3 weeks ago
17 ARTICLE AD
Agatha All Along wraps things up in a two-part finale (“Follow Me My Friend/To Glory at the End” and “Maiden Mother Crone”) offering a few legitimately clever twists, but ultimately ends up another in a long string of Disney+ MCU projects that ends almost exactly where it began.
Though Agatha All Along was pitched as a redemption story, the major reveal of the series is that the Witches’ Road really was a con perpetuated over the centuries by Agatha (…all along!) to harvest witches’ souls, leaving them as desiccated husks while she walks off with their powers. Harkness herself, alongside her son, Nicholas, invented the ditty and took it on the road, performing it at pubs and campfires to lure occult-practicing victims like a murderous organ grinder and her repentant monkey.
© Marvel She intended to do the same with her latest coven we’ve spent the series getting to know, except the ritual actually worked this time. As we find out, Billy/William/Teen/Wiccan unknowingly used his own repressed powers—borrowing from the reality-warping legacy of the Scarlet Witch—to make Agatha’s centuries-long con a reality. The show’s pop culture themed-trials were not just set dressing after all, but inspired directly by elements from Billy’s own bedroom, like a spiritual concept board, albeit with nearly everything run through the filter of his beloved Saw poster.
This was all very satisfying and clever (although not quite as immaculately constructed as last week’s twisty-turny Patti LuPone love-in), but again, didn’t amount to much for our heroes in the long run. Though we discover Death claimed Agatha’s son, and that she and Agatha do indeed have a history, their relationship isn’t properly explored in the final two episodes beyond even more textually acknowledging what was already insinuated. We learn Death has been providing Agatha with “special treatment” for centuries after allowing her son Nicholas Scratch to survive a fated stillbirth, only to claim him either way a few years later.
Death, I suppose, also didn’t mind Agatha’s innumerable body count; I’d be curious to know if that ever aroused the suspicions of either the FBI or mummy enthusiasts. It’s clear Death and Agatha have a complicated love/hate relationship, but we were denied the pair getting their own episode to unpack it in favor of a relatively quick confrontation.
© Marvel In the series’ final trial, Agatha, Jennifer, and Wiccan find themselves inside a morgue lined with grow lights for indoor plants, and are tasked with planting a seed kept in Agatha’s locket with the elements at hand (because death fosters life, you know?). While the three argue about the best way to do this, it finally comes to light Agatha was also the one who “bound” Jennifer after an anonymous benefactor hired her to do it (though it’s suggested she never needed her powers, so I was right someone would float the idea before the end).
Upon learning this, she’s able to perform a counterspell and fly off, leaving Agatha and Wiccan behind to finish the trial themselves after gaining what she sought on the road. Around this time, Agatha additionally assists Wiccan in harvesting a donor body for his brother Tommy, whose spirit is still apparently in limbo, allowing him to complete his desired goal and get him off the road, too.
Though Agatha’s able to complete the trial on her lonesome with some dirt and her own tears, Death still wants to kill one of them—either Agatha, her centuries-old romantic interest, or Wiccan, who we learn will continuously reincarnate in other dying bodies unless he finally turns himself in to Death herself. After a battle between Death and Agatha (one that only briefly indulges Marvel’s love of a big VFX blast-off, at least), Wiccan returns Agatha’s aid complete in his superhero costume, and they have the difficult conversation of who will live and who will die. Though Wiccan, feeling guilty about the part he played in the deaths of the rest of the coven, initially agrees to fall on the sword, of course Agatha takes the bullet, walking directly up to Death and kissing her on the lips.
© Marvel Though Death is apparently satisfied with the offering—and we and Wiccan alike do indeed watch Agatha die, her body forming a Rio-approved bed of flowers as it rapidly decomposes—in the final episode, after a long flashback to explain Agatha’s history with her son and the creation of the myth of the Road, Wiccan discovers Agatha remains on Earth as a ghost. She’s refusing to pass over because she can’t bring herself to see her son again. Luckily, this tees up a potential second season, and her wisecracking spirit (now with more comics-accurate white hair, making it very funny that the comics have only just relatively recently acquiesced to making Agatha look a little more Hahn-esque) embarks on a journey with Wiccan to locate his newly ensouled brother, Tommy.
© Marvel So, unless the series is renewed for another season, that’s all she wrote for Agatha All Along. There’s a lot to enjoy in the moment to moment here, but it’s still hard not to escape that the series didn’t do all that much to dramatically inch forward many of these characters. By the end, Agatha remains avoidant and morally dubious—but it’s not like there aren’t some consequences here. Agatha might still be around in some form, but death did catch up to her. Wiccan is still looking for his brother, but has come into his own as a practitioner of magic. Jennifer is back in action and hopefully gets to hang out with Man-Thing, somewhere down the line. Sharon, Alice, Lilia, Wanda (no cameo here), and the Salem Seven are all dead, it seems, and we still have no idea why the elemental force of Death itself was posing as a woman named Rio Vidal for a few episodes, other than a distanced interest in William Maximoff’s soul.
But even with those consequences, how much of Agatha All Along will have been worth it ultimately remains to be seen. Like the other Marvel shows at Disney+, things happened, newly introduced characters died, and nothing to particularly shift the status quo of the more-important-movies really happened. We’re another step closer to Young Avengers, if that’s your thing, as Marvel slowly but surely begins to tick off introducing versions of that famous Gillen/McKelvie version of the team.
But we’ve been through this before with Marvel TV: if Wiccan does ever appear in an MCU movie, Young Avengers or otherwise, he’ll be reintroduced in such a way you won’t need to have seen this series to understand what his deal is. Even taking it as its own thing, separate from the machinations of the wider MCU, nothing of much significance happened in Agatha All Along, aside from a few well-executed character deaths. When our heroes discover they’ve been waking in a circle, finding the shoes they removed at the beginning of the journey, I felt that.
Still, at least there was that pitch-perfect Mare of Easttown parody.
Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
