SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the finale (Episode 9) of Agatha All Along.
Maybe the real coven true was the friendships forged along the way. The coven two, though, is a lot more complicated.
The penultimate episode of Agatha All Along brought the many miles of tricks and trials of the Witches’ Road to a close, but it left viewers with many questions about the reality of what happened and who ended up where.
Episode 8, titled “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory At the End,” suggested that the road itself was all in Billy’s mind. Episode 9, the show’s finale, titled “Maiden Mother Crone,” expands on this notion while also filling in the history of Agatha, her son Nicholas Scratch and what Rio did to make Agatha hate her. Deadline’s recap of Episode 8 will refresh viewers’ memories before they head into the finale.
The finale opens on a lush green expanse of forest as women vocalize in the background. A hooded woman scurries through the woods in a purple robe. It’s 1750, and the woman is Agatha.
She is pregnant and, from the looks of it, in labor. She cuts up a lemon against a tree and bites down on it to start the process. She looks up, and Rio, cloaked in green, waits for her at the edge of a lake holding a flower.
“It cannot be,” Agatha says to her. “It must be,” Rio responds. “You do this and I’ll hate you forever,” Agatha says, begging Rio to let him live. This harkens back to when Death mentioned that she betrayed a woman she loved, making her her scar.
I can offer only time, Rio says. Agatha asks how much time. Rio disappears and Agatha gives birth to the baby. “I spoke no spell, I said no incantation,” she says as she names him Nicholas Scratch – made from scratch.
(L-R) Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and Death (Aubrey Plaza) in Marvel Television’s AGATHA ALL ALONG
A fog shrouds Agatha as she cuddles her son close and the episode jumps forward a bit. She is walking him through the woods as he cries when she stumbles upon a group of women singing around a cauldron.
“Sister come forth,” an older woman asks. “Is the little one well?” The woman lets Agatha into a circle of stones as the blue veins in them glow yellow, but she gives a look of suspicion to Agatha beforehand. “We haven’t eaten in days,” was Agatha’s excuse. Agatha sucked all their power away.
Six years later, an older Nicholas sits at the foot of a well. He steals a bell — that looks suspiciously like the one Agatha chimes before she and her makeshift coven start to sing — from a witch’s stand, luring them to Agatha’s cabin while she siphons off their power.
“Mama why do you kill witches?” he asks. “To survive,” she tells him, and he asks “Could we not stay with the witches and survive with them?”
Agatha says no, saying he should get used to the feeling of being solo.
“Walk, walk, walk the road / I walked the windy road,” he sings in an early version of the Ballad of the Witches’ Road.
“I cannot heal you, I cannot protect you from what’s coming,” she tells Nicholas when he asks her to make him food one day, knowing that Death will return for her boy.
Agatha and her son slowly put together the lyrics to the Ballad of the Witches’ Road, calling it the Windy Road.
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Nicholas then performs the song as Agatha skulks through the distracted audience. She pays him and encourages others to reward him too. One redheaded witch asks where he came upon the curious song. Nicholas looks ill and as he is offered a warm meal, he says “Thank you, but no. My mother needs me home.”
“We can kill more witches tomorrow,” he says, coughing, as dark hits the woods. As they fall asleep singing the song, Nicholas wakes up to Rio with a green flame, Rio holding the torch waiting for them in the dark. She beckons Nicholas, who picks something up off the blanket as he leaves with her. Agatha wakes up to find him dead.
“I want more time,” she sobs. She buried her boy beneath stones with a bushel of lavender, singing the song with new lyrics. “I buried my own heart, here with you my child,” she sings.
“You must know the way then,” a blonde woman tells Agatha, guessing she knows the way to the Witches’ Road according to the ballad. “I am in great need,” the young woman says after she tells Agatha of the road offering a prize worth the peril to witches who are brave and true. “Might you show me the way?” the young woman asks.
“You inquire in good faith, so I shall respond in kind,” Agatha says. “I know it by heart. First, we must gather a coven.”
