‘Agatha All Along’ Showrunner Jac Schaeffer On Sticking The Landing With Final Episodes & What’s To Come For Billy
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains major details from the final two episodes of Agatha All Along.
Agatha All Along‘s epic conclusion came with an unexpected turn on the Witches Road.
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The final two episodes revealed that, in fact, the Road never existed at all. The idea of it was conjured by Agatha, via a song that her son Nicholas came up with, to con witches into allowing Agatha to siphon their power. So, then, how were they on a physical Road, trials and all?
They’ve got Wiccan to thank for that.
In the interview below, showrunner Jac Schaeffer dives deep into the final episodes of Agatha All Along, Billy and Agatha’s “weird, spectral” relationship, and more. For a refresher, here’s Deadline’s recaps of Episode 8 and Episode 9.
DEADLINE: How did you approach these last two episodes? There’s so much in them, I’m just wondering where you started and how you landed here.
JAC SCHAEFFER: There’s so much to say, and that’s such a big question. I wanted I have this concept of like, the show is a spell. That was my obsession with the development — the show is a spell. I think that’s what made the ballad become what it was, and the idea that it’s a spell on top of a spell, because it’s Billy spell that makes the Road, but then it’s Agatha long con that she cast a spell over her community with this larger lie. Then the other touch point for me was, what is Agatha this truth? How do we marry those things? So the idea of Agatha’s truth being Nicky and her being a loving mother underneath this ‘show is a spell’ thing, that’s how I tackled it, in a macro sense. In terms of the logistics of the two episodes, the big smash, bang finale is always hard for me. It’s not my strong suit. I struggle with it. I put it off. With this show, I wanted to have, essentially, a fake finale. I wanted the penultimate episode to be the classic Marvel finale, and then I wanted the final episode to be the real completion of the story in terms of character and emotion.
I gave 108 to Peter Cameron, because I knew he could handle the Marvel finale of it, which was so not where I wanted my head to be. He came up with a lot of different versions of it. I’m so pleased with how it landed. Then, in terms of the production of it, we hired Gandja Monteiro because we knew she could manage these three episode, which are six, eight and nine, because they lean dramatic. They lean heavy genre spectacle, in a way that we knew she and her DP Donté Lee would bring a lot of beauty and gravitas too. Then we made a lot of discoveries in post, a lot of delicate work that I think brought the two together and made them sort of companion pieces.
DEADLINE: When Agatha tells Billy she isn’t ready to face Nicholas, is it her guilt over not being able to save him, or does she also harbor guilt about the fact that she’s been using his song to con and kill witches?
SCHAEFFER: It’s both. It’s the fact that she couldn’t save him, that she couldn’t find the knowledge or the power to save him, and it’s the fact that he always leaned good. He didn’t want to kill witches. He didn’t want to live her lifestyle. Instead of rehabilitating herself on his death, she doubled down, and as you said, she used his song to become essentially a mass murderer. I think there’s so much shame for her in that. I watch that final sequence that we call ‘Agatha through time,’ where the camera’s swirling around and she’s conning and killing witches through the ages, and what I see is someone grieving. She can’t get full. She can’t fill herself up, and so she’s just eating and eating and eating. I find it really heartbreaking. I think she has so much shame, because she knows, but that’s part of her connection point with Billy. Obviously, he reminds her of Nicky, and she can get close to their goodness, but she’s not quite there herself, if that makes sense.
DEADLINE: To Rio’s point, why does Agatha let so many people believe that she had something to do with Nicky’s death?
SCHAEFFER: She has that line where she says, ‘Because the truth is too awful.’ I was really enchanted with the idea that Agatha’s truth, and her true pain, was very human and very pedestrian — that she had a son, she loved him and he died, and that was it. That it could be that simple and that elegant, and that she can’t look directly at that, so she would rather the lies and the hate and the judgment and the urban legends. That is all easier for her and less painful. There’s theater to that, and there’s performance to that, and I think she’s comfortable playing the villain, and it was the design from the beginning that her story with Nicky would be private, that it wouldn’t be something that she shared with Billy, and it wasn’t even something she shared with Rio. That was her coven two on the Road together, and we wanted it to feel really intimate and truthful.
DEADLINE: When Rio visits Agatha at Nicky’s birth, there’s already a history there. Did you think about including more of their backstory?
SCHAEFFER: Yeah, we did a lot of work in the room on that and trying to decide how much of that we would feature — who, what, how did they meet? We talked a lot about their meet cute and once they fell in love, what that looked like, and we deliberated on showing that. You never know how shows will be received. I think watching people fall so in love and in lust with Agatha and Rio, I was a little bit like, ‘Ooh, we don’t really service that backstory.’ I feel like those are stories for another day. I look at the show and I’m like, ‘There’s a lot of story there that we can revisit.’ And the WandaVision universe, of which I feel Agatha All Along is a part, they are inherently non linear. I feel we can visit any character at any time because of that. So I do feel like there’s more to explore. But ultimately, this show is about Agatha’s journey, and it is a two hander with Billy, and that’s what we chose to prioritize with the real estate that we had.
