Warning! This review contains major spoilers for Agatha All Along episodes 8 and 9.
Agatha All Along had a lot to get through in its double-billed finale; exploring Agatha's backstory, resolving her tension with Rio (who was unveiled as Death in the previous episode), and revealing whether she, Billy, and Jen successfully made it off the Witches' Road. It's not surprising, then, that it only manages to satisfyingly wrap up a couple of the narrative threads it set up along the way, as it falls into frustrating Marvel tropes and prioritizes setting up a future MCU project instead.
In episode 8, titled 'Follow Me, My Friend/To Glory at the End', the coven's remaining members continue down the Road, only to discover that they've ended up back at its beginning. While Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) insists they walk it a second time, Jen (Sasheer Zamata) and Billy (Joe Locke) protest, with the latter putting on his previously abandoned boots and condemning the Road out loud for all it’s put them through. As soon as he slips his foot in, though, he wakes up in a body bag inside an empty room – and is shortly joined by Agatha and Jen.
"These are grow lights," Jen says, clocking the neatly-arranged pink beams emanating from the ceiling. "Are we supposed to grow something here?" "In a place with no soil or water? It certainly has the irritating sting of a Witches' Road trial," snaps Agatha.
For their final challenge, it's appropriately stark, though some may not enjoy the lack of visual flair that made episodes 4 and 7 such series' highlights. After Agatha ribs her for being bound, Billy argues that Jen, who's busy trying to think up a way to save the trio, doesn't actually need power, noting how she successfully rescued him and Agatha using old-fashioned potions earlier on. All this leads to a rather rushed realization that Agatha was responsible for Jen’s binding.
"It was the 1920s, I did the odd spell for bank notes. Hell, the patriarchy really shelled out to shush a lady," Agatha confesses, claiming she didn't know Jen was a victim of her dodgy employment. Convenient, really, given that Jen's wish at the end of the Road was to get her powers back… She performs an incantation on Agatha, which shatters her metaphorical shackles, falling to the floor when she realizes she's got her magic back, and vanishes. Her appearance in the episode is brief, but Zamata certainly makes the most of her screentime, beautifully distilling Jen's heartbreak, relief, and joy in just a few facial expressions. When she pops up later, having crawled her way topside into Westview, and uses her powers to fly off, I may have had a tear in her eye, and it's a testament to the Saturday Night Live star's work.
Messy motivations
Back in the "morgue", Agatha helps Billy look for his twin Tommy telepathically, and guide him into another young boy's dead body – despite previously agreeing with Rio (Aubrey Plaza) that she'd get him to surrender himself for "disrupting the sacred balance". When the pair complete the task, Billy vanishes, too, leaving behind a crack in the floor that exposes the dirt beneath. A lonely Agatha comforts herself with Nicholas' lock of hair. Inside her locket, however, she finds a seed, which she plants. When a flower blooms from it, a door out of the room appears and she scarpers; only to find herself back at her house in Westview.
It's at that point that the double-bill starts rattling through the story at breakneck speed and while it's undoubtedly so fun to see Hahn and Plaza having a diva off onscreen, it just doesn't really make sense. "Why don't you want me?!" a cackling Rio shouts at Agatha, before threatening to kill her "by death of a thousand cuts". It's so jarringly vindictive, given what we've seen of the character so far. Perhaps Rio and Death are two distinct personalities occupying the same body? But if they are, the show does nothing to support that theory.
It's a real shame that instead of providing some sort of closure for the obvious angst between the former lovers, the show flattens them into one-dimensional antagonists. "She is my scar," a sorrowful Rio said of Agatha in episode 4. What's the point of setting all that up if you're not going to bother exploring it? Plaza sneaks in the odd glimpse of tenderness and emotion, but they're quickly glossed over in favor of thrills and spectacle.
Fortunately for Agatha, Billy – in his full Wiccan get-up, another sensational look from costume designer Daniel Selon – returns to help fend Death off, with the more action-heavy scene culminating in him offering to pass over so that Agatha needn't die. In a shocking moment, Agatha tells Death to take the boy up on his word, but her ruthless resolve is shaken when Billy says, "Is this what happened to Nicky?" With that, she kisses Death, and dies. It's effectively dramatic stuff, and the trio of actors play it well, it's just hard to grasp the 'why' of it all.
Hahn-tastic performance
That confusion is only amplified in episode 9, when flashbacks reveal that Agatha didn't sacrifice Nicholas, like witchy folk have believed for centuries. Turns out, he was due to die in childbirth, but Rio postponed his death after Agatha begged for more time with him. In the six subsequent years the pair spent together, Agatha weaponizes Nicky's innocence to trick other witches and steal their power; a scam she continues after his death, as sorceresses approach her throughout history and ask her to assist them in walking the Witches' Road.
You see, Agatha and Nicky were the ones who wrote the song that is said to conjure the Road. In a montage, we see Agatha tricking different witches across different eras, going through the motions of summoning the Road before deliberately making them angry and fatally syphoning their gifts. Much like how WandaVision pulled the rug out from under us towards its end, it's an exciting, jaw-dropping twist that cements Agatha's villainy and recontextualizes all that we've seen leading up to that point, even if, again, it doesn't really stack up.
If there's one thing that can be said of Agatha All Along, it's that Hahn is perfect as Agatha; it's hard to think of any other performer who can flit so seamlessly between camp and comedic and heartwrenching pathos. From episode 9's final few minutes, it's hard to ignore the fact that the show was just a vehicle to introduce Locke's Billy, but if the cost of that is nine episodes of Hahn at her best, it seems like a reasonable price to pay. It's no trading your only son for the Darkhold…
Try to apply any sort of logic or deeper meaning to Agatha All Along's conclusion and it falls apart like a house of tarot cards, but it still makes for a good, spooky time this Halloween.
All episodes of Agatha All Along are streaming now. Itching for more? Here's our breakdown as to whether or not an Agatha All Along season 2 is on the horizon.
For more on the wider MCU, check out our guide to all of the upcoming Marvel movies and shows or get up to speed with our breakdown of the Marvel timeline.
