Agatha All Along reaches the end of the Road

“You hold nothing,” Jen says, and then she’s gone. She got what she needed from the road. They all did, at the end.

Agatha All Along doesn’t offer easy answers in its last two episodes. “Follow Me My Friend To Glory At The End” and “Mother Maiden Crone” largely eschew the Marvel formula—there’s a bit of pew-pew laser hands CGI fighting at the end of “Follow Me…,” but it gets out of its own way remarkably quickly—and leave viewers with a messy, difficult ending that reframes the entire series. Agatha doesn’t perfectly stick the landing, but it takes some admirable and surprising swings that ultimately make it one of the most refreshing Marvel projects in years.

“Follow Me…” opens with an ending. Rio has stayed behind in the cabin to shepherd Alice to the afterlife—Rio is Death, after all, and Alice is definitely dead. Alice isn’t ready to be done yet; she just lifted her family curse and finally has a chance to live unburdened from it. But Rio offers her a kindness that makes the end easier to accept: “You’re a protection witch. You died protecting someone.” 

While Jen and Teen are still reeling from Lilia’s death, Agatha and Rio finally get another moment alone after their talk in the recording studio in episode four. A lot has gone down since then, and Rio cuts right to the chase about Teen: “He is an abomination. He is disrupting the sacred balance…The son of the Scarlet Witch stole a second life. I can’t let him do the same for his twin. I have to take him.” It’s a little heartbreaking when Agatha responds, “Then take him.” She’s still not willing to admit, not even to herself, that she actually cares for the kid, cares about what happens to him. It’s easier to just put up a wall, shove the feelings down, and pretend it doesn’t matter. What’s one more dead witch to Agatha Harkness?

There’s a complication, though: Rio can’t take Teen unless he goes with her willingly. If he’s killed, he’ll just reincarnate, and Rio will have to track him down again. But if he goes willingly and chooses not to reincarnate, it’ll make her life a whole lot easier. Agatha plays to her strengths and capitalizes on someone else’s misfortune: She agrees to get Teen to surrender himself to Rio. In exchange, Agatha tells Rio, “I want you to stop pursuing me. I want you to stop making my life hell. And when I die, a long, long, long, long, long time from now, I don’t want to see your face.” Agatha set out on the Road to reclaim her magick, the power that was stolen from her; here, she’s taking back a different kind of power. Rio has no choice but to agree, and she leaves, using her knife to… cut a hole in the fabric of the wall? Wait, what? They’re on the Road; it shouldn’t have walls. This is the most explicit sign yet that there’s something off about this place.

Agatha, Jen, and Teen set out to find the last trial, but they end up right back where they started. They trip over their own shoes, which they took off at the beginning of their journey. And that doesn’t make sense; the Road can’t be a circle, it has to lead somewhere, there has to be some way out. Teen slips his shoes back on, and then everything falls away.

The trio wakes up in body bags in a morgue-like room. An odd place for the last trial, which centers on earth magick. They’re going to have to rely on Jen again. Before they can figure out what they’re supposed to do, though, Agatha lets a secret slip. She’s the one who bound Jen 100 years ago, though she claims she never knew who the target of the spell was; it was just something she did to earn a little extra cash. Jen immediately grabs some of Agatha’s hair and starts chanting an unbinding spell. It works, she disappears, and Agatha and Teen are on their own.

Realizing that they’ll be able to leave once they get what they want from the Road, Agatha guides Teen through finding a new body for his brother, Tommy, the same way Billy took over William’s body. He finds a suitable vessel, a drowning boy with no friends or family, but he has some major reservations at the last second. “Agatha, am I killing this boy so my brother can live?” he asks. But there’s no time for her to answer him. He got what he wanted, and now he’s gone. So she whispers the answer to herself instead: “No, Billy. Sometimes, boys die.”

