It’s the witching hour, and that means it’s time to talk about Agatha All Along. Of course I had to bring back the original witch in my life. Wait, that didn’t come out quite right. Mrs. Know-It-All is back, and we’ll sort the rest of that out later.
The penultimate episode of Agatha All Along did not disappoint. Right after the show finished I went online to let everybody know the review was coming, and the reactions were everything from “I was in tears” to “how could you do it” to “I can’t believe it.” And I thought, man, everybody got it absolutely right.
If you haven’t seen the show yet, please go watch it. We’re going to spoil the heck out of this one.
Hot on the Heels of Billy’s Week
Last week we had Billy, William, whatever we’re calling him, come into his own. We got his whole backstory, we got to see him bury Agatha and chuck the two witches, and then Agatha shows up at the end. This one picks up very nearly right there, with Lilia falling. My immediate assumption was that she was falling from the mud and this was simply the next moment.
This entire episode messes with time, and it gets into your head. Lilia does divination. By the nature of her gift, that’s what she’s all about. So this is her episode, the trial they deal with is her trial, and because we’re seeing the episode through her eyes, we get to see what it’s like to be in her head.
Remember all those episodes where she’d suddenly snap into a moment and we didn’t know what was going on? We assumed she was getting visions. They were definitely leaning into that stereotype of the crazy divination lady who sees things and doesn’t know what she’s looking at, so she says something random. She’s walking down the street and it’s “don’t go home on Thursday.” This episode puts all those pieces together, and it does it beautifully.
For all intents and purposes it should have been confusing. In the beginning it was, and we were kind of like, what? Then a light bulb goes off in your head. Even just a little bit, and you realize it’s nowhere near as confusing as you thought it was going to be.
The Flow of Time Is an Illusion
The way Lilia sees the world is broken into pieces because of how her mind works. She even says it to Jen at one point: the flow of time is an illusion, and most people don’t realize that. What it turns out is that she’s living and existing in multiple periods at once. When she was a little girl, her older mind was in there, seeing through the eyes of her older self. Same thing with all these other moments. It was fragmented, and we find out why it was fragmented.
Jen is in her corner right out of the gate. She has all these holes that have been filled in, and she asks Lilia how she knows this stuff. Lilia tells her the son of the Scarlet Witch kicked them off the road. “Teen is the son of the Scarlet Witch? How do you know?” “You told me.” Then a little later we go to the moment when Lilia wakes up from the fall, wakes up Jen, and tells her. They keep hopping around those points.
There are also the moments where she keeps flashing back to her childhood. “You are visiting. How long has it been?” “Centuries.” She gets to see, and I don’t want to say her mother, but a sister, a witch who taught her tarot early on. Mrs. Know-It-All pointed something out that I didn’t notice the first time. This is the half dead lady Lilia saw back around Episode 3, when she was going through the rooms and saw death for the first time. That’s who the lady was. She was part of the coven Lilia had when she was younger.
I love the fact that the lady says to her, so where are you right now, how old are you, how many years has it been since this moment? She gets it, because obviously she’s the more experienced diviner, and so she’s able to talk to Lilia like that. The whole time Lilia is saying she couldn’t do this and couldn’t do that, and the lady tells her she can totally do it. It’s just something she tells herself. It’s how she gets in her own way.
The Trial, the Tarot and the Swords
The trial itself is very fantasy. They’re all dressed as witches out of stories and myths. Billy is Maleficent. Jen is the old witch from Snow White. Agatha is the witch from The Wizard of Oz. And I’m going to say Lilia is Glinda the Good Witch.
In the very beginning it’s just Agatha and Billy in the room where the trial’s happening, and there’s a table with writing on it. Very important. “Your path winds out of time.” This is a timey-wimey episode if there ever was one.
They immediately think it’s going to be divination, that they need to use the tarot, that tarot is the trial. Agatha’s whole mentality is that tarot is a scam. It’s a hustle, no different than three-card monte as far as she’s concerned. Billy has a very different mindset: it’s about what you feel, what your intuition says, the interpretation, the whole bit. Every time they put a card down on the table, a sword falls from the ceiling. At one point Agatha tries to prove her point by just slamming cards down, and swords are falling everywhere. They all survive it.
At some point Lilia and Jen ended up under the ground. Lilia told Jen all of it, they walked where they needed to walk, they avoided running into the Salem Seven (who do come back later), and eventually they got to where they needed to be to join Agatha and Billy in the trial.
