Who doesn’t love a good con?
Recap
“Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End”
We see the end of episode five from a different perspective first as Alice “comes to” after her death and Rio is there to help her cross over. While Alice is dismayed over dying after breaking her family curse, Rio points out that she is a protection witch who died protecting someone. In the present, Jen is clawing at the door from the last trial, trying to get Lilia back. On the Road, Rio has a talk with Agatha, upset that she tried to hide Billy from her. Agatha realizes that Rio wants him because she views him as an abomination for taking over another’s body. But she can’t take him because he’d just reincarnate again—he needs to hand himself over. Agatha agrees to deliver him if Rio promises to leave her alone for a long, long life, and then not show her face when Agatha eventually dies. Rio agrees to the terms.
Billy and Jen join Agatha on the Road and they come upon their shoes again. The Road is a circle and Agatha has no idea how to get off, so she suggests just running it again. Billy decides that taking their shoes off out of respect for the Road was a mistake and puts his shoes on. The trio wake up in body bags in an empty room. The lights are going out slowly to time the final test. Jen is determined to save them, and Billy points out that she’s already saved lives on this journey without magic. It’s revealed that Agatha is the one who bound Jen; she didn’t know it was her, she was paid to do it by the doctors. Jen takes a lock of Agatha’s hair and does the unbinding ritual, denying Agatha’s power over her. Then Jen vanishes, having received what she wanted from the Road. The next is Billy: Agatha knows he wants his brother back, so they need to find Tommy a body to occupy, like Billy did for himself.
They sit together on the floor and Agatha encourages Billy to remember his life from before, at the moment they both “died,” and Agatha guides him to find a body for Tommy. They find a boy being drowned by his peers—it’s not in a good place, the boy has no family to love him, and Billy wants to know if he’s killing this boy so his brother can live. At the moment Tommy enters the body, Billy vanishes from the Road. Agatha assures the air that sometimes boys just die. She opens her locket containing a lock of her son’s hair and a seed. The lights are going out, but she suddenly has the idea to plant the seed in a crack in the floor using magic. When it grows, the lights come back and she rushes to the door insisting that she’s passed the trial. She emerges onto her lawn and Rio is there: Agatha didn’t bring her Billy, so she has to offer herself. They begin to fight, Agatha using Lilia’s advice to avoid a killing blow.
Before Rio can kill Agatha, Billy shows up to aid Agatha. He asks her not to take all of his power and begins siphoning it to her. Agatha takes a great deal of it, but does manage to stop before she kills Billy. Agatha tosses Billy away to fight Rio properly, but she’s losing. Billy rushes to Agatha’s side, but she insists that it should be her to die. Billy won’t allow it and offers himself up to Rio… just as Agatha promised. She turns to go, but Billy projects his voice into her mind and asks if this is how her son died. Agatha stops, turns back to Rio, and kisses her—Agatha dies. Billy drives home to worried parents and insists he’s fine. He heads into this room and realizes that all the components of the Road journey are in there. Billy is the one who created the Witches’ Road, and the signs were there all the way through (mainly in Agatha’s commentary). He hears a voice behind him, turns, and screams.
“Maiden Mother Crone”
Agatha Harkness is in the woods in 1750. She’s pregnant and about to give birth when Rio shows up. Agatha insists that Rio leave her child alone, which Rio cannot do—all she can do is give Agatha time. She won’t say how much time, however, and Agatha has Nicholas alone. She uses him to get sympathy from other witches so that she can take their power and continue on. Six years on, Nicholas is part of the gambit more actively; he leads the witches to his mother so she can siphon from them. He’s beginning to question the plan, however, wanting to know why they can’t stay with the witches and survive alongside them. Agatha insists that the witches would try to kill them instead. Nicholas begins to sing to a tune he invented about the wind-y road. The song transforms over time into the Witches Road song, which Nicholas sings in taverns for coin. One night they’re sleeping in their camp by the woods and Rio appears to the boy. When Agatha wakes, Nicholas is dead.
After Agatha buries him, a witch approaches asking if she knows how to get to the Witches’ Road because she heard her singing the song. Agatha realizes that she’s created the perfect con: She can tell witches that she’ll get them onto the Road; they can sing the song together. When the path doesn’t appear she can goad them into attacking her and steal their power, killing them all. She tried to do the same to the group with Billy, but his power created the Road for real. Back in the present, Agatha appears in Billy’s room as a ghost. He asks about the Road and Agatha explains that he’s the one who made it real. Billy panics because he believes this makes him a murderer. Agatha points out that she killed Alice, and Lilia made her own choice to face the Salem Seven, though she can’t say anything for Mrs. Davis. She points out that Billy did save one life, however: Jen is alive and well and has her power back.
Billy heads back to Agatha’s house and tries to do a banishing spell for Agatha’s spirit over the door to the Road. Billy is using Agatha’s locket for the spell, and wants to know why she won’t just die. Agatha admits that she can’t face her son, and makes contact with the locket, taking it and keeping it on her person. Billy wonders if maybe it isn’t good for Agatha to be a ghost; Agatha thinks they might make a great team. They agree to be a coven of two while acknowledging that they both have a tendency to get their coven members killed. Billy closes the door he created to a Road and leaves the cement as a memorial to those they lost, and the duo leave together.
