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+.