Then, the locket that Agatha’s been protecting this whole season and—oh, that’s her dead son’s hair in there, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah it is. There’s part of a dandelion in there, too, and the grow lights on the ceiling are flickering off one by one as the clock runs down and Agatha runs out of time. There’s only one thing left to do: Cry right onto the dandelion, plant it in the soil, and hope for the best. It’s a gamble, but it works. The dandelion grows, and Agatha escapes up the stairs just as the room collapses around her.

I expected Agatha to emerge into her basement, but she tumbles out the cellar door into her backyard instead. Rio’s waiting for her, and she’s not happy. Since Teen didn’t hand himself over, she wants Agatha instead. Rio attacks her, but Agatha still doesn’t have her magick back, despite completing all the trials. That’s when Teen shows up—or should I say Wiccan, since he’s back in full costume (which looks very cool in the wide shot) and Joe Locke nails his big entrance. And finally, we get what the whole show has been building toward: a chance at redemption for Agatha. Teen starts to transfer his magick to Agatha; she could take it all, drain him, and leave him dead, and he knows it, but he’s taking a chance on her. She stops herself just before she takes too much.

Still, they’re up against Death, and they both know one of them isn’t going to make it. “It should be me,” Agatha says, and then Teen steps up and asks to sacrifice himself for her, and she agrees, telling Rio to take him instead. She was so close to finally doing the right thing, and it’s fully heartbreaking this time, because she’s really going through with it. In the end, she can’t change—and it’s not clear if she ever truly wanted to. But Teen still hasn’t given up on her, even when she’s saved him only to hand him right over to Death. He telepathically pushes a question into her mind: “Is this how Nicky died?”

He’s talking about her son, whose death is one of the biggest mysteries in the show. In episode three, Jen told Teen that people think she killed Nicky and sacrificed him for the Darkhold. He didn’t believe her then, but now, faced with imminent death, the horrible rumor seems plausible for the first time. The mention of Nicky shakes Agatha out of her complacency, though, and she walks over and passionately kisses Rio on the mouth, allowing Rio to kill her and spare Teen.

And then it’s over, and there’s nothing left for Teen to do except go back home and try to explain to his parents where he’s been for the past 24 hours. As he walks around his bedroom, he starts seeing things that look familiar: Wizard Of Oz action figures, a picturesque beach scene that looks suspiciously like the location of the potions trial. “It was me,” he whispers, and then there’s a cackle somewhere in the distance, and the episode fades to black. It’s such a well-constructed cliffhanger that I wish Disney hadn’t dropped the last two episodes at the same time. I want to sit with this for a week, let it fester and squirm in my brain. But we roll right into the final episode, “Mother Maiden Crone,” instead.

It’s 1750 and Agatha is about to give birth when Rio shows up. It’s clear these two already know each other; Agatha knows what Rio’s appearance means. She moves quickly from denial (“It cannot be”) to anger (“You do this and I will hate you forever”) to bargaining (Please let him live. Please, my love.”). “I can offer only time,” Rio responds, and then she’s gone, leaving Agatha with no clue how much time she has left with her son.

As he grows up, Agatha uses Nicholas to lure witches in so she can kill them. He doesn’t like it, but he keeps doing it anyway, because he’s 6 years old, and she’s his mother, and she’s everything, and she can’t possibly be wrong, right? “Could we not stay with the witches and survive with them?” he asks her one day after she’s killed a few more. “No,” she responds. “Why?” he asks. “Because then they will try to kill us,” she says. This is how Agatha has learned to survive: kill witches before they kill her. It brings up a thorny question about what Agatha’s mother, Evanora, said in episode five: “You were born evil. I ought to have killed you the moment you left my body.” Was she really born evil, or did the betrayal of her first coven traumatize her so badly that she became evil? Wisely, this isn’t a question Agatha All Along attempts to answer, leaving it satisfyingly ambiguous.

