dies of smoke inhalation himself. She later names her son Richie in his honor. It is a simple choice that wrecks you: the goodbye kiss on the lid, the eyes-open death, the whole thing. Fans even cut side-by-sides of Marge's mannerisms with Richie Tozier's, which, yeah, tracks with the way Fuchs and company built Ricardo Santos: funny, sharp, great at impressions, glasses and all.

The miracle on ice

Just when it looks like the kids will not be able to drive that dagger home, Dick spots something way out beyond the fog: the Indigenous warrior from the Galloo myth reappears, this time holding a young boy's hand. It is Rich. He lets go and sprints across the ice, flips off Pennywise, and grabs the dagger alongside his friends. The extra strength they need? It is him. The blade bites into the earth, and Pennywise starts to rot.

Inside the show's own rules, this is a big swing. We have known Dick can see the dead. We have also known the dead cannot touch him or the world, and when he touches them they fixate on him in a way that makes life impossible. Physical impact from the dead is new. Dick literally calls it "a motherfucking miracle" because no one knew it was on the table. The show does not dive into para-physics. It goes for theme: love is as potent as any supernatural horror in Derry. Fuchs even laughs about watching actor Arian tear across the fake ice flipping It the bird. Sometimes you do just tell evil to, well, go away.

Where Dick heads next (and why it is not the Overlook yet)

If you assumed the next stop was Colorado, pump the brakes. At the end of the finale, Dick tells Leroy he is taking a chef job at a resort in London and asks, with tragic optimism, "How much trouble can a hotel be?" King diehards have been mapping his timeline against The Shining for months now. The Kubrick film has him at 70 at the Overlook. The novel pegs him at 59. Fuchs puts the Welcome to Derry version at about 43, which means he has some living to do before meeting the Torrances.

There is also a neat book-world breadcrumb here: in Tabitha King's novel Pearl, which plays nice with the broader Kingverse, Dick is head chef at a Key West resort, and that Key West gig is his last stop before the Overlook for winter. Fuchs says he actually wrote the farewell three different ways - Colorado, Key West, London - and they chose London because the man we leave in episode 8 is not yet the man from The Shining. There are more adventures and more demons between here and there. As for whether his fate lines up with Kubrick or King's version, Fuchs has a very specific answer in his head and is choosing not to share it. Sometimes the scariest move is letting the unknown stay unknown.

Where this leaves Welcome to Derry

Season 1 ties off Lilly and Ronnie, gives Dick a believable runway to The Shining, and threads a few elegant needles back to both It films. If this really is the last we see of these kids, it is the kind of goodbye that feels earned.

It: Welcome to Derry season 1 is now streaming in full on Max.