DEADLINE: Billy gets so emotional when Agatha is talking to him about not being ready to face Nicky. What’s going through his head there?
SCHAEFFER: I love Joe’s performance in that scene. I’m so moved by it. He is the perfect combination of little boy and new man. He’s right on that precipice, and you can see both. I find that so beautiful. As a mother especially, I find it really beautiful and really poignant. I think he’s crying about all of it. I think he’s horrified at what has transpired. I think he’s furious at Agatha for not telling him what she knew, for not revealing things. I think he blames himself. He blames her, and he wants her gone. But like Nicky, and like anyone who is an empath, the moment someone in front of you shows you their vulnerability, you connect to it. So the moment he sees her say something truthful, really emotionally truthful, he can’t help but feel empathy. They have been through so much, and there is a legitimate, true connection between the two of them. So I think that’s the transition.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me about crafting those lines, where Billy asks Agatha if he’s killing a boy to save his brother and Agatha says, ‘No Billy, sometimes boys die.’ It’s a really poignant moment.
SCHAEFFER: I’m pretty sure that Peter wrote, ‘Am I killing this boy so my brother can live?’ I think that was Peter. I wrote, ‘No, Billy. Sometimes boys die,’ because that, to me, that’s the nut. That’s the very bottom of the thing is that, I don’t believe that death is an injustice. I believe that death is the natural course of things, but I do believe people can be taken in what feels, to us still on the planet, too soon, or in a way that is unfair or in a way that [we] still here can’t cope with. It also telegraphs that she’s not chasing Nicky to resurrect him, which I feel like is a very common villain intention and villain emotion is like, ‘Someone I love died, I want to get them back.’ I wanted for Agatha, as a witch, that she would understand the permanence of his death. So I just wanted a really elegant line that speaks to what feels unfair about the about death, the finality of it. Also, to me, it is sort of a twin moment to Alice’s last scene at the top of 108 that there is a feeling of unfairness. But when you really look at the lot, you look at Alice’s life and what she did in her last moments, you know there’s meaning there. If you look at Nicky’s life and the love he had with his mother and the time they spent together, there was meaning there.
DEADLINE: So in terms of Billy conjuring the Road, we’ve already established he doesn’t really know how to control his magic. The implication is that he had no clue he did this, right? Not even in the back of his mind?
SCHAEFFER: Yeah, our sense of it is that Wanda knew to some degree, like there was some awareness with her. It was more that she was in denial. Whereas with Billy, it was our feeling that it truly was his subconscious that did it. He really, truly had no awareness. He’s so young and so inexperienced, and he was wondering if he’s Billy Maximoff, and he just really didn’t know what he was doing. We were trying to sort of try that case by showing how unpredictable his magic is. It’s kind of firing all the time— when he wants it to, when he doesn’t want it to. It’s chaotic, to use an appropriate term. We had initially developed the Witches Road as a real thing, and then that the idea that perhaps it was a hex came early. I felt very conflicted about it for a long time, because I was like, I don’t want to do WandaVision 2.0, but it was that extra piece that, yes, he made the road, but in fact, it was Agatha all along that was the thing that made it feel worthwhile and special to do. And it afforded us the opportunity, sort of like the nesting dolls, of every single thing in his room has a connection to the Road, and that’s the kind of storytelling that delights me and is just so fun to execute.
DEADLINE: Do you think Billy holds any culpability in the deaths of the other witches?
SCHAEFFER: I don’t. we talked a lot about it, because he didn’t directly kill anyone. I mean, yes, the road is an extension of his mind, but it’s sort of circumstantial. I do agree with him taking it extremely seriously. I really love Joe’s performance where Agatha says, ‘I do tend to kill my coven members.’ And she says it flippantly in her Agatha way, and he says, ‘So do I,’ with all the gravity of his being. He takes it really seriously. I think that that’s correct, and I think it bodes well for him moving forward, because anybody with power and talent can go to the dark side. I think, what I hope we’ve established, is Billy as a character who will hold himself accountable.
DEADLINE: Have you gone down the rabbit hole of where they’re off to next? What’s in store for them now that they’re off to find Tommy?
