Season 2 of Stephen King’s Hit Horror Series Must Finally Tackle the Crucial Detail It Keeps Ignoring

One of Stephen King’s sharpest TV adaptations only flirted with the weirdest corner of his universe; in season 2, the HBO hit needs to stop winking and confront the lore head-on. With icons from Pennywise to Randall Flagg looming, the series can’t keep skirting the cosmic connective tissue that binds King’s monsters.

HBO already played footsie with Stephen King lore in season 1 of IT: Welcome to Derry. Fun. Creepy. But if this show is going to keep leveling up, season 2 has to stop dancing around the big one and actually deal with the cosmic turtle in the room.

Yes, the turtle. And no, I’m not kidding.

King’s world is stuffed with unforgettable monsters — Pennywise, Randall Flagg, the greatest hits — which is why people tend to file him under 'horror first, everything else second.' But the mythology under all that screaming is way weirder and way bigger than killer clowns and walking plague-goblins. Case in point: Maturin, the universe-barfing turtle that sits at the center of It.

Maturin 101 (because this gets strange fast)

• In King’s novel, Maturin is a massive, ancient entity that existed before anything else. Legend goes, it was already old and tired when it, well, threw up the universe. Whole thing. One galactic hurl.
• Maturin barely engages with humans, but it does help the Losers Club — specifically appearing to young Bill Denbrough during 1958’s original Ritual of Chud — pointing them toward how to fight Pennywise.
• Maturin and Pennywise call each other 'brothers ' and absolutely do not send each other holiday cards. Decades later, when the Losers repeat the Ritual, Pennywise delights in saying the turtle died years earlier, supposedly choking on a galaxy. Grim, cosmic slapstick.
• Welcome to Derry is set in 1935, so no, the show can’t literally stage the Losers’ 1958 showdown. But it can nod to the myth, explain why Derry is rotten to the core, and plant the seeds for what Pennywise really is — not just a monster, but a piece of something much bigger and much weirder.

Season 1 already cracked the door open

The show proved it can swing at the weirder stuff and make it land. There was that eerie sequence where Derry’s indigenous elders recount Pennywise’s earliest massacres of white settlers — a historical gut-punch that also hints at something older and hungrier underneath the town. And the finale had Pennywise dropping references to events from the later IT movies long before they should happen in this timeline.

Translation: Pennywise doesn’t experience time like we do. That’s not just a cool flex; it’s the on-ramp to King’s cosmic side. The prequel format buys the show room to breathe, which means it can finally explore the trippier corners the two movies had to skim past.

Can a TV show pull off a benevolent space turtle?

Look, it’s a swing. But it’s not impossible. When King adaptations embrace the hard stuff, you can get something special. Gerald’s Game is the obvious example. And The Long Walk keeps floating around in development for a reason: the so-called 'unadaptable' material is often the most compelling on-screen when someone commits.

Why season 2 needs to go there

If you’re telling Pennywise’s origin story and you never touch the why of Pennywise — the cosmic ecology he comes from, the counterweight he’s been fighting with since before time — you’re leaving the most fascinating part of the myth on the table. Even a smart, suggestive approach would work: clue the audience in that Derry’s rot is connected to forces way above (and below) human comprehension, and that somewhere out there, the clown has a 'brother' who once tried to help.

The short version: season 1 proved Welcome to Derry can handle ambitious, out-there ideas. Season 2 shouldn’t blink. Bring in Maturin — even if it’s just glimpses, symbols, or a whispered name — and let the show own the strange, cosmic heart of King’s story.