Billy and Tommy, Agatha’s fate and more

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

Agatha Harkness, the coven-less witch, and Billy Maximoff, son of the Scarlet Witch, reached the end of the Witches’ Road in the two-part finale of “Agatha All Along” — and it was very little as it first seemed. .

The episodes – titled “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End” and “Maiden Mother Crone” – revealed the truth about how the Witches’ Road was created, who wrote the Ballad that conjured it and what really happened to Agatha’s son Nicholas Scratch. Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) helped Billy (Joe Locke) find 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 collect (almost) all the bodies she wanted.

But almost none of it played out at face value. Turns out the Witches’ Road isn’t real, the Ballad means nothing, Tommy’s whereabouts remain unknown, Jennifer was completely wrong about who was responsible for tying her up, and Nicholas’ tragic fate had nothing to do with the Darkhold or Mephisto. (Probably. More on this later.)

The hand stomping behind these revelations expertly evoked a kind of narrative witchcraft and how we expect witchcraft to reveal the truth hidden behind the veil of our expectations. Well, some people’s expectations. If you’re the kind of viewer who enjoys scouring the internet for fan theories—or hypothesizing some of your own—then you’ve likely come across some, if not all, of the twists in these final episodes ahead of time. And yet “Agatha All Along” dramatized them with such wit and care that it felt gratifying rather than disappointing to learn that these theories were correct.

Furthermore, the decisions 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 tied her up

While stuck in the final trial, Jennifer learns that instead of an evil Boston obstetrician, she was accidentally tied up by Agatha while passing through town. Outraged, Jennifer immediately grabs a lock of Agatha’s hair and performs the noncommittal ritual, which mostly consists of repeating “You hold nothing” over and over to Agatha’s face. When she regains her powers, Jennifer disappears; the next time we see her, she’s climbing out of the ground just outside Westview and flying to places unknown.

Her future within the MCU is unclear; in the comics, she crosses paths with Doctor Strange, but she doesn’t really cross paths with other MCU characters aside from the 2022 Disney+ special “Werewolf by Night.” But given her love for Billy — and her seemingly cosmic connection with Agatha — Jennifer may easily reappear soon.

Billy created Witches’ Road

Just like how Billy’s mother Wanda was unwittingly responsible for creating the sitcom world “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. ‘ The road itself. All the details—the Nancy Myers beach house, the Ouija board horror house, the fairytale castle—came from pop culture details that permeated Billy’s impeccably tidy bedroom. To Billy’s horror, this means that the deadly nature of the trials that led to Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp), Alice (Ali Ahn) and Lilia (Patti LuPone) was also his doing.

This presents some fascinating wrinkles for Billy’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is truly as powerful and as dangerous as his mother, and the guilt he carries over the death of his coven (although Agatha points out that she killed Alice and that Lilia chose to die) will likely hover over how Billy chooses to wield his magic going forward.

Agatha wrote The Ballad together with her son

The majority 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 all she can offer her is more time, but she won’t say 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 the “winding road” that eventually becomes “the witches’ road”, where it begins to a legend. Eventually Rio takes Nicholas’s life at night, through an unspecified illness (at the end he looks sick and has a foreboding cough). Agatha is left devastated and more willing than ever to manipulate other witches (now using the Ballad as bait) to drain their power – another example of how “Agatha All Along” explores the “trick” in “magic trick”.

However, there are still some unanswered questions about Nicholas. When he is born, Agatha remarks about how she had him “from scratch” rather than via a spell or incantation – but who fathered Nicholas, if he fathered him at all, remains unknown. Similarly, it is unclear whether Rio is acting on its own or from directives from a more powerful force, such as Mephisto – The Marvel comic book villain who seems to be constantly stalking the Maximoff family. Speaking of ghosts…

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

In their final confrontation with Rio, Billy volunteers his life to save Agatha’s – and Agatha gladly accepts until Billy asks Agatha telepathically if this is how Nicholas died. The memory is enough to make Agatha realize that she can save Billy’s life the way she couldn’t save Nicholas’ – since Rio took him in the 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, still unable to pass on to the afterlife to meet Nicholas. Instead, she returns to Billy, who is not only the son she never had, but the partner in magic she could never keep.

Tommy is alive – but in a terrible life

In “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End”, Agatha helps Billy connect with Tommy’s spirit and place him in a new body. But unlike Billy, Tommy’s new life is harsh: the body he inhabits drowned in a cruel swimming pool prank, and Billy realizes in a panic that “there’s nobody who loves him! He’s got nobody!” (In the comics, Tommy—reincarnated as Tommy Shepherd—actually leads an unforgiving life before reuniting with Billy.)

At the end of the series, the ghost Agatha and Billy go out into the world to find Tommy, a story that is expected to be picked up either in the upcoming Vision series with Paul Bettany or at some point between now and the next two “Avengers” movie — given that Tommy, aka Speed, is an integral part of the Young Avengers in the comics.