While Welcome to Derry’s exploration of Pennywise’s backstory could run into story problems, the prequel to Stephen King’s IT does have an opportunity to fill in one frustrating plot hole from the source movies. Released in 2017, IT was a blockbuster success and a hit with critics to boot. An adaptation of Stephen King’s infamously ambitious, timeline-hopping bestseller of the same name, IT wisely opted to split the novel’s potentially confusing story into two distinct time periods and focus on the young characters for the first movie.

While the movie cut out some of the book’s more shocking content (including one scene that even IT’s darker first draft didn’t go near), for the most part, IT was a remarkably close adaptation of a difficult, densely packed novel. However, IT’s limited runtime meant that the movie didn’t have time to make sense of some backstory, resulting in a few bizarre creative decisions that felt like plot holes on rewatch. Luckily, the upcoming prequel series Welcome to Derry can fill in these gaps.

Related: Stephen King’s Pennywise Prequel Should Avoid It: Chapter 2 Taboo

Welcome to Derry, as the title implies, will explore the titular town before the Losers Club’s initial encounters with Pennywise in the 80s. Although the novel and movie adaptations both imply that Pennywise curses the town, the IT movies, in particular, depict Derry as a wretched hive of scum and villainy with no redeemable characters outside of the Losers Club without ever explaining how the kids avoided becoming as loathsome as their parents, schoolmates, and fellow locals. While Welcome to Derry can’t depict Pennywise and Maturin the Turtle’s cosmic backstory since it is too ambitiously weird to be realized onscreen, the series could explain why these kids managed to avoid the Derry curse, how the curse works, and whether any other Derry locals have been freed from Pennywise’s influence over the decades.

Welcome To Derry Can Explain IT’s Derry Curse

IT Pennywise Derry Stephen King

Welcome to Derry can clarify how the town of Derry became so awful, shedding light on its gradual devolution instead of only depicting cartoonishly nasty, universally horrible locals. Before the Losers Club even learn about Pennywise, the movie adaptation of IT depicts cold, uncaring caregivers, outright abusive parents, two separate cases of violent school bullies, and an old woman who doesn’t intervene when she sees a small child being murdered in the street. While Stephen King is wrong to say Welcome to Derry’s "Pennywise prequel" premise is promising since the novel already gave the monster an origin story far older than the show’s 60s setting, explaining the curse once and for all could give the series a reason to exist.

Since IT’s movie adaptation was mostly focused on the Losers Club themselves and their relationships with each other, the movie rarely dived into how Pennywise worked or how he held his power over Derry. Even the sequel’s rushed Ritual of Chad sequence only explained how to (hopefully) defeat the monster and when he originally arrived in Derry, not how he managed to make Derry’s townspeople his pawns and how the Losers Club avoided this fate. IT’s slasher movie formula meant the movie had no time to address these questions, whereas the prequel show can make up for this. With a longer runtime, Welcome to Derry can finally explain the mysterious curse that Stephen King’s IT left frustratingly ambiguous.

More: Stephen King's Pennywise Prequel Must Avoid It Chapter 2’s Biggest Mistake