There will be major spoilers for the entirety of the Disney+ series Agatha All Along in this review, especially the gay bits. Proceed with caution.
After a very emotional two months, last night the final two episodes of Agatha All Along dropped, and they were DOOZIES. They were emotional, action-packed, and most importantly, so very gay.
Episode 8 begins with the answer to one of the questions we’ve been asking for weeks: Where was Rio after Agatha’s trial? Now that we know for sure that Rio is Death incarnate, we know some of our suspicions were correct: She had stayed behind to ferry Alice to whatever is next for witches when they die.
In the wake of Lilia’s sacrifice, Billy and Jen are also trying to wrap their heads around the Rio is Death reveal. Billy says, in disbelief, “Agatha’s ex…is Death?” and Jen confirms and says it tracks, which it absolutely does.
Agatha and Rio face off a few times in this episode. First on the Road, which is a fight that is so ex-coded. They poke at each other’s wounds, Rio saying Agatha is walking with another woman’s son, that she’s gotten special treatment like no one else in history, Agatha saying it didn’t feel particularly special to her. In the end, they come to a compromise: Agatha has to get Billy to surrender himself to Death, since Rio considers him an abomination since he took a body that wasn’t his and perverted the natural order of things. In return, Rio is to leave Agatha alone, and not come for her in death.
Basically, she wants to go no contact.
Rio agrees to these terms and exits by knifing a slit in the set backdrop. It’s an epic move, frankly.
Photo by Chuck Zlotnick. © 2024 MARVEL.
In this episode we also learn that Agatha inadvertently is the one who bound Jen’s powers, so Jen unbinds from her. When Jen starts chanting, “You hold nothing,” Agatha first responds with flirting and jokes but soon realizes she has to stay quiet and watches solemnly as Jen takes her power back. Her power is pink and pretty and as soon as she’s back to her true self, she vanishes from the road entirely. Safe.
Next up is Billy, so Agatha helps him find a body for Tommy. At first, Billy is afraid he’s killing the kid to find a body for Tommy, but when Tommy is in the new body, and Billy disappears from The Road, Agatha says sadly, “Sometimes boys die.” And if her delivery of that line doesn’t get her an Emmy, I swear.
Agatha plants a dandelion seed and gets out of the last trial, and finds herself in her own backyard in Westview, where Rio is sitting on her roof cackling, calling her “my love.” Agatha realizes she doesn’t have her powers, and she’s pissed. She got Billy off the Road, like she said she would, but it’s not enough for Rio.
They fight again, but this time it’s physical. Agatha uses what she learned from her coven — a protection spell, a healing spell, and Lilia’s divination — to stand her ground, while Rio keeps saying she knows Agatha loves her, keeps asking why she doesn’t want her. Eventually Billy steps in and saves the day, and at first Agatha is willing to give Billy up to her, but Billy evokes Nicky’s name, so Agatha decides to step in and save him.
And she does this by kissing Rio square on the mouth. And while she does so, she takes command of Death’s powers and Agatha, herself, dies.
“All that I know is I don’t know how to be something you miss.”
The thing about this is, we’ve seen Agatha take powers before. We’ve seen her trick and provoke and just take take take. She didn’t NEED to kiss Rio. That part was a choice. And we say “Thank you, Agatha.” (And thank you Jac Schaeffer. I’ve said a lot of thank yous to Jack Schaeffer in the past two months.) Agatha and Rio kiss like they’re drinking water after a year in the desert, with decades or maybe even centuries of built up tension and longing and heartache and love. Hard, complicated, messy love. They way they kiss, almost desperately, you can tell it definitely isn’t their first time, but they kiss like it might be the last.
“I never thought we’d have a last kiss. Never imagined we’d end like this.”
Agatha dies in her backyard, and her garden returns her to the earth. The natural cycle of life, just like Rio wanted, though she doesn’t look particularly happy about it. She lets Billy go, and he pulls up his hood as he sulks through Westview in Wanda’s footsteps, then drives home.
