The ending of ‘Agatha All Along’ sets off more witchy shenanigans in the MCU

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Agatha all the time sections 8 and 9.

No, Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff didn’t magically appear Agatha all the time. No, there wasn’t a main character, such as Mephisto, who was the subject of season-long fan theories. But the end of Agatha all the time confirmed some other hypotheses from the Marvel-watching community and laid the bricks for the (witches’) path forward – including perhaps the upcoming series Vision Quest.

The first big reveal: Ding dong, the witch is dead. Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness, that is. But it’s a move inspired by Marvel comics.

In episode 8, “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End”, Agatha makes a pact with “not Rio” Death (Aubrey Plaza). Billy (Joe Locke) is an abomination, Death says, because he broke the laws of nature by returning to the living by inhabiting the corpse of the very dead William “Billy” Kaplan. Death wants him, but she is unable to take him by force. Even worse, she knows he has the ability to do the same to his twin brother Tommy. So Agatha agrees to make Billy go willingly in exchange for her own life.

Kathryn Hahn and Joe Locke in ‘Agatha All Along’ two-part season finale.

Chuck Zlotnick/MARVEL


The remaining trio – Agatha, Billy and Jen (Sasheer Zamata) – reach the end of the Witches’ Road to face their final trial. At first they think they have been walking in circles because they come across the same shoes they put on the ground at the start of this whole journey. But when they put their feet into their shoes, they wake up inside body bags in a morgue.

Jen is the first to leave the road unscathed. She learns that Agatha, who has a history of performing the random spell on high-paying customers, was the one who tied her up in the first place. She performs the noncommittal song and regains her magic. And because that was her goal on the road, she disappears back into the real world. Agatha then feels compassion for Billy and decides to do the same for him. She guides the teenager to give himself what he wants from the road. Billy telepathically finds a vacant body in which to place Tommy’s soul. In this case, it is a child who is drowned to death by a group of bullies in a prank gone wrong. (We don’t see his face, so Marvel has the option of casting a potentially familiar person.) Billy also disappears from the road and gets his wish.

That leaves Agatha. She saves herself from the trial and returns to Westview, where she must face death herself. Billy swoops in, now wearing a cartoon-accurate superhero costume, and willingly gives some of his magic to Agatha so she can fight Death. Unfortunately, it is not enough. No one can conquer Death. So Agatha sacrifices herself to save Billy. After all, all Death needs is one soul.

But Agatha all the time is not done with the turns at this point. As Billy falls back into his life and the story melds in the final episode “Maiden Mother Crone”, he learns the harsh truth. The witch road was never real. It began as a song about “the windy road” Agatha taught her son Nicholas Scratch to sing centuries ago. The lyrics became “down the Witches’ Road” as a con. Nicholas would perform the ballad in public to earn money and help his mother lure other witches into their clutches to absorb their power.

Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke and Sasheer Zamata in ‘Agatha All Along’.

Chuck Zlotnick/MARVEL


Agatha was very prepared to do the same to Jen, Alice (Alice Wu-Gulliver) and Lilia (Patti LuPone) at the start of the series… until Billy inadvertently used his magic to reshape reality and create the Witch’s Way as a means to escape the Salem Seven. Billy realizes that all trials are based on things in his own room. That’s a lot The Wizard of Oz…including when he realizes it The Wizard of Oz figures inspired the episode 7 process.

Episode 9 reveals more about Agatha’s backstory with Death, who came after Nicholas when he was about to die in childbirth, but gave him more time at the behest of a desperate Agatha. As time passed, Death came for Nicholas in his sleep, leaving her lover behind when she awoke, setting Agatha down a villainous path of her own to steal the magic from every witch she could over the years.

Agatha all the timeIts ending sees the titular Harkness now appearing to Billy as a ghost, and despite some lingering pain between them, he decides to join him as a phantom guide as he now tries to find his brother Tommy. It’s clear that showrunner Jac Schaeffer and the Marvel team were inspired by Scarlet Witch: Witches’ Roada comic book series from the last decade in which the ghost of Agatha Harkness acted as mentor and guide to Wanda Maximoff as she traversed a mysterious dimension known as, well, the Witch Road. The MCU is now configuring Hahn’s Agatha to serve the same function, but for young Billy.

The final shot sees Billy and ghost Agatha set off in pursuit of Tommy. It wouldn’t surprise us in the least to see reincarnated Tommy now become a key player for Vision Questwhich is the upcoming Vision-centric series that arose from WandaVision. Schaeffer was originally involved in Vision Questwhich is now led by Terry Matalas (Star Trek: Picard). The show will follow Bettany’s “white Vision,” the version of Vision that SWORD originally built to subdue Wanda, but who ended up striking out on his own to discover himself and struggle with his newfound memories of the former Vision .

“(Matalas) and Jac have talked, and that show is really a love letter to everything that Jac built before and also continues in a way that is unique to that filmmaker,” said Brad Winderbaum, the head of Marvel Television. Weekly entertainment in front Agatha all the time season premiere. “There’s a long tradition at Marvel, whether it was (director) Shane Black who took the baton from (Iron Man and Iron Man 2 filmmaker) Jon Favreau for Iron Man 3or the Russians take the baton (from Joss Whedon). Avengers. Like the comics, these franchises benefit from different storytellers, different artists playing with the material in new ways.”

Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness in ‘Agatha All Along’; Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff in ‘WandaVision’; Paul Bettany’s vision in ‘WandaVision’.

Chuck Zlotnick/MARVEL; Marvel Studios (2)


If the first WandaVision sequel series featured Billy’s return, it would stand to reason that the next would feature Tommy’s return. All we know for sure is that Bettany will return as this version of Vision i Vision Quest. No release date has been set beyond a general 2026 timeline, but filming is expected to begin next year.

We also know that the MCU is setting up the introduction of the Young Avengers, a team of younger Marvel heroes from the comics, most of whom have direct ties to a main member of the Avengers. The end of the 2023s The Marvels showed Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) recruiting Hawkeye protégé Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) to join a new team. Prior to this, the MCU introduced Elijah Richardson as Eli Bradley, the grandson of Super Soldier Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) in the The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021); Jack Veal played the Kid Loki variant in Loki (2021); Xochitl Gomez played multiverse-hopping America Chavez in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022); Kathryn Newton played size-shifting Cassie Lang, Ant-Man’s teenage daughter, in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023); and now we have Locke as Billy, aka Wiccan.

Tommy is another member of the Young Avengers in the comics who goes by the name Speed, given his speedster abilities similar to his uncle, Pietro.

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Future Marvel plans have not been announced yet, but there are several “untitled” films on the release calendar. Plus, Winderbaum told EW that Marvel is “developing a lot of shows now simultaneously. So, in a way, we’re doing TV more in a traditional style, where we have to write multiple pilots and show bibles before we decide what we want to produce and actually bring to the screen, which allows us to experiment and also plan all sorts of different Marvel sandboxes.”

At least it seems so WandaVision sandbox continues to grow.