SPOILER WARNING: This story includes major plot details from Episode 8 and 9 of “Agatha All Along,” currently streaming on Disney+.
Agatha Harkness, the coven-less witch, and Billy Maximoff, the son of the Scarlet Witch, reached the end of the Witches’ Road in the two-part finale of “Agatha All Along” — and very little was as it first seemed.
The episodes — titled “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End” and “Maiden Mother Crone” — revealed the truth of how the Witches’ Road was created, who wrote the Ballad that conjured it into being and what really happened to Agatha’s son Nicholas Scratch. Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) helped Billy (Joe Locke) locate his twin brother Tommy, Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata) discovered how her power had been bound for 100 years and Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), aka Lady Death, wound up collecting (nearly) all the bodies she wanted.
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But almost none of it unfolded at face value. It turns out that the Witches’ Road isn’t real, the Ballad means nothing, Tommy’s whereabouts remain unknown, Jennifer was totally wrong about who was responsible for binding her and Nicholas’ tragic fate had nothing to do with the Darkhold or Mephisto. (Probably. More on this later.)
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The sleight-of-hand behind these revelations savvily evoked a kind of narrative witchcraft, and how we expect sorcery to uncover the truth hidden behind the veil of our expectations. Well, some people’s expectations. If you’re the kind of viewer who delights in combing through the internet for fan theories — or hypothesizing some of your own — then you’ve likely encountered some, if not all, of the twists in these final episodes in advance. And yet “Agatha All Along” still dramatized them with such wit and consideration that it felt gratifying, rather than disappointing, to learn these theories were correct.
Besides, the resolutions in this story also provoke several intriguing questions about the future for Billy, Agatha, Jennifer and Rio. Here are the major highlights:
Jennifer discovers that Agatha bound her
While stuck in the final trial, Jennifer learns that, rather than a nefarious Boston obstetrician, she was bound, accidentally, by Agatha while she was passing through the city. Outraged, Jennifer immediately snatches a lock of Agatha’s hair and performs the unbinding ritual, which mostly consists of her repeating “You hold nothing” over and over to Agatha’s face. Once she gets her powers back, Jennifer disappears; the next we see her, she’s climbing out of the ground just outside of Westview, and flying off into places unknown.
Her future within the MCU is fuzzy; in the comics, she crosses paths with Doctor Strange, but she doesn’t really intersect with any other MCU characters of note other than Man-Thing from the 2022 Disney+ special “Werewolf by Night.” But given her affection for Billy — and her apparently cosmic connection with Agatha — Jennifer could easily pop up again soon.
Billy created the Witches’ Road
Much like how Billy’s mother Wanda was unwittingly responsible for fabricating the sitcom world of “WandaVision” as a way to escape her grief, it turns out that Billy was so desperate for a way to find his brother Tommy that he summoned the entirety of the Witches’ Road himself. All the details — the Nancy Myers beach house, the Ouija board horror house, the fairy tale castle — came from pop-culture details riddled around Billy’s impeccably tidy bedroom. To Billy’s horror, that means that the lethal nature of the trials, which lead to the deaths of Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp), Alice (Ali Ahn) and Lilia (Patti LuPone), was his doing, too.
This presents some fascinating wrinkles for Billy’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He really is as powerful, and as dangerous, as his mother, and the guilt he carries for the deaths of his coven (even though Agatha points out that she killed Alice, and that Lilia chose to die) will likely hover over how Billy chooses to exercise his magic moving forward.
Agatha wrote the Ballad with her son
The bulk of “Maiden Mother Crone” was spent dramatizing Agatha’s life with her son, Nicholas, in the 1750s. When Rio appears as Agatha is in the middle of giving birth to him, Agatha pleads for her son’s life; Rio says that all she can offer her is more time, but she does not say for how long. For the next six years, Agatha utilizes Nicholas in her cons to steal the life-force from other witches, and they write a song together about walking along “the winding road” that eventually becomes “the witches’ road,” where it starts to become a legend. Eventually, Rio takes Nicholas’ life in the night, through an unspecified disease (by the end, he looks sickly and has a foreboding cough). Agatha is left devastated and more willing than ever to manipulate other witches (now using the Ballad as bait) into draining their power — another example of how “Agatha All Along” explores the “trick” in “magic trick.”
There are, however, still some unanswered questions about Nicholas. When he’s born, Agatha remarks about how she made him “from scratch” rather than via a spell or incantation — but who fathered Nicholas, if he was fathered at all, remains unknown. Similarly, it’s unclear whether Rio acts on her own accord or from directives by a more powerful force, like, say, Mephisto — the Marvel comics villain who seems to perpetually haunt the Maximoff family. Speaking of haunting…
Agatha gives her life to protect Billy — and to haunt him, too
In their final confrontation with Rio, Billy volunteers his life to save Agatha’s — and Agatha gladly accepts it, until Billy asks Agatha telepathically if this is how Nicholas died. The memory is enough to make Agatha realize she can save Billy’s life in the way she couldn’t save Nicholas’ — since Rio took him in the night, she never even got to say goodbye. She kisses Rio, falls to the ground and dies.
But — Happy Halloween! — she comes back as a ghost, still unable to pass on to the afterlife to face Nicholas. Instead, she returns to Billy, who is not only the son she never had, but the partner in magic she could never keep.
Tommy is alive — but in a terrible life
In “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End,” Agatha helps Billy connect with Tommy’s spirit and place him into a new body. But unlike Billy’s loving family, Tommy’s new life is a harsh one: The body he inhabits drowned in a cruel swimming pool prank, and Billy realizes in a panic that “there’s no one to love him! He’s got no one!” (In the comics, Tommy — reincarnated as Tommy Shepherd — does indeed lead an unforgiving life before he reunites with Billy.)
At the end of the series, ghost Agatha and Billy set out into the world to find Tommy, a storyline one expects will be picked up either in the upcoming Vision series with Paul Bettany or at some point between now and the next two “Avengers” movies — given that Tommy, aka Speed, is an integral part of the Young Avengers in the comics.