The next episode, the finale, begins with a flashback. We see Agatha giving birth in a forest in 1750, when a young Rio shows up. Agatha says, “Please let him live, my love,” but all Rio can offer her is time.
Agatha names her son Nicholas and tells him she made him not with magic or a spell; she made him from scratch. (Get it? Nicholas Scratch?)
As the years go on, Agatha and Nicky kill witches to survive. Nicky doesn’t understand why they can’t just live WITH the witches, and Agatha says it’s because they will kill them. Nicky doesn’t get it, but Agatha has trauma. Her very first coven turned on her and tried to kill her, and that coven included her actual mother. So she kills to survive.
At one point, Nicky asks his mother to use her “purple” to make him food but she says she can’t do that. She can do a lot of things, but she cannot do that. She also cannot heal him, protect him, or divine when “she” will return. All skills given to her by her future coven on the Road.
The duo make up a song to pass the time over their final weeks together, and that song becomes the Ballad of the Witches’ Road.
Before Agatha was Mother and Mommi she was just mama.
One day, Nicky decides he doesn’t want to kill any witches, and that night, Rio comes for him while Agatha sleeps. I don’t think the timing of that was a coincidence; perhaps giving her bodies bought Agatha more time with Nicky. But then again, it could be that the reason Nicky didn’t want to kill witches is because he felt so ill. I saw a few people online suggest that Rio came while Agatha was sleeping because she wouldn’t be able to say no to her if she begged for more time again. Rio has Nicky give Agatha two kisses (one for her, perhaps) before he takes Death’s hand in his and walks into the afterlife with her.
“Because I could not stop for Death—(s)he kindly stopped for me.”
In her grief, Agatha starts using the Ballad to trap witches and steal their powers. And in her defense, she ends up in a self-fulfilling prophecy. She never attacks first, not magically. When they finish the Ballad and a door doesn’t appear, she starts insulting the witches, calling them worthless, accusing them of being fake witches. And inevitably, they all attack her. So she steals their powers. We never get to see what would happen if it didn’t work, and the witches just said “aw shucks, thanks for trying” and went on their merry way. Though I suppose most covens seeking the Road have darker ambitions, or deeper desperation, than most.
The second half of this episode is Billy realizing he invented The Road. We knew there were clues around his bedroom, but we couldn’t be sure how much of it was just him unknowingly collecting things that made up The Road or what, but it turns out he was, indeed, Maximoffing the whole thing. As he comes to this realization, Agatha appears to him as a ghost. She claims she didn’t sacrifice herself for him, that she took a “calculated risk.” Which maybe means she knew Rio would hold up her end of the bargain and not show up to ferry her through the door so she would be able to linger as a ghost a little longer.
Billy is spiraling about killing people on the Road, WITH the Road, but Agatha says that by witch math, he technically saved a life. She intended to kill them all in her basement, but instead Jen got her magic back and is flying free, far from Westview.
Billy does some magic to try to banish Agatha “into Rio’s toxic embrace” but Agatha stops him. He asks why she won’t die and she confesses she can’t face Nicky, not yet. So Billy takes pity on her and they come to a truce. They say maybe they can be a “coven of two” and help each other out.
The season ends with Agatha saying to Billy, “Let’s go find Tommy.”
Oh to be haunted by Agatha Harkness.
What made my particular group chat lose our minds about this, is that it’s not a neat little wrapped up button the way a lot of these Disney+ Marvel series are. The ending of this season screams for more Agatha. And given the rousing success of the series — which was so wildly popular the official Marvel twitter made little twitter icons specifically for the queer ship that is half Agatha and half Rio whether you used the #AgathaAllAlong OR the #Agathario hashtag — I would be surprised if this was the last we saw of Agatha Harkness. I don’t know if it would be in a spinoff of this spinoff show (Wanda > Agatha > Maximoff Boys), or a movie, or what it would look like, but I have a feeling this story isn’t done.
And what’s fun about that is anything could happen. Rio could decide to give Agatha her body back, Rio could decide she doesn’t hate ghosts anymore and date one, Wanda could come back and revive Agatha as a thank you for taking care of her boy(s?), it’s anyone’s guess! All I know is that Agatha Harkness and Death herself are both queer women, and they could show up at any point in the future of Marvel.
