One of the bigger revelations in last week’s episode of IT: Welcome to Derry was the reveal that Madeleine Stowe is playing Ingrid Kersh, aka the real version of the old woman Pennywise (Bill Skårsgard) masqueraded as in IT: Chapter Two. Well, this week’s sixth episode, titled “In the Name of the Father,” went even further into the relationship between Ingrid and Pennywise with an extended sequence that is almost definitely a preview of what we’ll see in IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2.
Spoilers past this point, but a good chunk of the episode is presented (mostly) in black and white, and set in 1935. This is significant because the second season of the series is planned on being set during — you guessed it — 1935. While not officially announced as picked up by HBO, a writers’ room opened for the second season back in June of this year, with production planned for next year. We only have ratings info for the first episode, but that was strong; and as long as they didn’t fall off a cliff after that, IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2 is all but guaranteed.
The reason for the jump back to 1935 is TBD — the producers have teased there’s a twist coming in the Season 1 finale that will explain the backwards storytelling — but we’ve already gotten a big hint as to at least part of what will happen in Season 2, thanks to this week’s episode. Specifically, that during the 1935 cycle of the creature known as IT/Pennywise, Ingrid finally encounters her “father” again. Or rather, it’s IT pretending to be her father, Bob Gray.
There’s a lot to unpack and explain there, but as simply as possible it seems likely that there was a real Bob Gray in 1908 who was the real Pennywise the Dancing Clown. He had a daughter named Ingrid, who dressed up as a clown named Periwinkle and performed with him. We don’t know the exact details of that yet (they’ll be coming in a potential Season 3 of the series), but we do know something happened to Bob and he disappeared, likely something related to IT taking the form of Pennywise.
Cut to 1935 and we discover that Ingrid has been working as a nurse at Juniper Hill, as she still is during the 1962 cycle we’ve been watching over the course of IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1. Here a young girl at the asylum has been told to meet a clown down in the boiler room, and Ingrid thinks this may be her father, Bob Gray.
Later in the episode, Ingrid relates all this to Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) in 1962, explaining that this was clearly her father come back to her, and we see how she essentially let Pennywise snack on the little girl, with the creature slowly realizing that he can make Ingrid think he’s Bob Gray, and not a near-immortal alien supernatural creature that crashed into Derry billions of years ago and emerges every 27 years to eat children. I also do this with my kids all the time, by the way.
Anywho, in the “present” of Season 1, we get to also find out that the clown who was lurking outside Will Hanlon’s (Blake Cameron James) window in an earlier episode, and was photographed in the cemetery during the controversial ghost scene a few episodes back was not Pennywise… It was Ingrid, dressed as Periwinkle. She believes this is how to get her beloved father’s attention, but she’s clearly very much mistaken.
What’s most interesting about this is how much of this sequence we see in the episode, given all (potentially) eight episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2 will be set in 1935. We’ll likely see a whole lot more of Pennywise’s “daughter” in the season, as well as another major event, the ambush of The Bradley Gang. And certainly based on what we saw this week, it seems possible the “twist” at the end of the season is that this show is going to work backwards towards explaining why IT prefers the form of Pennywise, potentially based on the real Bob Gray. In a Season 2, we would likely find out more about the relationship between Pennywise (the IT version) and Periwinkle, aka Ingrid Kersh, aka Pennywise’s “daughter.” And in a Season 3 we would get to see what happened that caused IT to become Pennywise for good, leaving Periwinkle behind.
There’s one last wrinkle here, which is that Ingrid dresses as Periwinkle as the episode is ending, timed out to a major event about to happen in the next episode of Welcome to Derry: the burning of The Black Spot. The hangout area for military men of color and their friends is currently the hideout for Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), who has been having an affair for Ingrid. And in Stephen King’s novel — and as seen in visions throughout this season — The Black Spot burns down, thanks in part to the influence of Pennywise. But is it possible the clown who was at the fire in The Black Spot is Periwinkle, not Pennywise at all? We’ll just have to stay tuned next week. And in the meantime, cross our fingers that HBO picks up Welcome to Derry for Season 2, so we can see a whole lot more of what went down in 1935.
IT: Welcome To Derry Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of IT: Welcome To Derry premiere on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max at 9pm ET.
Here’s the full list of episodes in IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1 with premiere dates:
- Sunday, October 26, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 1
- Sunday, November 2, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 2
- Sunday, November 9, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 3
- Sunday, November 16, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 4
- Sunday, November 23, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 5
- Sunday, November 30, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 6
- Sunday, December 7, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 7
- Sunday, December 14, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch IT: Welcome To Derry
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