Commentary
Normally I’d be mad that Agatha died, but in this instance it was so clearly done as a way to keep her attached to Billy’s hip to cause maximum chaos in the future, that I’m not sure I’m bothered? It’s a pretty clever way to keep her as a mentor to him, the way she was to Wanda in the comics.
This finale is extremely weird in its pacing, and there have been rumors about a shuffle on the flashback stuff, so I’m curious as to whether or not that’s a part of it. That said, the show has won a personal award from me for being the only Marvel series not to end on an endless drag-out brawl that completely destroys the character and tone of everything that proceeded it. And, in fact, it resulted in far more emotional moments in episode eight than I was expecting, starting with Jen releasing herself from the binding Agatha (kinda unknowingly) put on her.
There’s a bit of a Labyrinth-esque “you have no power over me” aspect to the unbinding, but the choice to linger on the repetition, to move through the stages with Jen as she realizes this curse is ending, was incredibly powerful. Sasheer Zamata really dug in there with her heels and drove it home. And I do appreciate that if anyone was going to make it out of the venture relatively unscathed, it was her. (Even if I still can’t deal with the show completely glossing over how old Jen is and how different her experience of the world would have been even compared to women much older than her, living as a Black woman in the United States.)
That said, Billy’s journey to get Tommy back took things up a notch, and that’s largely down to the immediacy provided in the Road mechanics. (Which just twists that knife harder when you remember that it’s Billy making himself rush through this trial faster, according to his own imagined rules about how the Road should behave.) The result sees him leaving his brother in a comparative hell, nothing like the loving family that he received in taking over William Kaplan’s life. And because he did this retroactively, at the same time he took over William’s body, Tommy has now had years in that life with even less understanding of how he got there than Billy had.
Then we have Agatha, who, mercifully in all of this, doesn’t become an antihero in search of a better purpose. I fully admit to being a sucker for a redemption arc, but Agatha is delicious exactly as she’s presented: A lying, scheming, con artist slash serial killer who’s in love with Death. Does she clearly have a super tragic backstory that makes sense of her proclivities? If her dear old ghost mom was anything to go by, absolutely. But having her renounce all her evil ways doesn’t make her a better character. (Also, it’s still rare enough for women to get the fun villains. Let us keep her.)
There are so many things that are never explained, and I (mostly) like the fact that they don’t spell it all out. We have no idea how Agatha met Rio or why. We don’t know how she became pregnant or why she wanted a child. We never learn why Nicholas was marked for death ahead of time. We don’t find out much about Agatha’s power-draining abilities aside from what she insists and what we’re shown, so we have no way of knowing if there is (or was) any truth to her claim of not being able to control it. The thing I don’t like is that we get far less of Rio’s character once her identity is revealed, which feels like a mistake? The reveal doesn’t make her less interesting, but the show seems to think it does, or conversely seems to think that there’s no point in giving her much thought after that.
My biggest surprise for the entire show was being pleased at how they handled the backstory with Nicholas, even if the placement of the flashback was off: The series managed to make motherhood important for Agatha without making it the reason for the majority of her actions. He matters to her in a way that feels consistent and meaningful, but most of her behaviors are clearly informed by much earlier events. Where Multiverse of Madness ruined that for Wanda’s character in a big way, Agatha is a great example of how to use motherhood as a piece that makes up an entire human being, rather than focal point being used because some writers can’t think of any other reasons for women to have motivation.
But the lineage of this series with WandaVision is a straight line, when you come right down to it. Both shows are treatises on different types of grief, and also the ways grief often makes itself into a generational talisman: Billy and Tommy were created out of Wanda Maximoff’s grief, and both carry that grief with them. Billy literally uses the same tools his mother used to try and work through his own pain… and to better overall results, in fact. (Progress!) Whether or not a family reunion ever occurs, Billy and Tommy’s entry into this story comes from a markedly different place than any other characters in the MCU. I hope they use them well going forward.
Tarot Readings and Witchy Thoughts
- Say it with me: It’s never Mephisto. (Yes, I will be pleased about this for a month.)
- I love that the Witches’ Road was a con, but I might love even more that Agatha’s abilities make her kind of like a vampire? The way she needs to be invited in, the way she drains people of their life-force. Also loved that they do the old-fashioned birthing method of just squatting up against a tree in the woods and bearing down onto a blanket.
- While I do enjoy Billy’s Labyrinth-y bedroom (Sarah’s bedroom also contains all the pieces of her adventure in the film, manifested from her imagination), the thing I enjoy most is that they’ve given Billy broad enough taste that I’m guessing some younger viewers might find new favorites by staring at his walls: Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buffy, Carrie, and so on. Also, they saw an opportunity to put up the largest Trans Lives Matter banner that they could, and went for it. Beats the random little pin in Multiverse of Madness by a stretch, I’ll say that.
- One thing I need to know: Does kissing Rio always lead to dying? Because… if so, that puts a very different spin on the moment earlier in the show where Agatha almost kisses her and Rio stops it from happening.
- They still went with the usual MCU Leather-and-Metal Special for Wiccan’s look, but I loved how bright his colors are? Maybe Wolverine’s yellow suit finally warmed the right people up.
And that’s a wrap! Thanks for walking the Road.