When Jen and Lilia come flying through the bookcase, we get my favorite exchange of the episode. “What are you wearing?” “I don’t want to talk about it.” “What am I wearing? This is so demeaning.” “Hey, focus up. We can be culturally offended later.” I really loved that. That was perfect.
“I Am the Traveler”
That’s when everything really comes together. At first Lilia thinks she has to read Billy. After a couple of trips through her own mind, hopping through events, she realizes she’s been doing it wrong. “My path winds out of time. I was reading for the wrong person. I am the traveler.”
It’s her trial, and then everything makes sense. As she’s doing the cards, every moment we thought was crazy lines up, because they did such a good job making it look like she was losing her mind. They really made her look like the fraud in the little mall storefront who sells fortunes.
For those of you playing at home who were on Nerd Fights last week saying “I can’t believe she knew the future and didn’t tell him,” it was confirmed this week. She knew the future and didn’t tell him. “I remember you now. Your bar mitzvah.” “Are you the one who cast the sigil on me?” “I saw what was going to happen to you that night. I saw who you were and who you would become. I knew you’d need time.”
At one point she tells Jen this used to happen when she was younger, it stopped, and now it’s happening again. Jen asks why, maybe because she’s older? Lilia says no, I think it’s because I’m closer to the end. Jen says, of the road, where your power’s going to be back? And Lilia says no.
You knew immediately what was going down. That’s when everyone started crying, let’s be for real. We all knew it was coming.
Then she does her own reading. All season she has randomly blurted out cards, the Three of Wands, this, that, and here they are, in order. “The Queen of Cups. Three of Pentacles. The Knight of Wands. High Priestess. Three of Swords. Tower reversed.” As she’s doing it, everything begins to operate the way it’s supposed to, until she gets to the very end. The Tower is confusion, it’s chaos, unless it’s flipped, which it was. She puts it down, poof, the door opens. “Lilia, you did it. You saved us.”
As they’re all getting out, she tells Jen to go. “I loved being a witch.” And she slams the Iron Maiden closed, the one the doorway was hidden in, and faces down the Salem Seven by herself.
I love that they took this old lady who felt like she was at the end of whatever road she’d been on, who played it safe her entire life after shutting out everything she had, and had her face down the Salem Seven. What she did was amazing. I’m not going to spoil that piece for you. You need to watch the episode to see how she defeats them. It’s pretty incredible and worth the price of admission. Suffice it to say we do revisit her falling again.
The episode was so good we watched it twice.
Am I William or Am I Billy
When Lilia is first about to read Billy, she tells him he has to ask a question. It has to be relevant. Agatha jumps in: “Teen must ask her how we’re getting out of here.” “The question must be vital to his journey on Earth.” “I’d say it’s pretty vital. Lilia, can you just deal?”
And he asks: am I William or am I Billy?
That question got me, because early on Agatha and Billy are walking and she says, so, you have any questions for your old babysitter, your mom’s old best friend? And he says she’s not my mom, I have a mom. Meaning Wanda wasn’t his mom.
Whether Wanda made Billy Maximoff is settled. What I’m chewing on is which kid we’re looking at. Is he an angry, upset teenager because his mom created him out of nothing, and technically she’s not his, or he’s not hers? Or is it that he has a mom, the Kaplan mom, and for three years he had to pretend to be their son, to the point that he started to care for them, almost like a foster kid or an adopted kid?
We said it last week too. William before the accident wasn’t the same. How do you, as a parent, deal with your son’s personality completely changing after an accident? They had to lean on it being the accident itself. And in real life there are people who deal with exactly that. Areas of the brain get damaged and parts of your personality change. It’s behavior that comes from a traumatic brain injury. I loved that they wanted to address it.
Agatha kind of took a backseat in this episode, which I thought was interesting. Except for when she’s saying she likes bad boys.
Rio Is Death, and the Line Lilia Actually Heard
Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. It’s confirmed who Rio is.
Her entire life Lilia has been avoiding parts of her gift because she saw death everywhere. Death, death, death. That’s one of the reasons she ran from it for so long. Her original coven, the ones who raised her, she told them: I see all of you dying of a plague. They didn’t listen. And the lady in the past says to her, that comes for us all. “You say it like it’s a comfort.” “It is what we all have in common. It’s the only thing we have in common.”