And hopefully, because of how much this show ties into the MCU as a whole, they won’t be able to wash their hands of it and pretend it never existed in a few years like they did with Runaways, which was retroactively declared MCU canon and yet isn’t available to stream anywhere on the internet, and was the gayest thing in Marvel to date until it vanished. But now we have Agatha and Rio, and hopefully we get to see them gaying things up again soon.
Overall, Agatha All Along was an amazing ride. It was hilarious and devastating and magical and wonderful and emotional. It gave us all the delicious fun and camp of queer witches, but also grounded them with real emotional depth. The character of Death could have easily been a caricature, but instead she was complex with deep love for Agatha, remorse over parts of her job she wishes she never had to do, and desperation for Agatha to love her back. Between Wandavision and Agatha All Along, we also got to see all parts of Agatha: maiden, mother, crone. We got to see her at her most vulnerable and scared, we got to see her as a loving mother who would literally make a deal with Death to protect him, we saw the masks she wore for others, the walls she built to protect her heart, and we got to see her break down those walls, just a little, for a boy who made her son’s dream of a Witches’ Road come true. And Agatha and Rio’s relationship with each other, their queerness, was inextricable from the plot. It was centuries of love and lust and loss and longing. I do wish we got to see how they met, since Agatha was already calling Rio “my love” the day her son was born, so it was before 1750. Was it when Agatha found herself surrounded by bodies in Salem 50 years prior? I would have loved to see how their romance started, their honeymoon phase, see how Rio knows all of the scars on Agatha’s body without even looking, before Agatha became Rio’s own scar.
That said, there will hopefully be more time for that. Now that Marvel sees that a queer project can indeed succeed, maybe they’ll start greenlighting more of them, instead of shoving King Valkyrie half in the closet, or relegating them to background characters (or tucking them into very long movies that for some reason people hated but I personally enjoyed). Agatha and Billy being a dream queer team, with Death by their side, is a show I’d watch. I’m just saying.
I loved this show a lot, and will be thinking about it for a long time. I loved the weekly drops, because I’m a little old school and as much as I love a binge most of the time, there’s something about appointment viewing and watching a show (virtually) “with” my friends. I loved theorizing and overanalyzing “clues” with my friends and the internet at large in betweeen epsiodes. (It temporarily filled the TV Detective hole that develops between seasons of Yellowjackets.) I love that 90% of the show was made up of strong, smart, (hot), powerful women and one (1) queer teenager. I love that adult men hardly factor into this story at all, with the one exception of the minor role of Billy’s seemingly lovely human/adoptive father and some stray Westview residents. I love the humor, the heart, the sets, the COSTUMES. And I love the Ballad of the Witches’ Road and am not even sorry that it’s likely going to end up in my Spotify Wrapped. I think this show could be a turning point for Marvel to stop de-prioritizing its female-fronted media and stop pandering to the cis male straight white guys it used to center. Just like the success of Black Panther opened the door for a Black Captain America, and upcoming series like Ironheart and Eyes of Wakanda, hopefully the success of Agatha All Along will help them be open to more queer characters. There’s room for everyone’s stories in a world as wide and vast as the MCU.
If you need me, I’ll be rewatching Wandavision and Agatha All Along until we find out where to see Agatha Harkness next. Wherever it may bend, I’ll see you at the end.
Agatha All Along is streaming in its entirety on Disney+.
So much happens in these two episodes! I also loved the weekly release of this show and wish that they had decoupled these final two episodes.. can you imagine sitting for 7 days with the cliffhanger ending on Teen’s face realizing that he created/summoned the Road??
When Rio tells Agatha she’s gotten special treatment like no one else in history, I (later on) understood that to be a reference to Rio giving Agatha those 6 years with her son…. like, Rio did this thing for Agatha that she never does for anyone, because Rio loves her, and instead of being grateful for this gift, Agatha hates Rio for taking him at all.
