Agatha the Irredeemable

Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.

My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.

The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.

I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.

So my disappointment was that all of that cleverness seemed to be in service of something kind of shallow. No matter how well done, it ultimately felt like another MCU installment, instead of something with the ambition and reflection that WandaVision had. And the problem, as I saw it, was that the main character of the series had an unsatisfying story. And it would’ve been so easy to fix.

I saw an interview with Jac Schaeffer online in which she said they went back and forth on whether to make Agatha All Along a redemption story for Agatha. My first reaction to the conclusion of the series was that they’d never made up their mind. There were signs throughout the series that her selfish/callous nature was just a front, a defense against people who were afraid of her power, and a scary story that was easier to live up to than the truth of something painful in her past.

I had been expecting that once we saw the story play out, we’d see that she’d been feared and misunderstood, made a horrible mistake that somehow resulted in the loss of her son, and that set her on a path of being a villain intent on seeking power, since it was easier than being honest with herself. But then in the last episode, we saw that Agatha had been killing witches her whole life, ever since her first coven. She was a villain all along! It’s not just that there was no redemption; there was no arc at all!

After mulling it over for a while, I think it’s trying to tell a story that’s a little bit more subtle than my first interpretation. As I’m interpreting it now: it was Agatha’s betrayal by her mother, and the rest of her coven, that set her on the path of being a villain. She’d inadvertently killed them all, but it was traumatic enough that she no longer trusted any witches, and she instead chose to kill them and take their power. This ended up with her developing a rapport with Death, with the arrangement of Agatha “providing her with bodies” that they mention in the third episode.

Once her son was born, Agatha just began using him in her ongoing scheme of ingratiating herself into a new coven and then murdering them all for their power. This went on for years, and the lore of the Witches’ Road grew. Finally, his conscience made him decide he didn’t want to be part of it anymore. After that (the show makes it seem as if it happened that same night), Death finally took him. Grief and a desire for revenge make Agatha resolve to keep using the lore of the Witches’ Road, not just for survival, but to become more and more powerful.

It feels a lot more nuanced and mature than the version I’d expected from a show this broad and straightforward. The terrible revelation of the horrible thing that she did to her son, the thing that was so bad she can’t bear to face him even in death: she disappointed him. Even as a child, he was able to tell that what she was doing was wrong and unnecessary. She’d lost the only family she had, and instead of building a new one with her son, she was wiping out any opportunity for either of them to find a family beyond their “coven two.”

It also helps smooth out some of the pieces that didn’t seem to fit, to me. The “black heart” was definitively Billy, but Lilia’s sigil prevented her from using his name. He was essential to the coven, not just for the obvious reason that he created the road, but because he’s Agatha’s new family. Helping him find his brother is the closest thing Agatha is going to get to redemption.

The other witches’ stories fit thematically, more or less, since they’re all aspects of family, sisterhood, betrayal, and finding their purpose. The one that’s still out of place is Sharon Davis/”Mrs. Hart,” who I kept expecting to see resurrected but am still disappointed. I’m assuming that her character exists more as a misdirection than to serve a thematic purpose. Maybe it’s a reminder to people like me that Agatha is still a villain at series start, and not simply misunderstood?

Ultimately I’m really impressed that a series with so many different boxes to check off — MCU installment, sequel to WandaVision, Halloween season-scheduled horror comedy, woman-led series, story about fictional witches and the real-world significance of their characters — managed to be surprising and thematically resonant. One of the reasons I liked WandaVision so much was that it was completely and unabashedly a comic book story, but it still felt it had a reason to exist beyond its role in the MCU. I’m impressed that Agatha All Along went from feeling like a series of interesting escape rooms, to become another series that had ideas about found families and parenthood that went beyond just setting up the Young Avengers.