SCHAEFFER: I’m so happy with sending them off. From the very beginning, I think even before the writer’s room, that was the end game, is that she would be a ghost and she would be his spirit guide. We loved that as an arc for the show, and it felt really correct given the comics, which also I’m so delighted that people didn’t zero in on that in the comics. Because in the comics, she spends a lot of her time as a ghost. It seemed really obvious to me. I thought everyone would guess it, and bravo to those of you on the interwebs who did. There were scenes that I wrote that demonstrated what their quote-unquote, working relationship would be moving forward. So I certainly explored that, both on the page and in the room. But I am not responsible for any of those stories moving forward, so I’m just really hopeful to see them again and to see them be their weird spectral duo.
DEADLINE: Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is that Rio would definitely know if Wanda is dead. Given Rio’s relationship to Agatha, does Agatha know if Wanda is really dead? She gives such a non-answer to Billy when he asks her. But in the first episode, Rio says something like, ‘That witch is gone and all copies of the Darkhold with her.’
SCHAEFFER: It’s my opinion — and these stories will move ahead, and who knows what it will be — it’s my opinion that Agatha does not know. And yeah, it’s my opinion that Rio does. I think the word ‘gone’ is important. I was instructed to use the word ‘gone.’
DEADLINE: Another big question mark is Nicholas Scratch’s father. He’s also a bit of a question mark in the comics. Did you think about answering that?
SCHAEFFER: Well, yeah, like I said, I feel like there’s a lot of story left. We had a lot of discussions about that. And ultimately, for this story, it doesn’t matter. And we loved that.
DEADLINE: What about Mephisto? Was there ever plans to bring him into the fold?
SCHAEFFER: No. I think very, very early before the writers room, Mephisto was on our list, but ended up logistically not working for our show.
DEADLINE: When Billy is connecting the dots about the Road in his room, I noticed the trans flag in the background. When you were writing Billy, how important was it to you to make his queerness a core part of his identity in that way?
SCHAEFFER: It was so important to me, and I credit the LGBTQ+ writers in the room for guiding that conversation. If I can speak for them — and I’ve had some side conversations with them to make sure it’s appropriate that I can speak for their wishes and their intentions, and they’ve given me their blessing — it was vitally important to them that Billy’s queerness be featured and be a part of his identity, but not the sum total of his identity. It was vitally important to the writers that that the Kaplans were wonderful, loving parents who accepted their son completely, and that it wasn’t a conversation we needed to see on screen. It was something that was a given. It was important to the team that Billy be in a healthy relationship, a loving relationship, and again, that wasn’t the conversation. It was just a feature of his life that was that was important, but not the point. I followed their lead. We had so many conversations, and it was also about the queerness being the sort of stylistic foundation of the show, which felt very right and very important. And I’m really proud. I’m proud of the show, and I’m proud of the team, and I will always be grateful to Joe Locke for being so elegant in his handling of taking on this role and doing press and being the person that he is.
DEADLINE: Going off that, how did you navigate Agatha’s queerness and telling that story?
SCHAEFFER: I’m so happy to say that it was such a natural process. There was no agenda. It landing on this character of Rio Vidal, who we created, we wanted to bring Death as a character into the show, but the creation of Rio was happening before we came up with the idea of Death. Prior to that, in our conversations about who this pursuant antagonist character would be, we liked the idea of the person being someone that Agatha had had a romantic relationship with. To use an appropriate term, in the room, it was very fluid. Man, woman, super powered, not, witch…it circled and it iterated until it really started to feel right that this dark, mysterious, powerful force that is Rio/Death came to the fore. Mary Livanos was instrumental in the characterization of Rio. Giovanna Sarquis, one of our writers, she came in with the idea of of her being Latinx, which just added this lovely dimension. So we did not start, like, at point A, Agatha is queer. That’s just where it went for us.
DEADLINE: Jen’s line about it making total sense that Agatha’s ex would be death made me chuckle. It does make total sense.
SCHAEFFER: That was legitimately from the room. It’s so fun when lines are essentially us talking, and that was 100% us talking and being like, ‘There’s nobody else.’ We couldn’t think of anybody else. We threw out names of other comic people and and no one felt like a big enough deal and sexy enough, because we also were so psyched on the idea that Agatha would be the one in the power position. So the idea that death is besotted, and Agatha is the one saying, ‘No,’ we just couldn’t get over.
It’s so fun and sexy and great, but also, it’s quite tragic, because the reason that Agatha is so isolated is the nature of her power. It means she has to kill all the witches around her. That’s very sad. It’s really, really tragic. She cannot fulfill her natural instinct to be tribal because of this power that she has. So what’s she gonna do? She’s gonna get with death, the only lady who’s gonna be excited by her career.
DEADLINE: I know you already said it but I just want to ask one more time. No Season 2? No spinoff? You don’t have anything in the works?
SCHAEFFER: No, I don’t have anything in the works.
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