“Where’s the door? Pathetic, embarrassing,” Agatha yells at a group of women she assembles to conjure the rumored road. They then attempt to blast her with their magic, which she siphons off of them, leaving them dead.
A montage unfolds as Agatha shows up in different fashions through different time periods and takes more and more power, finally catching up to when she did it with Alice, Sharon Davis, Jenn and Lilia. She is completely shocked when a door appears, but she knows it’s Billy.
Flash forward to Billy from Episode 8 saying “It was me.” The evil laughter was, indeed Agatha, but she appears as a GHOST with gray hair in an outfit like she appears in the comics.
“By the way, I did not sacrifice myself for you. I took a calculated risk,” She tells him. “I’m still figuring out the rules.”
“Did I make the road?” Billy asks her.
“Unlike your mother, sorry, Wanda, you did something interesting with your power. It was just a con. The song doesn’t mean anything. It never did,” she tells him. “The road wasn’t real until you made it real.”
“If I made the road then that means that I,” Billy concludes. “I killed them. Are they ghosts too? I’m a murderer.”
Agatha says she killed Alice and Lilia chose to die.
“My mind killed them,” he tells Agatha, who says “Don’t give yourself too much credit. If you actually do the math on it, you saved a life.” Cut to Jenn crawling up through the dirt back onto the border of Westview near the sign. She flies away with her newly recovered pink powers.
“I was gonna kill them all in my basement on day one,” Agatha says. “If you wanna be a witch, get used to this feeling”
“I’ll never get used to this,” Billy says, to which Agatha responds, “We’ll see.”
Billy visits Agatha’s — previously Ralph Bohner’s — all boarded up with her purple mushroom grave still in the backyard. He goes into the basement, where the pentagonal door with a blue glow behind it awaits him, as does Agatha’s ghost, who says he took something from her and wants it back.
“Give me what I want and I’ll be on my way,” she tells Billy, who draws a petagram of chalk and places some candles around the border, performing analog magic in Agatha’s eyes, or not.
He looks eerily similar to Wanda as she dreamwalks using similar materials. Suddenly, his black notebook pops out from behind Agatha into his hands. He pulls out her broach as he finds a page in the spellbook to recite an incantation to banish her.
“Time to go into the light or Rio’s toxic embrace or wherever you deserve to spend eternity,” he says. “I really don’t care anymore.”
(L-R) Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke) in Marvel Television’s AGATHA ALL ALONG Episode 8
“You think you can just send me into the afterlife with an incantation and a personal item?!” Agatha asks Billy, who says “It worked on Wanda’s spell.”
“That wasn’t you,” Agatha says as she laughs. “Okay, maybe you loosened the jar.”
“Five seconds ago, you were all bent out of shape about killing witches!” she says to Billy.
“You’re already dead!” he fires back at her.
Her translucent form flickers as he repeats the words. “Why are you still here? Why don’t you just die?” Billy asks Agatha, who shouts “Because I can’t face him!” meaning Nicholas, as Billy deciphers. She had knocked her broach to the floor, and she can pick it up, touching it to her chest where it adheres.
“I’m sure he would forgive you for whatever you did,” Billy tells her.
“See, it’s when you say things like that,” Agatha says to him. “That you remind me of him.”
“You picked it up,” Billy observes.
“I’m a quick study,” she says.
Billy says maybe being a ghost could suit her — “Spirit as my guide,” to which Agatha says “We could make a good team, you and me.”
“Coven two?” Billy says as a tear rolls down his face. They then realize they both tend to kill their coven members.
Billy looks to the floor and pulls up the hex he created, labeling the stone tile of the floor with the names Sharon Davis, Alice Wu-Gulliver and Lilia Calderu in the center of the pentagram.
“One door closes,” Agatha says.
“And another opens,” Billy finishes her sentence and a staircase up into white light opens.
Then Agatha says “Let’s go find Tommy.”
Thus, viewers have reached the end of the path in Agatha All Along, but hopefully not the last we’ve seen of Agatha Harkness or Joe Locke’s Wiccan aka Billy Maximoff aka William Kaplan.
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