And I really did interpret it as a gift of love from Rio to Agatha –– not as transactional, as some have suggested (and which you maybe imply, Valerie, that Agatha is siphoning bodies to Rio to sort of stave her off coming for Nicky). It seemed more that he was already ailing (he’s coughing at the tavern), and Rio is aware that if he continues to challenge Agatha about how she moves through the world (…to put it mildly! meaning: as basically a self-interested mass murderer) their relationship will become more fraught. In a way, I took it as another gift of love that Rio takes him then. She allows Agatha to have a pure, effortless love for her child, and happy, loving memories.
Even the fact that Rio appears as this green-clad “maiden” – first to Agatha when she’s in labor, and then when she comes to take Nicky –– and she is so gentle with him. Compare that to how she appears to everyone else, with her death mask and weapons and ironic verve.
This is one thing I love about their dynamic on the show –– the show seems to take seriously that at the very least Rio’s love for Agatha is really. Agatha’s reciprocity feels a little more suspect give her unpredictable malice and manipulativeness. And surely Rio does benefit from being Agatha’s consort, given the number of deaths she wracks up. But I feel like the show takes that love seriously. And in kissing Rio like that when she chooses death, Agatha is not only giving herself over to Rio and whatever their thorny history is, but also to herself––facing the thing that has haunted her (her own death).
5 star comment! I came away feeling really confused by Agatha’s 180 from the tenderness of the end of episode 4, banter in episode 5, and “I like the bad boys” in episode 7 to outright rejection of Rio in episode 8. My initial and maybe ungenerous reaction was that they were shoehorning this conflict for a big “battle” for finale sake. But you’re right, the unpredictable malice is kind of how Agatha behaves around everyone. And maybe we can read Agatha’s rejection of Rio as simply her overwhelming fear of facing her son in the afterlife and projected anger at Rio for making her do it (eventually). But I’m also kind of confused why Rio wanted Agatha dead at all, even from episode 1. I think that’s what the finale flashback didn’t answer. I also read that Nicky was just ill, poor boy, and was going to die of natural causes at birth as babies sometimes do, but Rio gave him what time she could.
Valerie your review/recap makes me feel optimistic that this isn’t the end for Agatha and Rio, and hopefully, like in the comics, Agatha can get her (it must be Kathryn Hahn’s) body back. Also because Aubrey Plaza is a terrible liar when she said “no [Marvel] hasn’t talked to me about anything” (coming back).
Totally agree with what you add here!
On the point of why Rio wanted Agatha dead at all: with the caveat that I know nothing about the comics/backstory of Agatha or about the particular logic of how magic works in the Marvel world, I understood that Agatha has been able to live a very, very long time –– even for a witch –– (and possibly also to retain her more youthful appearance?) because of how she consistently saps the magic and life-force of so many witches. And Agatha used black magic spells from the Darkhold (the book that Agatha had but Wanda took in Wandavision, as I understand it, not having yet watched that show) to sort of stay ahead of death.
So I think Rio needs Agatha to die for the same reason she wants to take Teen, and the same reason she had to take Nicky: because it’s their time, because none of them can escape death, but all (in their own ways) have, at least for a period of time.
it is so incredibly fucking predictable that Marvel’s first significant gay storyline after 16 years of ignoring us culminates in a kiss of death.
Between that, Agatha being a boymom and killing scores of women, and the show apparently just being a setup for Teen, I was really disappointed in the ending.
Sadly i feel the same as you, after being super stoked in the beginning. Reframing Agatha as mainly a mom, of boys at that, having her mass murder witches, when in fact witches were mass murdered by men, a show focusing on queer, femme and non white characters where basically everybody is dead at the end (pulling a Rogue One )…
I first assumed Agatha as witch killer might be referring to comics Agatha, but i could not find that she murdered them, after quick research (i might be wrong). Also, the sappy mother story has nothing to do with the comic character. Her comics son is an evil sorcerer whom she fights at some point.
So i really don’t get where this is coming from. The story itself gave me nothing. It just ruined the character for me. It’s not even clear why she kills that many witches. It’s just a weird choice by the authors.
