Agatha All Along Reaches the Surprising End of the Witches’ Road — Grade the Finale!
The following post contains major spoilers for Agatha All Along‘s two-episode finale, now streaming on Disney+. Proceed with caution.
Ding, dong, the witch is dead. And she’s surprisingly chill about it.
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Disney+’s WandaVision spinoff Agatha All Along wrapped up with a two-episode finale on Wednesday night, which ultimately found Kathryn Hahn’s seemingly invincible witch finally succumbing to her own mortality, with perhaps a shocking amount of acceptance about her fate. But there’s much to discuss about what put Agatha in the afterlife, so let’s get to it, starting with Episode 8:
Following Lilia’s fatal trial on the Witches’ Road, Rio realizes that these ill-fated trials have simply been Agatha’s way of distracting Rio so that she can’t claim Billy’s life. Rio calls Billy an “abomination” who is “disrupting the sacred balance” by stealing a second life for himself; she can’t let him do the same for his twin, and Agatha shouldn’t be walking the Witches’ Road with another woman’s son in the first place. So, the ex-lovers strike a deal: If Agatha can get Billy to willingly turn himself in and let Rio kill him, then Rio will stop pursuing Agatha and making her life hell. Rio agrees to the terms, but it’s a loaded “OK” that she gives Agatha.
I’ll hit the fast-forward button a bit here, since most of the answers to our lingering Agatha questions come in Wednesday’s second episode, not the first. In short:
* Jennifer realizes that it was actually Agatha, and not some Bostonian doctor, who (accidentally) bound her magic back in the 1920s, and she performs an unbinding ritual to get her power back. (Much later, we see Jennifer emerging from under the ground just outside of Westview, and she contentedly flies off into the distance, power restored. Yay!)
* Agatha encourages Billy, during an especially intense moment, to try to find a vessel that his twin brother Tommy can live in. Billy visualizes a young boy, somewhere in the world, who is on the brink of drowning after his “friends” pushed him into a swimming pool as a prank — but the moment is cut short when Billy wonders aloud, “Agatha, am I killing this boy so my brother can live?!” and Billy promptly disappears.
* Rio, disappointed to see that Billy has gone… somewhere… instead of turning himself in for his demise, instead tries to kill Agatha once and for all, but Billy reappears in the nick of time to stop her, and later offers himself up to Rio for the taking. When Agatha reveals that she and Rio had struck a deal to facilitate Billy’s death, Billy (mentally) asks Agatha if this is how her own son, Nicholas, also died. This question seems to strike a chord with Agatha, and she instead pulls Rio in for a long kiss, sacrificing herself so Billy can live.
* Billy returns to his bedroom in Eastview — after what has apparently only been 24 hours; long day! — but upon looking around at the posters and trinkets in his room, he realizes that many of those objects made an appearance of some kind on the Road. The Wicked Witch of the West figurine from The Wizard of Oz sitting on a shelf… a Ouija board in the corner… a model of a very specific-looking tree… hmm! And as he’s taking this all in, Billy pieces together some strange things that were said to him by Agatha and the coven during their travels, indicating that the Road isn’t real, and that only a Maximoff could create a setting so “dramatic.” It’s not unlike that moment in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness when Wanda reveals to Strange that she’s entirely conjured the beautiful property on which she lives. Thus, Episode 8 concludes with Billy realizing, “It was me.”
Meanwhile, in Episode 9, we get quite a lot of Agatha backstory, taking place in the 1750s. Just as Agatha is on the verge of giving birth in the woods, Rio — a much younger, more innocent-looking iteration of her, without the cool half-skeleton face — approaches Agatha, seemingly coming to claim her not-yet-born child. Agatha begs for the child to live, and Rio answers, “I can offer only time.” But when Agatha asks how much time, she realizes Rio has disappeared; Agatha gives birth (against a tree!) to a healthy baby Nicholas, but she seems all too aware that Rio could pop up to take him away at any time.
For six years, Agatha and Nicholas make their way around the woods, with Agatha frequently scheming her way into other, more trusting covens before promptly killing all the witches. Nicholas asks why they can’t just live and work alongside other witches, but Agatha insists those women will kill them; she also tells him that, despite her considerable power, she can’t shield Nicholas from what’s coming.
During their travels together, Agatha and her son co-write a little ditty that we know to be The Ballad of the Witches’ Road, which they workshop quite a bit before landing on the version that’s later popularized. One night, while Agatha and Nicholas are sleeping, Rio materializes to beckon Nicholas away, and he goes willingly; Agatha sobs the next morning when she realizes her son is dead.
And while she’s mourning him later, singing a new, quite sad verse of the ballad, Agatha is approached by another witch, who overheard Agatha singing and assumes she must know where the Witches’ Road is. Indeed, Agatha and Nicholas’ tune appears to have taken on a life of its own, and now witches everywhere actually believe the Road exists. Never one to turn down a potential con, Agatha agrees to help this witch find the Road, provided they can put together a coven first. But after gathering the women and singing the ballad, Agatha kills them all — and she does that with coven after coven, for centuries and centuries, including the Agatha All Along coven that we’ve come to know. Just like she did with the others, Agatha was planning to kill Alice, Jennifer, Lilia and Sharon as soon as they finished their ballad… until, shockingly, Billy conjured a real Witches’ Road all on his own.
Back in Billy’s Eastview bedroom, Agatha appears to him as a ghost that has not yet fully crossed over. She confirms that Billy made the Road real, but stops him from spiraling that he’s responsible for the coven members’ deaths; after all, Agatha was planning to off the women anyway, and he really saved Jennifer by allowing her magic to get restored. But Billy wants to be done with Agatha for good, so he returns to her Westview basement where the door to the Road still exists. He attempts to permanently send her into the witchy afterlife with a banishment spell, but it won’t take: Agatha believes, to her core, that she can’t face Nicholas in the great beyond, and she manages (even in her ghostly form) to swipe back her locket that Billy had taken after she died.
Billy says that Nicholas will surely forgive Agatha for whatever she did to him. “It’s when you say things like that that you remind me of him,” Agatha replies. But now that she’s spoken aloud her fears about facing Nicholas, and collected her locket from Billy, Agatha seems much softer and more at peace with her fate in afterlife limbo. She suggests that she and Billy would make a good team from here on out, and after sealing up the door to the Witches’ Road (instead turning it into a memorial for the fallen Sharon, Alice and Lilia), Billy flings open the door to Agatha’s cellar.
“Let’s go find Tommy,” Agatha offers, and the pair walks outside together.
In a bit of a break from Marvel tradition, there’s no mid-credits or post-credits scene to be found after Agatha‘s finale ends — and there’s also no cameo from Elizabeth Olsen, who many fans theorized might return as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch in these final episodes. After all, Wanda loomed large throughout the season, what with Billy’s connection to her, and the alleged discovery of Wanda’s corpse in the series premiere.
For Olsen’s part, she went from saying (in September 2022) that she’d “love to pop up” on Agatha All Along, to a more eyebrow-raising, “I think I’ll be back…” in March 2023, after production on Agatha had already begun. Then again, those of us who watched WandaVision were so certain Doctor Strange would appear in that show’s finale… and we were mistaken.
That’s a wrap, Agatha All Along fans! What did you think of Wednesday’s finale? Cast your votes in our polls below, then hit the comments with your full reviews!
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