That was an awesome line.
Then we revisit the moment Lilia first wakes up. “Who is that?” “Don’t you recognize me, Lilia? In the end, all roads lead to me.”
And we replay the moment in the music booth. What we heard Rio say to Agatha was that she gets the pleasure of watching Agatha do what she does best, which is kill all the witches around her. What Lilia heard was “you get your power and I get my bodies.”
It all clicks. When Lilia grabs her by the arm later and says don’t think I forgot what you said in the recording booth, she’s talking about that line, the one we never heard. That’s a fascinating insight. She’s Death, for sure.
Where the Finale Goes
Next week we’re looking at Agatha, Billy and Jen. I don’t know about you, but I think Jen’s not long for this world.
Billy also made some interesting assertions about whether he believes Agatha actually traveled the road, and I thought that was an interesting question for him to ask. When Lilia was doing the divination and they showed the picture of Agatha holding her son, heartbroken, that was the Three of Swords. Mrs. Know-It-All thinks that goes back to Agatha losing her son because of the road, and that there’s a lashing coming Billy’s way: how dare you say that, I thought you were my son. I can see that happening.
She doesn’t read the comic books, so her prediction comes from listening to me, and it’s that we might end up with the old, white-haired, very crone-looking witch. For the record, Agatha started out in the comics as a very quirky nanny for Franklin Richards, Reed Richards’ son in the Fantastic Four. Later you find out she has magic, she has abilities, she’s got connections to Doctor Strange, and that’s when she becomes closer to the Agatha we know. She’s always had a dark streak, in her humor and her personality.
I believe we get a brief look at her time on the road. We have to. Even if it’s short, they’re going to have to show us what happened in the past and what happened when they reached the end of the road.
It was amazing that this was only a half hour episode and it was that full. I think next week runs longer than we expect, because Jen has to be resolved, Rio has to be resolved, Billy has to be resolved. That’s a lot.
I don’t think they do a Season 2, and realistically they shouldn’t be doing series like that unless it’s something like Daredevil, where it’s designed for that medium. Agatha comes from WandaVision, and WandaVision came from the MCU proper, meaning the movies. I think this is a logical place that leads to other stories. It’s how Marvel should have been doing a lot of this, as the connective tissue between things. This week they announced the Blade movie was taken off Marvel’s schedule, and they’ve kicked into high gear the Midnight Sons, a very supernatural-heavy team from the comics with Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange and some other folks. Mrs. Know-It-All put in a word for Moon Knight, and I do like me some Moon Knight. I feel like there’s a world where they recontextualize a lot of things and move into that realm. I don’t know that we get a Young Avengers right off the bat.
Last week I would have said Billy was definitely getting Tommy back. After this episode I’m not so sure. I think we end with some things unresolved. They may end with Agatha pseudo-sacrificing herself, and I say pseudo because nobody’s dead in comic books.
They’ve cleared the field. The Salem Seven were the only other major obstacle. Now Rio is technically the obstacle, and they’re telegraphing that she may be the main antagonist at the end, because “all roads lead to me” is what she says. Remember, in the first episodes she came busting into Agatha’s house wanting to kill her, and we still don’t know why. Rio said herself that she had to do her job and it hurt the person she cared for. There are a lot of questions about how those pieces play.
And the road might be a really fancy trap. A trap to get people there and give Death her due. If you’re worthy to live, fine, you get your wish. Everyone else is the price. Everything else is Rio’s bodies, her pound of flesh, if you will.
The Verdict
The penultimate episode of Agatha All Along is a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
At the end of the first time we watched it, I turned and asked, so what would you give it? She said, I don’t know, this is my 10. And I said, my 10 too.
Nine times out of 10, no pun intended, if we’re going to give a show a 10 it’s going to be on the penultimate episode. We’ve given a 10 early in a season before and it’s been worth it. But you know we always talk about what penultimate episodes are supposed to do. They either set something up, or they’re the climax and the last episode is just resolution, everyone figuring out their new normal. This was a complete setup episode. Penultimate all day long. Which means next episode is the payoff for everything we’ve seen to this point, and it lands the day before Halloween. I expect great things.
I want to know what everybody thinks is going to happen in the finale. Does Jen make it, does Billy get Tommy back, and is the road just a trap that feeds Rio her bodies? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
