We’ve got one episode left to go in the freshman season of IT: Welcome to Derry, and the HBO series just dropped one hell of a twist in the final moments of this week’s episode, “The Black Spot.” Only — and spoilers past this point — it’s bizarrely a twist right out of the classic comic book series Watchmen.
To give a brief bit of recap here, the bulk of the first half of the episode dealt with the burning of the hangout of the title, The Black Spot. Caused by local town racists, this was nonetheless the Augury, a massively violent event that marks the end of IT’s (Bill Skårsgard) two year cycle, where it finally feeds enough to go to sleep for 27 years, before it emerges to terrorize Derry once again. In this case, we know that IT will emerge in 1988 to eat poor Georgie Denbrough, kicking off the events of the first movie, appropriately titled IT.
…Except the US military has other plans. We’ve been told since the premiere of the series that the goal the military had, led by General Francis Shaw (James Remar), was to weaponize Pennywise (Skårsgard) in order to win the Cold War against Russia. What Shaw told Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) is that they would use the 13 pillars made of the comet that brought IT to Earth, and kept IT inside the borders of Derry, to decrease the radius of the prison until they could trap IT.
Turns out that’s not what they’re doing at all, as Hanlon rudely discovers after the military digs up one of the pillars. Instead of moving it “three clicks” closer to the center of Derry, the soldiers take it to their base where they are planning on melting it down — essentially leaving the cage door open for the creature known as IT/Pennywise. Hanlon pulls a gun on his fellow soldiers, with Shaw deescalating the situation by telling Hanlon he’ll explain everything.
Shaw’s actual plan? To release Pennywise into the United States, because he believes that you can fight fear with a common enemy. He points to how Derry is calm after the previous night’s violence, and thinks that sacrificing children every once in a while is worth the cost of peace in the United States. It also becomes abundantly clear that Shaw’s views are extremely regressive as he calls out race riots and the women’s movement as two big problems with the country.
“You want to make America Derry?” asks Hanlon skeptically, and if you missed the “Make America Great Again” allusion going on here, perhaps it was all too subtle for you, but there it is. While this takes place in 1962, it’s pretty clear that the show is paralleling the paranoia of the ’60s with the intense push against societal change going on in 2020s.
Of course, Shaw is tricking Hanlon, he got him away from the pillar in order to melt it down, which is what he does. And Pennywise, all set to sleep for 27 years inside his pile of body parts and pool of blood wakes up, and heads straight for Leroy’s son, Will (Blake Cameron James). Will likely should survive this attack — after all, he’s the father of Mike Hanlon, part of the Losers Club which takes down Pennywise twice in the future — unlike poor Rich Santos (Arian S. Cartaya). But it certainly won’t make Leroy buy into Shaw’s plan any further once he finds out America’s #1 sewer clown used his new-found freedom to try and eat Leroy’s son.
The weirder part about this, though, is with some variation: this is Ozymandias’ plan in Watchmen. In the comic (and movie, and animated movie, and most importantly to this article HBO TV series), Ozymandias decides what the world needs is a common enemy. In fact, he very specifically is looking to deescalate the Cold War tensions between the United States and Russia, which have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. So he creates what looks like a giant alien squid and releases it in Times Square, killing millions, in order to rally the world against the alien threat.
As we saw in HBO’s excellent Watchmen sequel series, it didn’t work, and those same divisions drove us even further apart than before, militarizing the country’s police force. But more to the point, it’s bizarre to use the same logic for a twist on the already wild premise of trying to weaponize Pennywise, when Watchmen‘s own twist is pretty famous. In fact, as both DC Comics — which published Watchmen — and HBO are owned by Warner Bros. Discovery (hey, they even read DC Comics in earlier episodes of Welcome to Derry) it’s not like they’re blissfully unaware of it’s existence.
You know who also could have flagged this for them? Jovan Adepo, who played the Emmy nominated role of Hooded Justice in HBO’s Watchmen series. Another person? Cord Jefferson, who was a writer and story editor on Watchmen and writer and consulting producer on Welcome to Derry. It’s possible this could be a purposeful tribute, but it’s also an unnecessary extra twist that seems like a ripoff… Even though it does help underline what the show has been working towards thematically, something this first season has often struggled with.
There’s an extra added bizarre bit here in that we know Pennywise doesn’t leave Derry, based on the events of the movies. Perhaps the weapon young Lilly (Clara Stack) is holding will replace the pillar melted by the army, and it will keep IT inside the town line. Or perhaps, as some fans have speculated, the pillars don’t actually keep Pennywise inside at all, it’s merely the belief in them working that makes them powerful. But either way, this whole pillar nonsense, in my opinion, defeats one of the more powerful aspects of IT…. Pennywise stays in Derry because he likes it. He likes driving the adults to violence, and preying on the fear of children. He enjoys it. There’s nothing keeping from leaving Derry, because all the delicious food he wants is right there. That’s what Stephen King baked in from the novel… Not that Derry was anything special, but that this fear and violence could break out in any town at any time. It’s universal, not unlike an alien squid.
And to get away from this digression, I’m just not sure what layering a Watchmen twist on the military storyline adds to the whole thing, other than defeating one of the biggest swings the series has put out there, i.e. the military trying to capture IT. Whether it’s a swing and a miss I’ll leave up to you. But as for for this particularly twist? They did it 35 minutes ago.
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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