Ok, i might change my mind a little bit, if the intention was that Rio is Nicholas other parent.
“Maiden, mother, crone” – we saw Agatha be all three. That’s why the story needed her to also be a mother.
Rio took lesbian dramatics to a whole new very terriyfing but also oddly sexy level. That whole backyard scene had my jaw sitting forgotten on the floor, it was so brilliantly executed. I love how throughout the finale, they hinted at just how long Rio and Agatha have been lovers. It really adds more depth and tragedy to their current circumstances, and I know it’ll probably never happen but I would love a spinoff or stand-alone film that explores the origin story of their love – how they met, how and when they fell in love, all the chaos they inevitably caused etc.
Can I very respectfully ask Autostraddle to stop putting spoiler images on the home page? I was waiting for the kettle to boil so I could sit down to enjoy the show and had a look at the site. There was the image for this piece – a massive spoiler.
I am saying this as constructive criticism as I really enjoy the site.
I was so disappointed. Please remember, some of us live on the other side of the world and the time difference means the shows can drop while we’re in work or asleep etc, so we can only get a chance to watch it hours after you guys can.
I agree, the homepage was a spoiler for me too before I had a chance to watch!
Seconded! With so much appreciation for the work this staff does, please consider the fact that the spoiler warning message at the top of the article comes in too late given the title and top picture already give away the spoiler of biggest interest to the readership. By the time we get to see the spoiler warning, we’ve already been deprived of the choice to avoid spoilers.
Thirded! After a whole week’s wait, I was gutted to have it spoilt this way!
Can we talk about Nicky saying “I have to go home to my mom” the night Rio comes for him!????
Variety just published an interview with showrunner Jac Schaeffer the offers a bit more insight into the Rio/Agatha backstory (as well as some other aspects of Agatha and the show).
Interviewer: Shifting gears to Rio, did you have more of the backstories worked out of what her relationship with Agatha was like?
Jac Schaeffer: We did. We talked a lot about their meet cute. We had these really pretty visuals of Agatha killing people and then seeing Rio across the bodies, like that line, “They met over corpses.” I mean, I saw it in my mind. It was really beautiful and also quite funny. And then the room took it in a direction that then they lived together in a cottage, and we talked at length about it, to the point of, “Is Rio Nicky’s father?” We went down those paths, and they were very gratifying to explore. I think there’s more story there, but we were already biting off so much with the Nicky sequence that was vital to this story, that it didn’t feel like we could flash all the way back to Rio and Agatha before Nicky and then get into Nicky. It sort of threatened to tip the boat over, but I think all those discussions informed what you do see of their relationship.
From the Deadline interview:
SCHAEFFER: Yeah, we did a lot of work in the room on that and trying to decide how much of that we would feature — who, what, how did they meet? We talked a lot about their meet cute and once they fell in love, what that looked like, and we deliberated on showing that. You never know how shows will be received. I think watching people fall so in love and in lust with Agatha and Rio, I was a little bit like, ‘Ooh, we don’t really service that backstory.’ I feel like those are stories for another day. I look at the show and I’m like, ‘There’s a lot of story there that we can revisit.’ And the WandaVision universe, of which I feel Agatha All Along is a part, they are inherently non linear.
https://deadline.com/2024/11/agatha-all-along-ending-explained-showrunner-interview-1236163889/#comments
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I actually really liked the portrayal of Agatha’s parenting. It felt unusually relatable to me, in that she clearly had a caring relationship with Nicky, but it didn’t automatically make her more femme or socially acceptable. In comics characters who are queer or gender-nonconforming are so rare to begin with, and female characters with kids always seem to double down on the cosher normatively. I wish it went without saying, but I also appreciated that getting pregnant and having a kid was clearly her choice and it was either just her decision or something that may have included Rio somehow, but not a cis dude.
I’m a bit weirded out by people’s concern that she’s a “boy mom.” Like, “boy mom” can be a weird toxic social identity that people take on, but it isn’t an automatic result of giving birth to a boy, and I didn’t feel like Agatha had any of those traits. I also don’t really feel like her affection for Billy is maternal. *shrug*