The Time-Bending Reason Pennywise Is Obsessed With Will Hanlon In IT: Welcome To Derry

This article contains spoilers for "It: Welcome to Derry."

"It: Welcome to Derry" expands upon the lore of Andy Muschietti's "It" universe, going back in time to show us how past residents of the titular Maine town handled It's ascendence. One of the main ties between the show and Muschietti's movies — 2017's "It" and 2019's "It: Chapter Two" — is Blake Cameron James' Will Hanlon, who later becomes the father of Mike Hanlon, played by Chosen Jacobs in the first movie and Isaiah Mustafa in "Chapter Two." Pennywise has it out for Will, and it's because It experiences time non-linearly and knows what his son will do in the future.

Pennywise has become the quintessential scary clown, but this unhinged harlequin is not the true representation of the entity lurking behind those glowing eyes. That horrific being is actually an ancient evil that crash-landed on Earth around 1 million BCE. In Stephen King's original 1986 novel "It," we learn that the entity's true form is the Deadlights, which represent as close an approximation of the real evil force as the human mind can comprehend. Still, anybody who gazes upon these otherworldly rays immediately goes insane, as we saw in episode 7 of "It: Welcome to Derry" and the movies to which the show acts as a prequel.

But the Deadlights are not a representation of anything physical, rather a glimpse into a realm human beings simply can't comprehend, wherein the true entity known as It resides. In this basic form, It experiences time in a completely different way than those in the physical realm, which is to say that it can see time as one continuum rather than as a linear progression of events. This is why Will becomes a fixation for Pennywise in "Welcome to Derry."

At the end of "It: Welcome to Derry," episode 7 (which beat the movies with a major character death), Pennywise appears to Will Hanlon before bathing him in Deadlight rays. Of course, anyone familiar with the book, "It," or "It: Chapter Two," will know Will makes it out alive as he becomes the father of Mike Hanlon. Mike is one of the members of the Loser's Club, the group of kids who eventually take the fight to Pennywise and destroy the entity for good in both the book and "Chapter Two." In the latter, Mike actually removes the clown's heart before the group collectively crushes it. As such, "Welcome to Derry" shows Pennywise attacking Will in order to try to prevent that from happening.

Show co-creator Andy Muschietti spoke to Deadline's Crew Call about Pennywise's vendetta against Will. "If you see in the big arc of the movies and this show, you will notice that there's kind of a central figure in the Losers of 1989, which is Mike Hanlon," he explained. "That later on pays off when, in 'It Two,' we realize that Mike is the only one of the Losers who stayed in town and that actually did something to fight. And he's the one summoning the Losers to their reluctance and basically harnessing back against the monster to kill it." Since the true form of It can essentially see the future, he therefore targets Will to prevent Mike's future actions. "Given that It is an entity that doesn't experience time in a linear way like humans do," continued Muschietti, "It's only appropriate that he would go back and attack the kids, basically in other times before they do what they do."

Much of what Andy Muschietti says about It targeting Will Hanlon makes sense, but since we know the young Derry resident makes it out alive, there's also the big question of why Pennywise used the Deadlights on Will rather than simply killing him outright. That would have made certain that Will could never recover from his brush with the Deadlights and would have prevented him from ever fathering Mike Hanlon. What's more, as with all time travel stories, there are plenty of paradoxes raised by It's ability to comprehend time as a whole rather than as a linear progression. If it knows that Will eventually fathers Mike, and that Mike will be the instigator of the actions that eventually lead to It's demise, then wouldn't it also be able to see that its use of the Deadlights in 1962 isn't going to prevent that?

All of this makes Muschietti's "It" universe about as confusing as the convoluted "Terminator" timeline. That's significant for a show that's already an impressively complex extension of the two movies and the Stephen King-verse as a whole. Muschietti and his co-creators, Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, have said that "Welcome to Derry" will not only expand "It" lore but ultimately explore the macroverse, making it essential viewing for King fans. That also makes it an incredibly ambitious project, especially since the co-creators planned this series as a trilogy that will go back in 27-year increments.

Now, with the writers exploring It's eternal view of time, things are set to get even more complicated. Thankfully, "Welcome to Derry" has already proved that exploring this stuff can actually make for a compelling show that doesn't feel like a slog through the arcane minutiae of the King-verse.