As Nicholas grows up and they travel around, they find ways to pass the time. Agatha and Nicholas sing, sometimes, making up lyrics about walk, walk, walking a windy Road. “Wherever it may bend, I’ll be there at the end,” they sing. This is how “The Ballad Of The Witches’ Road” came to be; it originated with Agatha and Nicholas. She was right when she said the lyrics were “coven two,” not “coven true,” on the Road. She would know; she wrote it, hundreds of years ago.

Nicholas performs the Ballad in taverns, where it starts to gain notoriety. Agatha works it into their witch-luring scheme, too, until Nicholas breaks the routine one day and runs off before Agatha has a chance to kill anyone. That night, Rio shows up while Agatha is sleeping and takes Nicholas away.

After Agatha buries her son, she’s broken. The Ballad provides a new way forward; as it’s become more popular, Agatha uses it to build a coven, convince them the Road is real, and use the ritual to steal all their powers and kill them. She does this over and over and over again, across decades and centuries until she meets Teen. And she’s planning on doing it in episode two in her Westview basement with Jen and Lilia and Alice and Sharon, but then Teen’s there, and the door’s opening in the floor, and somehow, the Road is real.

Back in the present, Agatha explains this to Teen when she visits him after he realizes he was responsible for the Road. “Unlike your mother—sorry, Wanda—you actually did something interesting with your power,” she says. The Road was just a scam she cooked up, but he made it real with his incredibly powerful magick. (Also, Agatha’s a ghost now, but she seems pretty chill with it, and it’s honestly a good look on her.) Teen, however, is concerned about the implications of creating the Road. “If I made the Road,” he says, “like, if I literally made the Road, then that means that I killed them.” Sharon, Alice, and Lilia, the three who didn’t return. But, Agatha counters, she’s actually the one who killed Alice, and Lilia sacrificed herself. So really, he’s only got one death on his conscience. Besides, he actually helped Jen get her power back, so that basically makes up for it, anyway. This isn’t exactly what Teen wants to hear, so he leaves, heading back to Agatha’s house in Westview.

Even Agatha isn’t sure what he’s up to at first, but it quickly becomes clear that he’s trying to banish her. Except, somehow, she won’t leave. “Why won’t you just die?” he asks. “Because I can’t face him!” she yells. Here we are, finally, at a moment of clear emotional honesty from Agatha. It hits Billy, and the audience, hard. He offers her an olive branch: “Spirit as my guide?” “We could make a good team,” she muses. A coven of two. “Let’s go find Tommy,” Agatha says, and then they set off together, and that’s it, that’s the end, a Marvel show with a truly daring finale. There’s not even a post-credits scene. I did miss it a little bit, but I appreciate more that it’s another way in which Agatha All Along sets itself apart from the rest of the MCU and proves that there are stories to be told in this world other than classic hero vs. villain tales. Sometimes, things aren’t that black and white. Sometimes, we lose our power—whether it’s taken from us or we give it away bit by bit until we suddenly realize there’s nothing left. But there is value in the process of reclamation, even if the road forward isn’t always clear.

Stray observations

• • That’s a wrap on our Agatha All Along coverage! Thanks for sticking with me to the end. I was very open about how cynical I was about this show going into it, and it surprised me at nearly every turn. I really, genuinely enjoyed it, both as a refreshing part of the MCU and as a standalone TV series.
• • That goat was ridiculously cute, but I need to know what happened to Señor Scratchy.
• • Joe Locke’s Wiccan costume looks pretty sick.
• • Sorry to everyone who was hoping for a Wanda appearance, but I thought the show did a really good job of setting expectations about that early—i.e., that it wasn’t going to happen, and that wasn’t the point of the show.
• • I still need more info about Agatha and Rio, though. If there’s one thing this show was missing, it was a good backstory episode for them. 
• • It’s hard to single out any performances among the cast because they were all great, but Patti LuPone absolutely wrecked me (in a good way) in episode seven, and Sasheer Zamata had some really nice moments in episode eight. And the core trio of Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, and Joe Locke killed it at every turn.