‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Stars Explain How Those 1908 Flashbacks Inform Everything About General Shaw and Rose: “Everybody Gets Sucked Back to Derry”

HBO opens with a sweet story of young love.

**Spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 “Now You See It,” now streaming on HBO Max**

We learn that all the way back in 1908, a white boy named Francis met an Indigenous girl named Rose and they became instantly connected. The two would spend their days together in the fields and forests outside Derry, Maine, but there was one area that Rose forbade Francis to visit. That’s because a great evil lay there. An evil that we know as It. Francis went there into that part of the woods anyway and Rose had to rescue him with the help of the same slingshot that would later lead Dick Hallorann (Bill Skarsgård)’s lair.

Yes, we learn in IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 3 that Francis would grow up to be General Shaw (Kimberly Guerrero) runs the Derry antique store. We also learn that when Francis’s family moved away from Derry, he forgot all about It, the town, and Rose. It was only when he was part of a military experiment involving hallucinogenics that it all came rushing back to him, hence the idea for Operation Precept.

When DECIDER spoke with the cast of IT: Welcome to Derry, James Remar and Kimberly Guerrero were emphatic about how much Episode 3’s cold open determined the rest of Francis and Rose’s lives, whether it was entangling them with Pennywise or establishing them as star-crossed soulmates.

“That, I believe has informed the direction of General Francis Shaw’s entire life,” Remar said. “This encounter with this demon and being saved from the demon by Rose as a kid, and then being snatched away from Derry by his dad and then living a life in the military… And everybody gets sucked back to Derry.”

Guerrero shared that experience “was really instrumental in [Rose’s dedication to her role within the circle that protects the world from this creature.”

“I was born to do this. I was called to do this. I’m in a long, long line of ancestral calling that’s passed down from generation to generation and I know that I’m called to that,” Guerrero said. “I want to step into that that role as a warrior and as a leader. And in order to do that, I will have to sacrifice love for myself, romantic love. I’ll have love in other ways: familial love, communal love, love for my fellow townspeople in Derry.”

But true romantic love is not something either Francis nor Rose can enjoy. “When [Francis] left, he left such a hole in her heart that she never quite recovered from,” Guerrero said. “Francis still occupies that part of my heart that’s just a little girl in love and, you know, just wants to settle down, have a boyfriend. And she’s still there at 64 years old wanting that!”

Remar revealed that he felt that Francis was in an equal predicament. “To my knowledge, General Shaw never married or had a family,” Remar said. “I don’t have pictures of my kids on the desk. You know, there’s no picture of the wife on the wall. It’s just, I married the Air Force.”

“And I married my duty,” Guerrero said.

“So we parallel each other,” Remar said. “She married her duty and I married my duty, in absence of the romantic things that we wanted and enjoyed when we were very small.”

Rose and Francis may parallel each other, but they’re also on something of a collision course. It’s Rose’s duty to keep the secret of Pennywise while it’s Francis’s to find and weaponize It.