This review contains full spoilers for Agatha All Along Season 1, Episodes 8 and 9.
As it turns out, it was Agatha all along. I shouldn’t have been surprised, yet I was. The two-part finale to Marvel’s Agatha All Along brings the story of the Witches’ Road to an end that feels rewarding but also, frustratingly, somewhat unsatisfying depending on the kind of answers you are looking for. The show does a fair job of tying up some of its mysteries and rounding out its characters, but one too many other important questions were left unanswered.
The main thread of the show has been about wicked witch Agatha Harkness forming a mother-son/mentor-mentee relationship with fledgling sorcerer Billy Maximoff, and in that regard the final two episodes are a win. It seems Billy’s true super power is seeing the best in people – even unrepentant magical mass murderers – and it’s a mighty feat for him to break through to Agatha, to the point where she actually acts selflessly for once. Agatha choosing Rio’s kiss of death in order to spare Billy led to a tragically beautiful death, right down to the patch of purple flowers her body leaves behind.
Then, of course, we got the show’s big twist. I didn’t see it coming in the slightest, so I was blown away when Billy realized that he unknowingly used his reality-warping powers to create the Witches’ Road. Like mother, like son. With this reveal, so many of the show’s more peculiar moments suddenly make perfect sense, such as Agatha asking Billy if he was sure he’d never kill to get what he wanted. When paired with Agatha’s backstory sequence in the final episode, in which we learn how she came up with the ballad while raising her son Nicky (made from scratch), it really shows how intricately plotted this show was from the word go.
Unfortunately, while the main story stuck the landing beautifully, some of the subplots did not fare so well. There are plenty of little things I could nitpick but the most significant flaw, in my mind, is that the finale (and, as a result, the show at large) doesn’t explore what makes Agatha Harkness tick with any satisfying significance. Why does Agatha feel so guilty about losing Nicky when it wasn’t her fault that he died, essentially, from natural causes? We’re told Agatha never addressed the false rumors about how she lost her son (such as trading him for the Darkhold) because the truth was worse… but that’s very much not true. Who could fault her for being a mother who wanted to spend what time she could with her baby boy?
We also don’t learn why Agatha’s mother was wholly convinced her daughter was born evil. That might have at least explained why Agatha was fine with murdering countless of her own kind over the centuries. I found myself waiting for a big reveal that would make me at least sympathize with why Agatha wound up being such a remorseless killer, but that answer never came. It feels like the show is missing a vital piece of the Agatha puzzle, and as a result some of the emotional moments towards the end don’t land with quite as much oomph as they should do. This is reminiscent of WandaVision’s finale, in which it felt odd that Wanda didn’t face any consequences for kidnapping and torturing an entire town. Agatha All Along leaves me feeling the same – some crucially necessary story beats are frustratingly absent.
Another part of the finale that feels somewhat underbaked is Agatha’s relationship with Rio, who we previously had learned is the embodiment of Death. Marvel readers know it was Thanos who courted Lady Death in the comics, so I was intrigued to learn more about how she came to favor Agatha in the MCU. Yet that also goes unexplained. Even in the flashback to a young Agatha, the two are already lovers. Without knowing how or why they came to be together in the first place it’s hard to feel moved by their final confrontation. That said, the battle does have a stand-up-and-cheer moment when Billy makes a grand entrance in full-on comic-style Wiccan gear. Simply put, he looks freakin’ awesome.
While the character of Death doesn’t quite satisfy, the show’s overall handling of death as a concept is well done. From Alice remarking how it feels unfair that her life ended just as it was about to start a new chapter, to Agatha grappling with the traumatic loss of her boy, the show doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to exploring how we process the inevitably of death. It was tough to watch Billy process how he is inadvertently responsible for the deaths of Sharon, Alice and Lilia, and it was equally as touching for him to mark their names in stone so they didn’t go forgotten. The fact that Billy accidentally killed three people with his powers feels like something that will follow him for a long time as he continues his MCU journey.
