Billy and Tommy, Agatha’s fate and more

SPOILER WARNING: This story includes important plot details from episodes 8 and 9 of “Agatha All Along,” currently streaming on Disney+.

Agatha Harkness, the witch without witches, and Billy Maximoff, the son of the Scarlet Witch, reached the end of the Witches’ Road in the two-part finale of “Agatha All Along” – and very little was what it seemed at first glance .

The episodes – titled “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End” and “Maiden Mother Crone” – revealed the truth about how the Witches’ Way came to be, who wrote the ballad that created it, and what really happened to them happened. Agatha’s son Nicholas Scratch. Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) helped Billy (Joe Locke) locate his twin brother Tommy, Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata) discovered how her power had been bound for 100 years, and Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), aka Lady Death, ended up collecting (almost ) all the bodies she wanted.

But almost none of it unfolded at first glance. It turns out that the Witches’ Way isn’t real, that the Ballad means nothing, that Tommy’s whereabouts remain unknown, that Jennifer was completely wrong about who was responsible for binding her, and that Nicholas’s tragic fate had nothing to do with the Darkhold of Mephisto. (Probably. More on this later.)

The sleight of hand behind these revelations cleverly evoked a kind of narrative witchcraft, and how we expect sorcery to reveal the truth hidden behind the veil of our expectations. Good, some people’s expectations. If you’re the kind of viewer who likes to scour the internet for fan theories — or hypothesize a few of your own — then you’ve probably already come across some, if not all, of the twists in these final episodes. And yet ‘Agatha All Along’ still dramatized them with so much humor and attention that it felt more satisfying than disappointing to hear that these theories were correct.

Additionally, the resolutions in this story also raise several intriguing questions about the future of Billy, Agatha, Jennifer, and Rio. Here are the main highlights:

Jennifer discovers that Agatha has tied her up

While stuck in the final trial, Jennifer discovers that, instead of a nefarious Boston obstetrician, she was accidentally tied up by Agatha while moving through the city. Enraged, Jennifer immediately snatches a lock of Agatha’s hair and performs the dissolving ritual, which mainly consists of repeating “You have nothing” to Agatha’s face over and over again. Once she regains her powers, Jennifer disappears; the next moment we see her, she’s climbing out of the ground just outside Westview and flying off to places unknown.

Her future within the MCU is vague; in the comics, she crosses paths with Doctor Strange, but she doesn’t really cross paths with any major MCU characters other than the 2022 Disney+ special “Werewolf by Night.” But given her affection for Billy – and her seemingly cosmic connection to Agatha – Jennifer could easily resurface soon.

Billy created the Witches’ Way

Just as Billy’s mother Wanda was unknowingly responsible for concocting the sitcom world of ‘WandaVision’ as a way to escape her grief, it turns out that Billy was so desperate for a way to find his brother Tommy that he summoned all the witches . ‘Away yourself. All the details – Nancy Myers’ beach house, the Ouija board horror house, the fairytale castle – came from pop culture details found throughout Billy’s immaculately tidy bedroom. To Billy’s horror, this means that the deadly nature of the trials, which led to the deaths of Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp), Alice (Ali Ahn), and Lilia (Patti LuPone), were also his fault.

This presents some fascinating wrinkles for Billy’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He really is just as powerful and just as dangerous as his mother, and the guilt he bears for the death of his coven (though Agatha points out that she Alice, and that Lilia chose to die) will likely stick with how Billy chooses to perform his magic in the future.

Agatha wrote the Ballad with her son

Most of ‘Maiden Mother Crone’ was spent dramatizing Agatha’s life with her son Nicholas in the 1750s. When Rio appears while Agatha is in the middle of giving birth to him, Agatha pleads for her son’s life; Rio says the only thing she can offer her is more time, but she doesn’t say for how long. For the next six years, Agatha uses Nicholas in her cons to steal the life force of other witches, and they write a song together about walking along “the winding road” that eventually becomes “the witches’ road,” where it begins to change. become a legend. Ultimately, Rio takes Nicholas’s life at night, from an unspecified illness (by the end he looks sickly and has an ominous cough). Agatha remains devastated and more willing than ever to manipulate other witches (who now use the Ballad as bait) to tap into their power – another example of how ‘Agatha All along’ turns the ‘trick’ into ‘magic trick’ investigates.

However, there are still some unanswered questions about Nicholas. When he is born, Agatha notes how she created him “from thin air” rather than through a spell or incantation – but who Nicholas’s father is, if he is conceived at all, remains unknown. Likewise, it’s unclear whether Rio is acting on his own volition or under directives from a more powerful force, such as Mephisto – the Marvel comics villain who seems to constantly haunt the Maximoff family. Speaking of moving…

Agatha gives her life to protect Billy – and also to pursue him

In their final confrontation with Rio, Billy offers his life to save Agatha’s – and Agatha happily accepts, until Billy telepathically asks Agatha if that’s how Nicholas died. The memory is enough to make Agatha realize that she can save Billy’s life in the way she couldn’t save Nicholas’s – since Rio took him away at night, she never even got to say goodbye. She kisses Rio, falls to the ground and dies.

But – Happy Halloween! – she comes back as a ghost, but still can’t go to the afterlife to meet Nicholas. Instead, she returns to Billy, who is not only the son she never had, but also the partner in magic she could never keep.

Tommy is still alive, but in a terrible life

In “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End”, Agatha helps Billy connect to Tommy’s spirit and place him in a new body. But unlike Billy, Tommy’s new life is harsh: the body he inhabits drowns in a cruel swimming pool prank, and Billy realizes in panic that “there’s no one to love him!” He has no one!” (In the comics, Tommy – reincarnated as Tommy Shepherd – indeed leads a brutal life before reuniting with Billy.)

At the end of the series, ghost Agatha and Billy went out into the world to find Tommy, a storyline that expect to be picked up in the upcoming Vision series with Paul Bettany or sometime between now and the next two “Avengers.” movies – as Tommy, aka Speed, is an integral part of the Young Avengers in the comics.